“Nothing is Black + White”Michael HershipsGlynis Berry202007-10-07T19:10:00Z2008-04-06T15:27:00Z2008-04-06T15:27:00Z16733841Michael Herships, PhD329450511.5604RECALLED INTIMACYCLYDE PHILLIP WACHSBERGERCLAIRE WATSONatart sites651 West Main Street (Route 25), Riverhead, New York 11901 631- 591-2401http://www.artsitesgallery.comDate: April 12 – May 18, 2008Reception April 12, 5-7 PMGallery Hours: Thursday –Sunday, 12-5 PM.For group tour information and additional hours call 631-591-2401These two very different artists are being shown together because they both create art that evokes a sense of intimacy, whether through the fond portraits of Clyde Wachsberger’s relatives and friends or Claire Watson’s small sculptures formed from remnants of past lives. There is a serenity in Wachsberger’s watercolors that creates a utopia out of memory and human affection. Faces, clothes and hints of domestic settings mark the progression of time in domestic scenes. Claire’s sculptures are more mysterious, transforming discarded objects usually associated with touch (gloves, sock darners) into imaginative human forms. In her hands the past, sensed but not necessarily understood, takes on new life not envisioned by the original users.CLYDE PHILLIP WACHSBERGERStatementThe watercolors were painted on 6 by 8 inch handmade Twinrocker paper in Orient, New York and in New York City, between 2002 and 2006. I worked from family photographs. The earliest are crackled sepia-toned prints from the beginning of the last century. Many are small Brownie black-and-whites from the late 1940s and the 1950s. some are Polaroids that have faded to pastels. A few are color prints made from kodachrome slides. The most recent photographs are crisp and bright.For me, each photograph only fixes a time and place into fact. My memories color in the emotions. The moments I chose to paint are colored the way I remember them, or the way I remember being told about them, or the way I would like them to have been. I have painted them the way I want them to be remembered.Bio:Clyde Wachsberger was coeditor of Of Leaf and Flower for Persea Books, for which he received the 2002 Garden globe Award for Best Book Illustration by the Garden Writers Association. He is also the author of Daffodil and Rose for Harry N. Abrams, Inc. His reviews of opera have appeared in the British Opera. His garden columns have appeared in the North Fork Press and The East Hampton Star. He has twice received grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, one for writing and one for painting. CLAIRE WATSONStatementMy current work explores historically feminine articles as intimate tokens of the material self.  Ladies' gloves are altered, hand-sewn, fitted with skeletal wire armatures, and stuffed with sawdust to become discrete standing objects. As the objects bend towards doll-likenesses, they begin to incorporate doll parts or doll-making techniques. The gloves suggest flesh and its fragility; preoccupations with its containment or disclosure; and escape through role-playing and costume.  In un-making them, I think of women's traditions of handwork, particularly in long hours of sewing, but they are also reminiscent of doll-things or toys. In a parallel vein wooden kitchen implements, sewing tools, etc., are combined with doll maker’s clay.  I’m intrigued by the antique forms and forgotten uses of such things as wooden sock darners, and especially by implicit references to the human form in handles and other functional parts.  The objects, covered with translucent “flesh colored” clay and with modeled features, seem to become familiars of an arcane domesticity, artifacts of a particularly feminine history, imperfectly remembered.   Language and art are tools, and playthings.  I make objects to see what they will look like, but mainly to give form to ideas that can't be put to words, and names to images that arrive in the imagination wholly unexpectedly.BioClaire Watson, a resident of Water Mill, received a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Rome and Philadelphia.  Her work has been shown in New York at Islip Art Museum; the Anthony Giordano Gallery at Dowling College, Oakdale;  Art in General, NYC; and the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx. It has also been exhibited at Baxter Gallery, Maine College of Art in Portland; the Steven Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco; and at Johnson Gallery, Middlebury College, Vermont.  She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990-1991, and is a 2007 Fellow in Sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts.