March 11, 2013
Memoryscapes, by William McCarthy, Graham Honaker II and Hank Paper, will be featured at the University of New Haven’s Seton Art Gallery through March 28.
The Seton Art Gallery is located in Dodds Hall on UNH’s Main Campus, 300 Boston Post Road, West Haven. The exhibit is free and open to the public.
A memoryscape is not an exact representation of a factual world, but rather an impression or evocation of things remembered. There are multiple themes that run throughout the exhibition including commentaries on popular advertising and culture and longing for an imagined or once visited landscape. Although the artists have varied styles, a viewer will see a unity of color, references to culture and society, and a feeling of timelessness and weightlessness in each of the pieces.
Featured are moments of quiet reflection in McCarthy’s soft-focus, dream-like landscapes, all of which are painted from memory.
“Memory, much like a dream, is never sharply in focus or detail but always suggestive,” says McCarthy.
Also featured are urban-scape collage paintings by Honaker that, like layers of dreams rising up, combine disparate iconography from the past, and Paper’s photographs of moments in time that showcase the off-kilter beauty of everyday life.
“We offer a palate of projections that will hopefully move the viewer to a place deeper within himself,” says Paper.
Paper documents contemporary culture and society in the streets of North America, the United Kingdom, Western Europe, the Middle East and Cuba. He has been exhibited extensively in New Haven, where he is represented by the Kehler Liddell Gallery.
Honaker II, originally from New Mexico, lives and works in Hamden. His paintings comment on contemporary society with subjects ranging from potentially harmful political structures to the simple poetics of everyday life.
Originally from Columbus, Ohio, McCarthy works out of his basement in Hamden. From memory, he paints the Connecticut landscape, along with the images of Cape Ann salt marshes and the flat countryside of Ohio. The landscapes are coupled with an abstract sensibility and reappearing themes, allowing him to create illusions of atmospheric perspective.
For more information, contact Laura Marsh, director of the Seton Gallery, at lmarsh@newhaven.edu
