NEVIS
Artist: Rachel Harms

February 3 through March 24, 2007
Opening Reception/Lecture: Saturday, February 3
(2-5pm) Lecture 4:00pm
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday Noon-5

Rachel Harms, an English-born and educated artist will exhibit her most recent abstract paintings in the Joan Lukas Rothenberg Gallery at the Redhouse. These paintings, influenced by the warm, brightly hued, West Indies Island of Nevis, offer a stark contrast to the play, “Frozen”, by Briony Lavery that also opens the same weekend at Redhouse. On the other hand, these paintings are also a wonderful complement to the underlying “construction” and premise of both the play and the ways the characters evolve, reflecting the continual interchange between the recognizable and the abstract, the visible and the invisible. Emotions and images that at first appear recognizable are at the same time highly unpredictable. Just as the characters' relationships in the play grow and deepen in unexpected ways, so too do Harms’ paintings transform, through light, color and shape. Both reveal their equally dramatic construction. Frozen offers up a lot of provocative ideas and, for the most part, leaves the audience to draw their own conclusions. The play’s subject matter is not easy to swallow, and it is not meant to be. Surprising associations can be made between these two art forms; Harms’ work holds its own significance as important abstract painting. Harms is interested in basic contradictions between nature and life, solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. These paintings beckon the viewer to linger, search, and discover the unexpected. They are refreshing, precisely honed constructions, both beautiful and affecting. The following is an excerpt from a statement that Harms wrote about her work:
“Meanings conflict. There is impossibility in creating a single, unified reading. Layering implies vestiges and ruins of perception. A lingering sense of history cannot be denied. Marginality and authority are not mutually exclusive. There is power in the confusion of fiction and truth.”

Rachel Harms has exhibited throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, including at the Creaser Gallery in London, the New Waterfront Museum in New York City; and recently at Onondaga Community College and ThInc in Syracuse. Harms earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Parson School of Design in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the Chelsea School of Art in London. Harms currently lives in Skaneateles with her husband and daughter.