SPARK: Three Shows to See This Month

We recently featured Julie Durkin Marty in our spring issue. She’s an artist and the co-owner of G-Town Arts in Redding, CT.

As knowledgeable about art as she is talented, Durkin Marty has graciously offered to sporadically contribute SPARK, reviews and recommendations of shows she thinks are worth a visit.

Yes, Durkin Marty hypes up her own gallery, but The HAPs wouldn’t run her words if we didn’t agree: G-Town is a leading, forward-thinking arts space. (That’s why we wrote about Durkin Marty in the first place! Well, that and her transportive paintings.)

We hope you can take some time to check out these shows.

State of Alarm: Margaret Roleke

Ball & Socket Arts
493 West Main Street, Cheshire
Through May 10

Margaret Roleke’s show draws you in.

The wall pieces shimmer from across the room — colorful, almost festive. Then you get close enough to see they’re made of spent shotgun shells and brass casings. It startles. It resonates.

Roleke lives in Redding. Sandy Hook happened near her home and gun violence has been at the center of her work ever since. Shotgun shells are manufactured in candy colors — from a distance they look like beads — and Roleke uses that deliberately. The show also includes large, hand-stitched fabric works of Kevlar and found materials, and cyanotype photographs where the American flag appears and fades on cloth.

This is one of the most urgent shows on view in Connecticut right now.

WRIT & WEFTED: Sally Van Doren & Nancy Koenigsberg

daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
Litchfield — By Appointment
Through June 7

daphne:art is a rare and hidden gem: a by-appointment gallery run by veteran curator Daphne Anderson Deeds out of her home.

This show pairs two artists who work at the boundary between language and material.

Sally Van Doren is a poet and visual artist whose paintings and drawings grow from thousands of pages of illegible handwriting — marks that stopped being words and become something else entirely. Nancy Koenigsberg, whose work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, weaves and knots copper and steel wire by hand into sculptures that are at once industrial and delicate — forms that cast shadows as compelling as the objects themselves.

The show and gallery are worth every effort to get there.

Charged Field

G-Town Arts
5 Main Street, Georgetown (Redding)
Through May 9

Yes, this is my gallery. No, I can’t be objective. Yes, I think you should come anyway. Here’s why: Twenty painters* make compelling work that operates through color, surface, and material rather than recognizable imagery.

If you’ve ever seen a painting and felt something before understanding why you felt something, this is the show for you.

*Nelleke Beltjens, Trudy Benson, John Cox, Lisa Corinne Davis, Mason Dowling, Julie Durkin Marty, Joseph Fucigna, Lisa Hoke, Jenny Kemp, Dan Makara, Stephen Maine, Karen Margolis, Bob Marty, Holly Miller, Rob Nbadeau, Alyse Rosner, Andrew Schwartz, Sarah Walker, Laura Watt, and Deborah Zlotsky

Upcoming events at G-Town Arts:

• April 19, 1pm — Artist Talk: Joseph Fucigna & Sarah Walker

• May 8, 6–7pm — First Friday Cocktail Hour May 9, 4–6pm Closing Reception May 9th, 4-6pm