The Laffer Gallery Presents: “Double Vision”
Featuring Caroline Ramersdorfer and Jenny Kemp
June 27 – August 2, 2015
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 27, 5-8pm
The Laffer Gallery is proud to announce, Double Vision, with painter Jenny Kemp and sculptor Caroline Ramersdorfer. Double Vision captures the nuances within the artists intricate abstractions and translucent layers, leaving the viewer to experience simultaneous perceptions within the works.
Jenny Kemp’s interest in abstraction comes from her desire to create images that serve to represent unseen phenomenon. The results are paintings that are dense, intricate and often abstruse. Biologically-inspired imagery, stemming from contemplations on our relationship to organic matter is built through lines and planes of subtly shifting hue intensities and gradations, generating form through a slow additive process of layering line work by hand that parallels growth and changeability in the natural world.
These investigations are furthered by capturing macro shots of her paintings and manipulating them into small stop-motion videos, which spark a conversation about the tensions between depth and flatness, movement and stillness, handmade and digital.
Jenny Kemp received her Bachelors degree in studio art from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and her MFA in Painting from the University at Albany. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the country, most recently at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, NY, a two-person show at Middle Tennessee State University and an invitational exhibition at The Painting Center in NYC. She has been featured in publications such as 100 Painters of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson, The Huffington Post, Seattle’s City Arts, LUXE, NY Times, Fabrik, and Apogee magazines. She is the 2015 recipient of The Arts Center of the Capital Region’s Emerging Artist Award. She is also currently a Visiting Professor of Studio Art at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT and sits on the board of Collar Works, a not-for-profit, artist run exhibition space in the Capital Region of New York.
Caroline Ramersdorfer’s sculptures are expressive abstractions capture light through delicate, translucent layers of marble to convey the passage of time and evoke an emotional response from the viewer. Symbolism and cross-cultural references are important to her work, representing an interior world both physical and spiritual, something she called architecture of the soul.
Since moving to the Adirondacks, Ramersdorfer has found inspiration in her rural environment. Her work has opened up, breaking through the rigid angularity of her earlier work into more expressive abstractions. With nature more of a guide, the new works provide a refreshing fluidness and unpredictability.
Caroline Ramersdorfer studied philosophy in Paris in 1979, before enrolling in the International University of Art in Florence, Italy, where she studied African art history, museum science, and Renaissance fresco restoration. She received her MFA in sculpture in 1988 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, Italy.
After completing her studies, Ramersdorfer’s career took off, thanks in part to grants from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and the Arts and Culture and the Federal Chancellery in Vienna to work abroad, most notably in Japan in the early 1990s. A grant from UNESCO supported the Carambolage Project, a 1998 exchange with artists of the Caribbean.
In 1995 she returned to Austria where she established studios in Vienna, and in Vorarlberg, in the home designed by her father, the architect Mag. Willi F. Ramersdorfer (1922-2010). Over the next few years, she worked in both Asia and Europe on the Energy series, developing the Ring Project in Fukuoka, Japan, and the Inner View series in Vienna. Since then, she has participated in exhibitions worldwide and won commissions to create a number of large-scale, site-specific works at nearly two dozen international sculpture symposia. Her sculptures are installed in private and public art collections in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Egypt, Canada, U.S.A., China, Belize, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she was awarded first prize at the 2005 Emaar International Art Symposium for Inner View. In early 2009 Ramersdorfer was one of 17 artists participating in the Abu Dhabi International Sculpture Symposium. She produced a 15-ton sculpture in white marble, which took five weeks to create.
After spending summers in the Adirondack Region of upstate New York, Ramersdorfer became a permanent resident of the US in 2009 and has a studio in Wells, New York.