Artist Helen Quinn To Speak at Art Garage

COOPERSTOWN—Internationally active artist Helen Quinn will present a free artist’s talk on Thursday, August 10 at 6 p.m. at the Art Garage, 689 Beaver Meadow Road, just outside of Cooperstown. Quinn’s program is offered as part of the current show, “Passages: Creatures and Curiosities.” The three-person exhibit also includes work by Ava Fedorov and Petey Brown.

Quinn is an artist, stylist, and designer who lives in Jackson Heights, Queens and, during the summer, Treadwell. Nothing is simple with Quinn: All of her work seems to involve multiple layered processes. The Art Garage is featuring four bodies of her wide-ranging art in this high summer exhibition.

These groups include small, functional ceramic “head pots” with super-dark shifting blue/black glazes, inspired by indigenous work seen in Oaxaca, Mexico while Quinn was an artist-in-residence there; dark and rich handmade paper pieces from her “Suspended Series” that include images from medieval Japan; and a colorful quartet of two-dimensional works, “Circus Rorschach,” inspired by visual “fragments” she finds on the #7 train in Queens.

“Mustaches, eye glasses, textile patterns, video game characters, and signs seen from the window,” she noted, “are all ripe for the picking—by layering, repeating, and mirroring these shapes, a portrait of the shared experience of a train car, a subway stop or a neighborhood starts to emerge.”

“The work seeks to capture the spirit of people who come together in passing by cataloging fleeting and valuable fragments,” Quinn explained.

This fascination with visual fragments encountered on the subway also informs the largest pieces in the show—three sparse, yet rich, 5-foot-high silkscreened prints embellished with hand-drawn touches that celebrate the whole range of objects, people and relationships—which she calls the “Floating World of the 7 Train.”

The title and approach are influenced by Japanese woodblocks called Ukiyo-e, developed during the Edo period (1603-1868) in Japan, where Quinn studied as a Luce Scholar on a one-year fellowship. Those prints depicted “urban scenes where merchants, townspeople, geisha, and samurai engage in a world of work,” she explained. “Images from the floating or fleeting world—Ukiyo-e.”

To Quinn, Jackson Heights, Queens is “my modern day Edo (old Tokyo)—while riding the above-ground 7 train, I use my sketchbook to collect hair styles, mustaches, masks, and eyeglasses of the hard working, magical characters I see framed against the changing sky visible through the windows…With these historic prints in mind, I make silk screen prints and gouache drawings that represent modern, abstract, fleeting worlds.”

Quinn’s floating world prints are crowd portraits, diagramming the intersection of people.

“The portraits can be a formal taxonomy, like a menu or an eye chart in the doctor’s office,” she explained, “or a tenuous configuration like a 2-D mobile. The portraits can also take the form of a layered crowd with elements suspended underwater as if the characters are floating in stillness.”

The Art Garage will open at 5 p.m. on August 10, with light refreshments, and will also be open Saturday, August 12 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. for browsing. Space is limited and reservations are always recommended, though not required, by texting or calling (315) 941-9607 or at leartgarage@gmail.com. Guests are asked to park on the gallery lawns.

Artist Petey Brown will present the third in a series of “Passages: Creatures and Curiosities” artist’s talks on Wednesday, August 23.