Anne Canfield and Gary Petersen
April 2nd – May 7th Opening Reception Saturday April 2, 6-9 PM Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1-4 PM and by appointment (Also open 4/29 6-8 PM for Mt. Airy Final Friday event)
Mount Airy Contemporary 25 West Mt. Airy Avenue Philadelphia PA 19119 (267) 270-2787 www.mountairycontemporary.com info@mountairycontemporary.com
(Press for this show: "Joyful Space", Roberta Fallon, theartblog.org
Inquirer Review Anne Canfield Gary Petersen
MAC is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Anne Canfield and Gary Petersen.
Anne Canfield is a painter and draftsperson based in the Philadelphia area.
Canfield draws and paints on a tiny scale and is inspired by the detail, whimsy and geometric naturalism of both early Netherlandish and Indian Miniature painting. She uses a variety of media as point of departure, ranging from personal photography to elements of film. Loosely narrative, her pieces reveal quiet, solitary moments as a sense of time or place is trapped and brought to a stand still. Concerned with identity, memory and psychological phenomenon, her recent work symbolically explores these fixations. While combing this awareness of being, time and place, her works reflect everyday life, daydreams, and, finally, the fragility and the boundlessness of both humanity and the natural world alike.
Gary Petersen is a painter based in New York.
Over the past ten years Petersen’s abstract paintings migrated to a hard edge geometric style. But using hard edge, for him, does not mean adhering to a minimal or reductive ideology. Petersen has begun working to bring into the formal, symmetrical, and impersonal tradition of geometry a lyrical unpredictability, using color to add the personal with an American pop sensibility.
Petersen is interested in how advertisers, designers and pop culture have mined the long tradition of geometric abstraction for their designs - book covers, record album covers, and magazine advertisements, particularly in the decades of the 1950’s and 60’s reflect this use. Petersen inverts this borrowing pattern, looking back at those designs and affectionately referencing the bygone optimism of the 20th century’s post-war middle decades, the years when cartoons and sci-fi conflated into the Jetsons. The complex spatial ambiguities of the Jetsons universe - where buildings float in an indeterminate and disconnected futuristic airspace - represents well the 50s vision of the future embodied across its cultural landscape.
About MACMount Airy Contemporary was founded in 2009 by co-directors Andrea Wohl Keefe and Colin Keefe. Based in northwest Philadelphia, MAC focuses on providing low key, high quality art experiences in an informal residential setting.