Photos: Going somewhere in Newark via gallery's showing of local artist's "Going Nowhere" paintings
Photos from the Index Art Gallery dual-artists showing of Kelly Ann Pinho’s collection of paintings, “Going Nowhere,” with as pictured in the sixth photo, Sunil Garg’s light-wielding sculpture pieces. Light is a big element of Pinho’s works which are in part a meditation on the idea of “going nowhere” during the height of the COVID pandemic, when the artist’s mother died from COVID and she was unable to grieve in a traditional manner because of the restrictions.
The other strong element at play in Pinho’s work is her exploring the way she was able to take her makeup off, literally and metaphorically, contemplating for the first time, she writes in an artist statement, how important upkeep of a superficial notion of appearance had been since she started working in the service industry as an adolescent. The paintings, like “Spring Heel Jack (30x30),” utilize makeup, and along with the way the waves/distortions of colors play with any light source, some of them also evoke makeup running down someone’s face or a wall being painted with one solid color going askew, made a palette to explore something more than the one-dimensional plainness a wall typically has — which makes their contrast with the Index Art Gallery’s space all the more striking up close or at a distance. One visitor noted there’s a line of European explorations of color they fit with as well.
Wall-watching should have been bigger during the height of the pandemic than it was some places, particularly where a mixture of high population density and a lack of firmly middle class options/resources meet, for COVID not to be so tragically big in the way it was, and in some part, forming color portals the way Pinho’s work does here is inherently a response to that.
Pictured are also slides and writing from Pinho’s slide show presentation:
“My sister said it was like these people”
“Like these people never heard someone say no”
The works, which are for sale, continue to be on display at Index Art Center’s temporary art space for about a month in Newark’s Teachers Village, at 245 Halsey St., in Newark, N.J. Admission is free and open to the public but are by appointment only. Plan a visit at this link: http://www.indexartcenter.org/?page_id=56.
Pinho is a Newark-raised artist who resides in Jersey City.