What’s Known, Not Seen

The title of an art exhibit currently at Silk Road Gallery is The Third Reconstruction, a reference to painter Karen Dow​‘s methods of image creation. The title could easily apply to the final iteration of the exhibit, which opened on Feb. 20 and runs through Mar. 30 on Audubon Street.

Initially, Dow was to have been paired with another Yale alumnus, a figurative painter. Then she was going solo. Finally, as serendipity would have it, her work has been paired with that of Venezuela-born ceramicist Kiara Matos of New Haven.

The gallery roster’s own reconstruction of the show, now featuring Dow and Matos, comes across as a brilliant stroke of planning, given the complementary pairing of the two bodies of work, the artists’ appreciation and respect for each other’s craft. The exhibition suggests and reinforces relationships among the pieces.

Dow teaches two-dimensional design and color theory at Southern Connecticut State University and printmaking at Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) in New Haven. Her exhibit of some 30 paintings, monotypes, and collages grew out of a project last summer at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, where she studied with master print maker Chris Shore, producing up to 50 works in a very brief period of time. This work, she said, later informed the painting series.

Dow said that a statement by noted painter Sean Scully — that painting, for him, was about relationships — resonated with her: ​“Central to my work has always been composition, color, and shape. But it is what is happening in between these facets that is most important.”

The organic growth of the composition, the relationships of the elements of color and shape as they inform the next step in the work, and the relationship of one work to the other and ultimately to the viewer, are all connections she nurtures as the works continue to reveal themselves. ​“You understand after a while, the work’s strengths and weaknesses, and you love them for both,” she said.

Noting that her work has evolved from dealing with precise geometries created with tape, rulers, and other tools, Dow said she now looks for ​“that human quality that is uniquely my own.” Her study of Gee’s Bend quilts, the African-American quilting traditions of Gee’s Bend, Alabama that emphasize improvisational, geometric simplicity, have inspired a more handmade approach to her painting.

Her geometric shapes list and slant about, freed from the bonds of regularity and predictability.

Dow’s process involves laying the work on a table and loosely tracing paper stencils to create her compositions within established parameters. Shifting paper shapes and swaths of color was a teaching and design technique used by Yale art instructor and 20th-century abstract painting icon Josef Albers, whom Dow teaches in her color theory classes. After several passes in the evolution of her work, traces of previous layers are retained in places, a purposeful pentimento technique that is part of the interplay of solids and transparencies evident in her work.

At the end of her talk, Dow quoted artist Agnes Martin, one of her earliest influences: ​“Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.”

Ceramicist Kiara Matos began her studies in ceramics in 1992. She has since honed a repertoire of skills in creating her clean-lined works, rooted in natural forms and interactive experiences with nature.

Elegant, minimalist forms of porcelain that evoke the spirit of the mid-20th century design aesthetic may manifest in abstractly glazed bird forms …

… simple stylized leaf shapes and trays that incorporate functionality but stand on their own as decorative aesthetic objects …

… bowls …

… or vases.

Some exhibition pieces share design elements of shape, color, and sensibility that work especially well in this intimate, spotlit gallery.

Matos’s botanical and ornithological observations free her to take visual cues to another level. ​“More than trying to imitate, though I observe and then develop my version of it, usually I will recall either an observed shape, or a color combination that sparks a creative process which may yield an entire line or just a couple of pieces,” she stated. Her functional pieces are delicate in shape and form — as in her ​“eccentric circle bowls,” which yield playful juxtapositions and saturated color placement not unlike the work of her co-exhibitor.

Both artists had an opportunity to give brief talks at the well attended opening last Saturday, a busy day of openings throughout New Haven that included overflow crowds at both Fred Giampietro Gallery on Chapel Street and the No Pop Studio’s group exhibit on Park Street.

“The Third Reconstruction runs through March 30 at the Silk Road Gallery, 83 Audubon St.