February 13 - March 7, 2003

Brooke Hammerle and Donald Smith

The Chazan Gallery @ Wheeler will be presenting an exhibition of photographs by Brooke Hammerle and paintings by Donald Smith from February 13 to March 7, 2003. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, February 13 from 5 - 7 p.m. The public is invited.

above image: Hammerle, Mirror in grey I, Iris print

Brooke Hammerle makes digital photographic prints that reflect her background as a painter. Although her subject is nature, her photographs are luminous studies in color and form. "Photographing through mirrored surfaces, or directly into light, I create a world reflected, of spatial ambiguity to the viewer. Although my images are from the visual world, the subtlety of shapes, patterns, and relationships allow them to float in a rhythm of their own, suspended between reality and illusion."

Hammerle is the Photographer to the Brown University Art History and Visual Art Department and to the Bell Gallery. She has shown her work throughout New England, most recently at the Virginia Lynch Gallery.

An abstract painter in the purest sense, Donald Smith eschews post modernist ideology to make visually arresting oil paintings in the painterly tradition. Working with broad strokes of color, Smith sees himself as visually-oriented rather than conceptually-oriented and likens the act of painting to the composition of music.

Smith maintains a studio in Rhode Island and has been a visiting artist and lecturer at Harvard, Yale, and RISD. His work is in public and private collections all over the world.

above image: Smith, Composition 2001, oil on board