Celia Bland and Charlotte Mandell

February 16, 2008 at 2pm

The Gallery at R&F Handmade Paints
84 Ten Broeck Avenue
Kingston, NY

A $5 donation is suggested.

For directions please visit R&F’s website at http://www.rfpaints.com/

Celia Bland teaches poetry and essay-writing at Bard College, where she is the Dean of Studies. She has degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and New York University and has been a visiting artist at Utica College, Iona College, Keene State University, and the Rome Community Center. Her profiles of poets Robert Kelly and Jean Valentine appeared in Poets & Writers in 2004. Her book of poetry, Soft Box (CavanKerry Press) was nominated for Poetry Society of America and PEN America first book awards, and received the silver medal for best book of poetry for 2004 from ForeWord magazine. It was named one of the ten best books of 2004 by Chronogram magazine.

Check out Celia's work at:

http://www.entelechyjournal.com/captions_for_cartoons_not_yet_dr.htm

http://www.acarts.org/mystic/MRR5bland.html

Charlotte Mandell has translated over twenty books, including Fragments of the Artwork by Jean Genet, The Book to Come by Maurice Blanchot, and A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert. Her translation of The Lemoine Affair, a novella by Marcel Proust that has never been translated into English before, is forthcoming from Melville House. She is currently translating Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones for HarperCollins. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

See Charlotte's work at:

http://home.earthlink.net/~cmandell/charlottemandell/

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2007/09/maurice-blanchot-1907-2003-by-jean-luc.html


In the Gallery at R&F: "A Pattern of Connections", an ambitious new installation by Lorrie Fredette. The show will run from February 2nd through March 22nd, 2008.

Lorrie Fredette's delicate new suspended installation sprang from an unlikely source for artistic inspiration - an outbreak of poison ivy. Two years ago, the artist used her own skin as a site for intense study - drawing, photographing and further manipulating images of her rash digitally, and storing these images on her computer. Through further research, her data bank expanded to include a voyeuristic collection of images of other people’s rashes, as well as encompassing current environmental and polical issues related to climate change, (because it turns out that poison ivy thrives and becomes more potent with an increase in carbon dioxide). This led to further research about the molecular structure of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses.

At a certain point, Fredette had collected so much information that she had to devise a system for sorting and storing it. She made a purposeful decision to keep this process as random as the dealing of cards, intentionally skewing her data. "A Pattern of Connections" is a chain-of-events story that has both evolved and degraded over a long period of time, with each new link containing a new "misrepresentation". The finished piece, suspended from the gallery ceiling like an undulating canopy, becomes a demonstration of how information is morphed by the very processes which attempt to collect, store and represent it.