Parallel Developments: Works by Suzanne Kammin, Barbara Owen and Laura Petrovich-Cheney

The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is pleased to present Parallel Developments, a group exhibition of works by Suzanne Kammin, Barbara Owen and Laura Petrovich-Cheney.

Suzanne Laura Kammin has worked as both an abstract and representational painter but has consistently been interested in the materiality of the painted surface. Kammin’s work investigates the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, playing with ways to represent and contradict deep and flat space using color, mark, texture and translucency.

Barbara Owen is a painter but she seeks to work outside the confines of what a traditional painter does.
Throughout her career Owen has worked in series in order to explore how color, shape, material and paint itself develop and change one’s experience of each piece, while consistently exploring her subject matter. As a formalist, her work plays with space and the relationship between shapes. As a colorist, she is trying to create effective and emotional responses to the work. And when paint is applied to a flat surface (paper, canvas) and used to build shapes, the work can be a unique hybrid of painting and sculpture.

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to coastal communities in fall 2012 was evident in the wooden debris that littered the affected communities in its wake. Floorboards, pieces of cabinets, and window frames were often all that remained of homes torn apart by the storm’s ferocity. It was after the storm that Laura Petrovich-Cheney began collecting the castaway wooden debris—remnants evocative of life before the storm. Inspired by the geometry of American quilts whose simplicity belies their conceptual underpinnings, Petrovich-Cheney pieces together this salvaged wood into something meaningful and orderly. As both formal, abstract art objects and expressions of feminism, traditional American patchwork quilt designs are designs she finds familiar and comforting. Her wooden quilts evoke a past heritage of craftsmanship and labor as well as the American ideal of a pioneer woman’s can-do spirit and instinct for survival.