Current exhibits
The Black Swans of Ellen Carey
Gallery at Blue Back Square; 69 Raymond Road. in the parking lot across the street from Whole Foods, near the Cheesecake Factory.
Gallery hours: Monday - Wednesday, 9-1 Thursday and Friday 9-3, Saturday and Sunday, 1- 4 p.m. (860) 231-8019
Click here to view a video of Ellen talking about her exhibit. Video courtesy of Julie Bidwell
Ellen Carey is an internationally recognized lens-based, camera and photographic artist. Considered a pioneer in the cameraless photogram and lens-based Polaroid photographic and contemporary art field, Carey creates unique images, often monumental and site-specific installations such as Pulls XL for the Wadsworth Atheneum, which honored her work as its MATRIX #153 artist, and Mourning Wall for Real Art Ways. Both installations are interdisciplinary and use the internationally well-known, large format Polaroid 20 X 24 camera or Polaroid 40 X 80 (now dismantled).
Carey often creates, designs and exhibits the positives with their negatives, giving equal status to both. They are distinctly abstract and minimal, simultaneously expressed as visual objects seen in the specificity of this Polaroid photographic process. Her breakthrough artworks, termed Pulls, which she discovered in 1996, highlight her investigations (1996-2010) into the less-is-more tenets of images, with little or “zero” exposure, while creating new forms that challenge meaning as well as question the origins of their making.
Carey’s work has been the subject of 47 one-person exhibitions in museums, alternative spaces and commercial galleries, and has been included in several hundred group exhibitions. Carey has work in the permanent collections of more than 20 museums, such as The Albright-Knox, Chicago Art Institute, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, LA County, Metropolitan, Smithsonian, Whitney, Wadsworth Atheneum and in several corporations, such as Polaroid, Dow Jones and Banana Republic. Her work is privately held in the LeWitt Collection, Nancy and Robinson Grover Photography Collection, which recently gifted her work to the Yale University Art Gallery, and the well-known art collectors Linda Cheverton-Wick and Walter Wick, the creator of the I SPY and “Can You See What I See?” picture puzzle books for children.
ArtBeat: an exhibit of work by West Hartford Public Schools students
Clubhouse Gallery: 37 Buena Vista Road, West Hartford. Gallery hours: Thursday - Sunday, 1-4 p.m. (860) 521-1138
Land, Sky and Sea: 100 Pearl Street Gallery
An exhibit featuring work by West Hartford Art League members Julie Bidwell, Frank Federico, Carol Ganick, Lee Goode, Elizabeth Lazaren, and John Rohatsch
Opening reception: Wednesday March 31st, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.