Back to Gowanus Sediment Exhibitions
Said I Meant
Said I Meant, a play on the word sediment, is an exhibition of work by thirteen artists and writers that explores the griefs and joys we leverage in order to feel most alive. During this period of tremendous social, environmental, and technological transition, how do we use our histories to live wholeheartedly in the present and plan for the future?
Participants:
Barry Beach explores the intersection of the human and natural world through multiple media and forms. His work is influenced by the built environment and topography visited through years of road trips, snowboarding, and hiking. Barry lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and regularly exhibits his work in galleries and online, most recently in the 2019 Crocker-Kingsley Exhibition in Roseville, California and the 2019 Made in California Exhibition at Brea Gallery in Brea, California. His education includes an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
Diane Bertolo works with pixels, paper, sticks and stones to create physically diverse works that mix chaos with logic as they mark the passage of time and the demise of nature. In addition, she creates small poetic objects to celebrate the “everyday,” and, through her practice, asks questions that are unspeakable in our first language.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered over 40 original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Recent works include “…hewn & forged….” at the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival (2016); “_______ is the thing with feathers” at “Call & Response: Experiments in Joy” (2014); “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” (2014); and “Fugue (Da, Montréal),” at the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (2014). Her writing has appeared in Small Axe, Obsidian, Asterix, Rain Taxi, and other publications. Her performance memoirs, Swallow the Fish (2017) and Experiments in Joy were published by The Accomplices. A recipient of the Rema Hort Mann 2019 LA Emerging Artist Grant, the aim of her work is to open up space.
Ellen Driscoll’s work encompasses sculpture, drawing, and public art. Recent installations include “CartOURgraphy” for Middle College High School and the International High School in Queens, "Night to Day, Here and Away" for the Sarasota National Cemetery, and “Bower” with Joyce Hwang at Artpark. Earlier works include “The Loophole of Retreat” at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, and “As Above, So Below” for Grand Central Terminal. Her awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, and a Fine Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work is in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art. She is Program Director of Studio Arts and Visiting Professor of Sculpture at Bard College. She has been awarded the Outstanding Educator of the Year award for 2018 from the International Sculpture Center.
Paul Eprile is a longtime publisher (Between the Lines, Toronto), as well as a poet and translator. He is currently at work on the translation of Jean Giono’s 1951 novel, The Open Road (forthcoming from New York Review Books), and lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.
Jacqueline Ferrante is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her thickly layered abstractions are mirrors of the history, buildup, and decay found predominantly in urban environments. She investigates the relationship between color, texture, and form as they change over time. Telephone poles with decades of postings and detritus accumulation, sides of brick buildings with cracked paint revealing moments of history along with color trends, transit paths, the ebb and flow of life and human touch. Her work re-creates and mimics this history and texture through the process of layering, rubbing, and stripping paint. These techniques function as a gesture towards the forgotten beauty of the world around us. Ferrante was born and raised in Long Island, NY and received her B.A. in Art and Theater Production from Northeastern University. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally.
Elisabeth Frost is the author of All of Us: Poems, the chapbooks Rumor and A Theory of the Vowel, Bindle (a collaboration with artist Dianne Kornberg), and the critical study The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry. Frost has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation-Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, and others. She is Professor of English and Women’s/Gender/Sexuality Studies at Fordham University, where she edits the Poets Out Loud book series from Fordham Press.
Abby Goldstein (b. Chicago, IL) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. Ms. Goldstein is passionate about art, typography, and design. She is an Associate Professor of Art and heads the Graphic Design Concentration at Fordham University, NY. Ms. Goldstein has exhibited her work in the US and abroad and has received numerous awards, fellowships, and public commissions. Ms. Goldstein lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Dianne Kornberg has had thirty-six solo exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her work is in several important museum and public collections including those of the American Embassy in Belize, the Houston Museum of Art, the Princeton Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. She has been featured in multiple book publications and is the author of four books, two in collaboration with poets. Kornberg is Professor Emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.
Katherine Leiner is the author of many works for children, among them, Mama Does the Mambo, Hyperion Press. She has also written several novels: Digging Out, Penguin Group, and most recently a food book, Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks and Food Activists. She is currently working on a novel about murder, and a relationship between a mother and son. Katherine believes deeply in the act of writing and re-writing.
Spencer Merolla studied religion as an undergraduate and had embarked on a career in academia before returning to her first love, visual art. Her work has explored the social practice and material culture of grief through various affectively-charged materials. Merolla has shown nationally and in London, most recently at the Bard Graduate Center and ChaShaMa in New York City. Her work has been featured on Hyperallergic, The Jealous Curator, and The Creators Project. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Robert Pennington is a social documentary photographer, filmmaker and educator whose thirty-year career in media arts has taken him throughout the US, South Pacific, Europe and Latin America. Early in his career, Pennington worked as an editor and has also produced and directed. His editorial work has been shown at Cannes, Sundance and the Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals. His directorial debut, Polynesian Power, a documentary that chronicles the ascent of two Samoan athletes to the NFL, premiered on ESPN and subsequently aired on PBS. He has also produced and edited projects for HBO, Disney, Telemundo and numerous advertising agencies. Pennington has worked in various educational systems for over a decade teaching in New Zealand, Latin America and the United States. He is currently a Teaching Artist in New York City.
Lourdes Sanchez is a Cuban-born New York painter whose primary mediums are watercolor and ink, which she uses to explore compositions that are equal parts geometric and organic. She is interested in both embracing and transcending a history of prettiness in the watercolor tradition, and sees it as a metaphor for the desire to align with loveliness often sought by or imposed upon the feminine, while giving a glimpse of the complex subtext beneath. However some of her work is simply an unbridled love affair with the natural world, and a fascination with the geometric and molecular structure which is the underpinning of organic life. Her work is represented by the Sears Peyton gallery in NYC and L.A. and she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, N,Y and Merida, Yucatan.