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Thicket
May 5— June 23
Opening
Reception Friday, May 5th 6—9pm
Wed-Fri 1-5pm
Sat-Sun 11am- 4 pm
or by appointment
508-843-2184
Rafius Fane Gallery

The Rafius Fane Gallery is pleased to present “Thicket”, a solo exhibition of
recent sculptures and drawings by Ellen Driscoll. In her sculptures, Driscoll
combines cloth that typically covers the body as clothing or blanket with larger
abstractions of maps and diagrams, or the wilds of tangled forest branches . The
scale of the singular and intimate body is set against the much larger scale of cities,
forests, wind currents and continents.

In her drawings, exquisite plants and birds inhabit dystopian wildernesses–freshly
minted worlds emerging from post-industrial landscapes. The artist removes the
ink with water to reveal the silhouettes of both plants and birds. These ghost
images within the drawings are palimpsests of what survives and adapts in spite of
environmental adversity.

In her sculptures, the single body is situated within a much larger sense of drift,
migration, and realignment. In her drawings, the plants and birds are caught in
webs of rapidly evolving ecological shift where what is indoors and what is
outdoors are in visual flux.

In both media, the artist shifts our perception and destabilizes our vantage point,
creating openings for new perspectives to emerge.

The Olana Partnership and Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7 FM are pleased to present Groundswell, a new iteration of their award winning event. From 2-6, visitors will explore contemporary works sited throughout the grounds of Frederic Church’s historic Hudson Valley estate, Olana. “Telescopic Tea Table” created with Daniela Gomez, is a mirrored table upon whose surface float countries where Church painted during his international travels, and mirrored tea pots which directly mirror sculpted ornamentation on the historic house on the hill above. During the day, over 100 cups of mint tea were served to visitors as a gesture of hospitality–at the tea table.

This piece was created for the Bard College Studio Arts Faculty exhibition in the fall of 2013.

In this two person exhibition with Ellen Driscoll and Robert Oxnam, we spent several days creating a matrix that would make a single work out of our two disparate bodies of work on a 25 foot wall at the Brooklyn Zen Center.

Paper Architecture, 2002

Created with the New York Times, and other print media from countries such as Japan and Holland, these new sculptures reconfigure the daily information stream into micro-architectures. Constructed with trestle girders similar to those found in large civic infrastructure, scaffolding reminiscent of unfinished building projects, and translucent facades in which the print of both sides of the paper is conjoined to create visual cacaphony, these sculptures play with our notion of the authority of information. Seemingly sturdy, yet transparent and weighing no more than a few ounces, these sculptures affirm the ephemerality of the information that surrounds us, and quietly question the sources of power which inform and shape that information.