: October 1, 2012
Kim Cridler
David Kroll
Top: Kim Cridler, Field Study 18: Buckthorn, 2012, steel, bronze, agate, each 62" x 32" x 42"
Below: David Kroll, Fourteen Eggs, 2012, oil on panel, 10" x 22"
Exhibition Dates
November 1 - December 29, 2012
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 1st, 2012 from 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Lisa Sette Gallery is pleased to present new work by Kim Cridler and David Kroll. This exhibition of graceful monuments to the experience of life, change, sensuousness and beauty will be at Lisa Sette Gallery from November 1st to December 29th. A reception for the artists will be held on Thursday, November 1st from 7:00 – 9:00pm
Sculptures by Kim Cridler derive their sense of lovely impossibility from this paradox: her works explore the delicacy and transience of the natural world in massive structures of iron, bronze, and steel. Cridler’s sturdy vessel forms, encrusted with exquisite, expertly metalsmithed ornaments of pearl, beeswax, gold and eggshell, are both unlikely and deeply intuitive; they are the artist’s tribute to the natural world and the role of human life within it.
A collection of Cridler’s new work, including several never-before-seen sculptures that herald a new direction for the artist, will be on exhibit at Lisa Sette Gallery through the months of November and December.
“My work is intended to remind one of the world of making and using—to remind one of being in the world,” says Cridler, commenting on her artistic obsession with vessel shapes: “Vessels have been used as containers for grain, for wine, for the bodies of our dead. They symbolize collection and preservation, as well as ceremony and abundance… This information is carried both physically and emotionally in our expectations of its very form.”
Cridler, who was raised in the Midwest and continues to work there, starts each sculpture with graphite sketches of the flora and fauna around her Wisconsin home. These images inspire the ornamentation that adorns her vessels. Like the vessel-shapes themselves, ornamentation is, for Cridler, a way of reminding viewers of the sensuous experience of being in the world—serpents, seedpods, branches and insects swarm, coil, and fling themselves up spiritedly from the vessels’ surfaces. “Ornament, unlike many other art forms, is solely concerned with giving pleasure,” says the artist, “The ornament in these works is derived from everyday looking at and living in my environment.”
While still focused on an exploration of natural beauty, which she says is what “ties her to life,” in newer work Cridler narrows in on the concept of transience and mortality as part of the existence of all things. Her recent work is larger in scale, some sculptures exceeding 400 lbs., and uses vessel forms to prop up asymmetrical examples of the fallen detritus of nature—such as the splintery form of a broken tree branch—or employs large flanking vessels “to reference both the fullness and futility of trying to frame a space between.”
Says the artist, “This is the direction I am more interested in now, talking about the same cyclical things that got me interested in vessels in the first place, but more directly referencing the natural world. A lesson I learned early growing up on a farm, that the experiences of living and dying were recognized as one. In recent work I am gently moving from the symmetrical balanced order of pattern and ornament to show the beginnings of displacement, disorder and perhaps even destruction as something in keeping with growth. All things change—change affirms that you have not been forgotten; you have not been left alone by life.”
David Kroll’s paintings are realist in representation and symbolist in intent, drawing influence from both the genre of the tabletop still-life as practiced by the Dutch masters and the romantic notion of the landscape as expressed by the Hudson River School.
He acknowledges the history of these forms of painting and expands their concerns into a contemporary dialog between the cyclical processes of time, nature, and humankind. In doing so, his seductive and mimetic scenes balance fragility and change, offering the viewer a site to contemplate temptation and mortality.
The artist states, "I paint personal refuges and interior landscapes – places to visit for solace and sanctuary. Much of my work is intuitive. My paintings are imagined, invented moments that touch upon human’s complicated, perplexing relationship with nature. I try to create an emotional and intellectual connection – however fleeting – between the viewer and the power of landscape, the web of life, the idea of nature itself. I think about the natural world not as an expendable resource but as a past home, once abandoned and forgotten, now the subject of our longing and our dreams. Increasingly what remains is an idea or memory of nature, rather than nature itself. This has been a central theme of my work for many years."
Lisa Sette Gallery maintains a very active exhibition schedule, mounting approximately 10 exhibitions a year ranging in theme and genre. For more than 27 years, the gallery has been committed to showcasing a range of contemporary photography, sculpture, painting, installation and performance art.
To request high resolution images, please contact us at (480) 990-7342 or use the email links below.
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