Fantastical Realities: Sandra Caplan, Maya Ciarrocchi, and Ray Ciarrocchi with Derfner Museum (Hybrid)
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This exhibition will be the first time two generations of the Ciarrocchi-Caplan family will exhibit together. Sandra Caplan (b. Winnipeg, Canada, 1936) focuses on still life, Ray Ciarrocchi (b. Chicago, Illinois, 1933) on landscape, and Maya Ciarrocchi (b. Winnipeg, Canada, 1967) works across disciplines. The worlds they create and the realities they express are intimately connected to the times and places in which they work.
Sandra Caplan works almost exclusively in still life, using vivid colors and staged tableaux that she carefully assembles and paints directly from observation. What results, however, is fantastical. Flowers, fruits, fabric, mirrors, and personal objects are painted in bold, saturated colors and at large scale. Among the objects Caplan includes are “photos associated with people and places from the past,” including “reproductions of paintings that hold an emotional connection,” Caplan has explained. In Downtown View, September (1989), for example, she juxtaposes the subjective, internal world, symbolized by the still life, with the objective reality represented by the New York City skyline beyond the studio window.
Ray Ciarrocchi has a strong formalist practice related to the physical aspects of landscape. His vibrant compositions begin with observation and become fantastical places all their own with the dramatic color and shadow that appear within his works. Describing his process, Ciarrocchi states, “the canvas . . . becomes more ‘real’ than the subject which initially inspired it.”
Ciarrocchi uses light as a way to explore the potential of color, transforming observed reality into something dreamlike. For example, the rhythmic stylization of natural forms and saturated pinks, greens, blues, and purples of Field by a River (1989) present a view of the Susquehanna River—the longest river on the East Coast and a subject that Ciarrocchi has returned to many times over the years—as a transcendent, surrealistic landscape, at once recognizable and strange.
