News

Carol Gove works out of her Santa Fe studio as an abstract mixed media collage artist. She has a BS from the University of New Hampshire and studied at the DeCordova Museum School in Boston. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibits over the last 20 years.

Her paintings and collages are exhibited nationally at G2 Gallery in Santa Fe, Gebert Contemporary in Scottsdale, Stremmel Gallery in Reno, and Galerie d’Orsay in Boston. She is a member of the DeCordova Museum Corporate Art Program and The National Association of Women Artists in New York. Her work can be found in public collections including the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston.

She has been accepted in many nationally juried shows including a 100 year retrospective exhibit “In Context: Collage & Abstraction” at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York. This exhibit included contemporary artists as well as master work by Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner and more. She has also exhibited in groups shows in the Boston area at the DeCordova Museum, the Danforth Art Museum, and the Whistler Museum of Art.

In addition to working in her studio, Carol volunteers much of her time in animal rescue. Currently she is the VP of Operations at Felines & Friends in Santa Fe. Previously, she was the Assistant Director at a cat shelter in MA. She also has donated her artwork to many non-profit causes including The Human Rights Campaign, Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in NH, Citizens for Affordable Housing in Boston, The NH Institute of Art, and the Contemporary Art Forum in Phoenix.

SEE CAROL’S WORK

Born in Texas and raised in Virginia, Christine Cassano is an interdisciplinary artist, now living and working in Arizona and exhibits regionally, nationally and internationally. Her work explores connection, accumulation and convergence as metaphor within our new, hyper-connected era. She gains this inspiration and understanding by traversing our ecological, technological and cosmological systems. She investigates biological formations, technological patterns and aerial views as she examines their recursive forms and connections within our universe. Notable in Christine’s work is her ability to make use of inherent physical properties of materials in order to transform them into experimental mediums. These methods often result in the making of small, unique patterns of organic units in outlandishly large numbers. Materials such as copper, porcelain, glass, mirror, concrete, metal formations, and even her own hair as threading is utilized as medium. Christine’s installations, sculptures, sound pieces and two-dimensional pieces are formed by collecting, connecting, stacking, tethering and suspending materials. These arrangements and relationships explore principles, correspondences and paradoxes of our cultural progress while also offering new considerations of emerging hybrid forms and converging systems.

Christine graduated with a BFA from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She is a recipient of the 2018 Artist Research Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2016, she was awarded a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, supported in part by the Nathan Cummings Foundation Endowment. In 2015, she was awarded a residency at the University of West Georgia and was also a recipient of the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art Grant, resulting in a published artist catalog of her work. Her public art sculptures, installations and commissioned works are in various collections throughout the US and abroad.

From curator, museum director and arts writer, Marilyn Zeitlin, in Bring All To Front, 2016  – “Among many ways in which we can grasp the world are to either declare it simple and place all phenomena under one all-embracing idea, or go about the process incrementally, accumulating small segments of understanding that may gradually form larger clusters. The former is what most religions offer. The latter is something more like a jigsaw puzzle or Lego approach. It suits skeptics, scientists, inventors and artists. Knowledge can be gained in small pieces by experimentation: testing theory and gathering data. The relationship among these discrete packets is not immediately obvious, but over time — even a lifetime — several may snap together, and then larger units may click together to give a bigger parcel of understanding. The excitement of snapping pieces together makes for a great day. Sometimes the snap is recognized with a Nobel Prize. More often, it is simply personal satisfaction. An epiphany.

Christine Cassano puts the metaphor of the second alternative into visible, tangible terms, but also perceives the correspondences of form among widely different kinds of phenomena. She is an artist who sees relationships across fields of experience and knowledge and finds ways to present her epiphanies using a wide range of materials. But she is also engrossed by science and the new ways it gives us to see the invisible and relationships of systems. Cassano revels in the complexity that science can define. In her work, she suggests intersecting systems. She embraces complexity. Her work almost without exception brings together opposites, usually several sets in a single work. Inside/outside; natural/manufactured; the biological/the machine; public/autobiographical. Reaching into the cosmological approach, she sees resonance between the natural and mechanical which share patterns and processes.

SEE CHRISTINE’S WORK

Corinne Geertsen grew up on the plains of Montana. She developed a rich inner life and an affinity for strong horizon lines and big skies. She always drew.

Her father was a psychologist. Psychologists at that time would often show someone a set of dramatic pictures and ask them to make up a story about each picture. Geertsen spent a lot of time with the picture plates of her father’s tests, fascinated by the ties between stories and images. As a result, she moves easily between story line and image and back again as she works, nuancing her work with psychological twists.

She has always enjoyed animals, which are often central to the design and content of her work. At the age of seven, she dragged a horse home and put him in the backyard, in case he was lost.

Geertsen had beginnings in science with several student research grants from the American Cancer Society involving genetic mapping. Her brother, who became a particle physicist, made a space capsule for her hamsters and planned to send them to the moon from a drive-in movie screen structure near their home.

She grew up with psychology and science. Her pictures are full of contraptions, mechanisms, personalities and plight.

She studied drawing and painting at Brigham Young University where she acquired a B.A. and an M.F.A. in drawing and painting. Photoshop and digital art did not yet exist.

She and her husband moved to Arizona in 1980, where she continued her love of landscape from the back of a good trail horse.

Much later she took a Photoshop course to restore old family photos. Two weeks into the class she began seeing her ancestors as characters in dramas. “Photoshop matches the way I think,” she says. “When I first found Photoshop, I felt I had discovered the other half of the map.” Working digitally dovetails nicely with the way her mind works. She often paints a necessary object, photographs it and digitally adds it into a work.

Her work spans more than a century and a half of technology. She uses Civil War and Victorian era studio portraits as source material, yet she works digitally on a computer with massive memory, deep within the technical intricacies of Photoshop. She enjoys the contrast and challenges of working with multiple technologies.

She works from her ever growing collection of 45,000 old photos and photos she takes herself. They include scans of photos she took in the 1970’s, photos from the 3 years she lived in Denmark, as well as photos her genealogist husband unearths.

Geertsen currently lives and works in Mesa, Arizona.