IN THE ANNEX: NOVEMBER 2023
Delaney Conner + Robert Sullivan + Nick Ward
”About Face” Juried Show Award Recipients
November 2- 26, 2023.
SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, November 3, 2023, | 5:00–8:00 PM
PRICE LIST (PDF) ➢
Delaney Conner
Delaney Conner's work focuses on nuanced facial profiles to highlight the delicate boundary between a woman's ability to feel beautiful and the overt sexualization she may receive when externally perceived. To reject the insinuations often thrust upon the female form, she presents only highly rigid and resolutely geometric portraits of women, without a stroke of traditionally accentuated voluptuousness or vulnerability. By abstracting identifiable features and removing individual characteristics to varying degrees, she re-examines our perceptions on “appropriateness”. Her mission is to create broadly familiar subjects that reflect femininity as part of the Whole rather than the Individual. The textures and micro-patterns in the thread-work accent the idea that there is no definable limit from where the fabric that we wear ends and our inner, more personal and emotional inner weavings begin.
Conner is a New York City based artist, born and raised in Aspen, Colorado. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2017 where she majored in Architecture and minored in Art History. Delaney discovered punch needle embroidery in 2019 and has been expanding her skill and subject matter in this medium for the past three years. Her utilization of the punch needle technique deviates from Delaney’s education in architectural watercolor rendering, but one that she equates to “painting with textiles”. Delaney currently lives and works in New York City, practicing in Residential Architecture & Interior Design as well as pursuing her passion for art.
Robert Sullivan
With paint as his primary medium, Robert Sullivan places a contemporary lens up to the traditions of figure painting and narrativity. Color theory, transparency, and conceptual frameworks embedded within his imagery push the expected conventions of the genre towards unfamiliar, allusive meaning. Sullivan’s technical facility with paint is a product of traditional training in the craft, while the conceptual platform of his work is wholly modern, drawing upon the zeitgeist of visual culture. This creates a working duality within his pictures, allowing figure painting’s storied history to have a dialogue with the discourse of the present.
Sullivan possesses an expansive range to his artist’s career — with painting, digital media, design, illustration, critical theory, and writing integral to his educational and professional experiences. Currently a lecturer at Lesley Art+Design in Cambridge, Sullivan specializes in seminars related to visual culture. His art is exhibited in galleries from New York City to New England, and is featured in collections both domestic and abroad. Sullivan maintains his art practice at his home studio in Portland, Maine and is a Core Member of Fountain Street Gallery.
Nick Ward
Nick Ward is a figurative painter and printmaker who creates portrait-based works that explore timeless stories through the internet obsessed eyes of today. Using traditional techniques but relying on heavily manipulated digital image and video files as reference materials, these paintings explore relationships in the social media age and the complicated connections between our digital and real world identities.
To create the imagery used for the paintings featured here, people are invited into the artist’s studio to collaborate on the creation of a series of video clips that will be layered together into short montages. These video files are then digitally corrupted using a variety of techniques that result in a video that is visually degraded and glitched in unpredictable ways. For instance, to create the reference image used for the painting, “Glitch Caused by The Word No,” an audio file containing the model speaking the word “no” is layered into the video montage as if it was a piece of video, causing the figure on screen to distort into blooms of vivid color. From this, the most impactful frames are used as reference material for the paintings.
Originally from a small town in southern Washington, Ward currently lives in the outskirts of Boston, MA with his wife, daughter, and their scrappy dog. His work has twice earned him Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grants for painting.