At Kenise Barnes Fine Art, “Cozy” Is The Operative Word
The gallery’s current exhibition, “Cool & Collected ‘23” offers a retreat from the disquiet of this third pandemic winter.
Gallerist Kenise Barnes beside Mary Tooley Parker's "Spare Room," 2022, hooked tapestry, 36x49 inches
Kenise Barnes Fine Art’s current exhibition, “Cool & Collected ’23,” is, despite the title’s reference to cool, as comforting as fleece socks and hot chocolate. Since 2010, the gallery in Kent has organized an annual exhibition with the same title, featuring works by emerging artists that have caught the gallerist’s eye in recent years. The current iteration, curated by the gallery’s associate director Lani Holloway, features four artists whose works explore the notion of comfort conveyed in cozy interiors, pictorial hooked rug tapestries, painted embroidery, and the nostalgia of winter lights.
“In choosing the artists and works for this exhibition, the theme I had in mind was ‘comfort,’” says Holloway. “It seemed like a much-needed feeling in the third pandemic winter.” She and Barnes have clearly read the room; at the packed public reception, the people who left the comfort of home on a chilly afternoon — babies and dogs in tow — seemed perfectly content to linger among the evocative, color-saturated works on display.
The gallery has mixed the works of the four women artists, arranged by Holloway so that each artwork connects to the artworks on either side. But when considered as a whole, their styles and subject matters telescope the viewer’s attention from the outer world to the inner. Amanda Acker, for instance, paints an outdoor garden scene and a nighttime view of a covered porch dressed in twinkling lights, an enticement to enter the home on a winter night.
Yayoi Asoma, Untitled (Green Rug), 2022, gouche on masonite, 18x24 inches
Once inside, Yayoi Asoma’s painted interiors, with their lively patterns, plants, furniture, and colorful rugs, speak to the familiarity of home. Somewhere, in one (or all) of the paintings, there is a room you’d want to live in, or something that evokes memories of one’s childhood home. Yet the unexpected perspective within the interiors, the artist — who passed away January 1, 2023 — examines the impossibility of an idealized notion of home.
Kirstin Lamb’s dappled technique draws the eye close to the canvas to inspect her labor-intensive paintings of labor-intensive textiles and patterns. Her embroidery paintings involve a one-to-one relationship of mark to stitch, the act of each brushstroke serving for the stitch of a needle. These embroidery paintings take their inspiration from French floral wallpaper of the 17th through 19th centuries, while others draw inspiration from vintage embroidery patterns from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. In this exhibition, they also include works of interiors and landscapes. The dabs and dollops are so meticulous, it's tempting to put your nose right up to the paintings for closer inspection.
Mary Tooley Parker’s hooked rug tapestries are the ultimate expression of the home as haven. She employs this traditional medium (she uses a primitive, wood-handled hook, not a latch hook) to create tableaus that depict snoozing dogs (one beside its napping human wrapped in a patterned blanket on the couch), and a circle of grandmas, an image, the artist says, she gleaned from a vintage photograph. The effect is inviting and tactile, and colorful enough to lift any spirits that need a pick-me-up in the dead of winter.
“Cool and Collected ‘23” runs through March 5.
Kenise Barnes Fine Art
7 Fulling Lane, Kent, CT
(860) 592-0220
