Tom Aprile, Mel Chin, & Sandy Winters
Summer Exhibition
Jun 7 - Aug 15, 1990
Tom Aprile's sculptures were seen for the first time at Frumkin/Adams in the gallery's 1989 summer exhibition Sculpture & Color. In an interview published in A Journal of Art (Cornell University), Aprile discussed his intuitive approach to the medium:
I want my collection of images and their physical transitions to continue to meld and multiply as the viewer perceives them. I feel a piece is successful when I can no longer keep track of the meaning levels; almost as if they are rolled over. I want my pieces to grow and bud out of themselves as though they really exist and grow.
Mel Chin is already familiar to Frumkin/Adams Gallery visitors from his participation in several group shows here as well as his 1988 solo exhibition which included an installation of a large axe-shaped room. Included in the present show are several new works, notably two sculptures from a series first seen in the Noah's Art exhibition of outdoor sculpture held in Central Park last fall. Titled Conditions for Memory, the project's aim is to mark the voids left by selected species- the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the sea mink, and the Labrador duck - once indigenous to the New York area and now extinct. The artist made cast-stone markers from the actual specimens which are opened to reveal the cast impression and marked with the date extinction.
Mel Chin was born in Houston in 1951. He was educated at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee and lived in Houston until 1984 when he moved to New York. Mel Chin's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Art and the Menil Collection, all in Houston, as well as the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. His work was featured last year in the Directions Gallery at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and he will be the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, opening September 23rd.
Sandy Winters was born in Arcadia, California in 1949. She had her debut solo exhibition at Frumkin/Adams this past January with a show of large-scale collaged paintings based on natural forms, and the works in the current exhibition are a continuation of this series. Winters begins with an irregular shape which is collaged onto a larger rectangle and filled with shapes and images derived from local (in this case, Florida) plant life. Sandy Winters first began working with this subject in the late 1970s when she began drawing in the greenhouses and gardens of the University of Tulsa where she was an instructor. She moved to Ithaca, New York in 1981 to teach at Cornell, and again to Miami in 1985, where she currently a professor of painting at Florida International University. An exhibition of Sandy Winters' recent paintings and works on paper will be on view at the Art Museum at Florida International University this summer, for which a full-color catalog is available