WELCOME TO
THE GUN SHOW
Featured Artists in The Gun Show
Kay Howell
Kay Howell’s photography has garnered an award at the South Shore Art Center Arts Festival Juried Exhibition in Cohasset, Massachusetts; been exhibited at Carriage Barn Arts Center in New Canaan, Connecticut; New Bedford Art Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts; Whistler House Museum of Art in Lowell, Massachusetts; Centerville Historical Museum in Centerville, Massachusetts; Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cotuit, Massachusetts; and Cape Cod Art Association in Barnstable, Massachusetts, among other venues. Born in Santa Barbara, California, she currently makes her art based out of the South Shore of Massachusetts. Kay likes her work to have a sense of drama – often a quiet drama – intimacy and individuality. Her goal is always to stand out from the crowd, in anything she undertakes. One way of achieving this is by approaching subjects from unusual perspectives: showing viewers things they’ve never noticed before, or getting them to look at something they’ve seen a million times in a new way. She likes to project the audience into an uncommon intimacy with people, animals, objects and places. Her preference is natural-light, documentary-style photography – finding the beauty in what’s there, rather than altering what’s there to fit the photographer’s preconception of beauty. She’s driven to shoot the authentic, not the rehearsed. And to find art in the everyday, not just the baroque. She likes to capture soul. Kay includes season and location as part of the photograph information when possible, because she likes her work to have a sense of season and place.
Walt Gorecki received his BFA in Illustration from California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he works as an illustrator and produces a variety of gallery installations, events, videos, and publications. He recently acted as Creative Director of Home Room, a mixed use creative space which he co-founded and operated alongside Shaddy Zeineddine. Previously, Walt was the Creative Director for L’KEG Gallery in Echo Park, which was awarded LA Weekly's "Best Art Gallery For Music." He is always seeking new, interesting creative projects.
"A free people don’t need to be armed. Not with physical weapons anyhow. The armor of the free is their own resilience; their ability to create, innovate, and explore without the constrictions of external conflict. Freedom of expression is the all-encompassing response that acts as an umbrella over the myriad components necessary for a society to be truly free."
- Walt Gorecki
Matthew Dickey
Matthew is a firm believer that art is a vehicle for social change. His work focuses on the built environment and divisions in social class. Matthew recently completed his Master of Science in Arts Administration from Boston University (BU) where he studied approaches to making art a viable business. He is now working to create an organization called the Dwelling that nurtures creativity and sparks community dialogue through art; all from the back of a truck.
Kelly Novak
Kelly Novak is an artist from Baldwinsville, New York, studying photography in the BFA program at SUNY New Paltz. She will enter her senior year at New Paltz in the Fall of 2013.
Gretchen Mahnkopf
Gretchen Mahnkopf studied at Tulane University and later took lessons at the Art Students' League in NY. Mainly self taught, she paints representative and photo realistic oils and watercolors. She has exhibited in few shows, mainly working on commission but was included in the Pelham Art Center's 40th Birthday show in Pelham, NY as well as several online sites. Currently she resides in a small town in the Hudson Valley with a three legged dog.
Jane Rainwater grew up in Westport, CT and currently lives in Andover, CT. Jane teaches art and design at several colleges and universities in Connecticut. She is also the owner of Rainwater Design. She holds a MFA from The Art Institute of Boston, and a BFA from The Hartford Art School. Jane Rainwater recently received a Radius Emerging Artist Fellowship from The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT. She also worked on an on-line project with the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, MN, and has shown her work in Pittsburgh, PA at The Three Rivers Gallery.
"My work is beautiful and ugly. People are often attracted to the aesthetics of an image or object that stimulates desire. Decorative objects are collected and exhibited in the home as status symbols of affluence and refinement. My work engages the viewer with its seemingly innocent decorative delight; yet upon closer examination the work challenges and questions our attraction by revealing darker truths. I explore the hidden cost inherent in most of what we find seductively attractive.
This dark undercurrent of 'cultural reckoning' informs my series of botanical illustrations, Botanical Tyranny. Rooted in the tradition of botanical illustration, the silhouettes of seeming real plants, such as Ipomoea Violencea or Hellanthius Ammos, are in fact carefully constructed from silhouettes of axes, scimitars, guns and grenades. Our measured gardens and cultivated civility are rooted in a history of violent conquest. While grenades may have replaced scimitars in our arsenals, the underlying theme remains. The beauty of our culture, like that all of those which preceded it, is but a mask for the ugliness of our own nature."
-Jane Rainwater