What Remains
January 7 - February 4
Free
WHAT REMAINS
Hetty Baiz & Laura Duerwald
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7 | 3-5pm
Hetty Baiz and Laura Duerwald have developed cohesive bodies of original and compelling work that convey potent visual sensibilities and intriguing affinities. This exhibition focuses on the artists’ shared interest in repetitive processes, their use of organic nontraditional materials, and on the tension and harmony between Baiz’s figurative weavings and Duerwald’s non-objective constructions.
Exploring the distinct processes and materials that drive each artist’s practice, What Remains presents an environment that is visually striking, contemporary, and accessible, initiating conversations about the cultural and aesthetic relationships that reside in the deep sensuality of the two artist’s work. It engages both the experienced viewer and the uninitiated alike with rich layers of contrast, texture, form, and content.
Hetty Baiz is an American artist who creates paintings characterized by rich textural surfaces. and interwoven layers of image, color and material. Made from complex processes that can include digital manipulation, printing, weaving, painting, drawing and burning with a torch, the final images — life size figures and larger than life faces — are literally built into the material. They appear to be fading into the rugged surface, or perhaps emerging from it, and the identity of the subject is absorbed into the materiality. Open ended questions about transience and the nature of being – of identity, mortality, and time, are intrinsic to her work.
Baiz has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Selected for the Incheon Women Artists Biennale in South Korea, she has taken part in collaborative art projects in China, Tibet, Dubai, Australia and France. Teaching art to underserved women at an NGO outside of Cape Town, South Africa introduced her to weaving, a technique that she now incorporates into her latest body of work.
The paintings of Laura Duerwald are built from layers of paper, salvaged fabric, botanical dyes, pigment, and wax, creating sensual surfaces and improvisational geometric compositions. Pattern and repetition are potent sources of meaning – they encourage slow meditative connections of mind and body, like an awareness of one’s breath. Their rhythms enable constantly shifting internal and external conditions to be embedded in Duerwald’s process and embodied in her work.
Duerwald received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University before moving to New York City, where she worked as an illustrator and graphic designer. Later, turning her focus to painting, she studied at the Art Students League in New York, and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Marywood University. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies at the NES Foundation in Skagaströnd, Iceland, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been shown in solo and two-person exhibitions, as well as national and international group shows, and is held in numerous private collections throughout the United States. Duerwald is represented by Dimmit Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas, Tew Galleries in Atlanta, Georgia, and Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, Maine. She works and resides in the foothills of the Endless Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania.
