Bittersweet - my first solo exhibition

I hope to see all of you at the opening!





Heres the press release :

Akus Gallery features artist Kelly Bigelow Becerra

Willimantic, Conn. –The Julian Akus Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University presents the exhibition, “Kelly Bigelow Becerra: Bittersweet” a solo show. There will be a visiting artist lecture on February 19 at 3:00 followed by a reception from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. with a special performance by the Quiet Corner Fiddlers. The exhibition runs from January 29 through March 12.

Kelly Bigelow Becerra is a contemporary artist who uses the labor-intensive process of direct, flatbed scanning of objects and people to create a digital vocabulary. Images are created by literally placing objects in direct contact with the glass of the scanner which creates shadowy, softly modeled shapes that are oddly foreshortened. The resulting archive of imagery is used to piece together scenes from her sometimes idyllic/sometimes abusive childhood in the rural Midwest. Both the heavily patterned images and the process itself of piecing the digital works together are inspired from traditional American sampler patterns. The viewer is drawn in by the unassuming, familiar, and homey patterns and taken aback by the deeper message of a family in disarray.

Bigelow Becerra was recently awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant via the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. She has exhibited with the Rodger Lapelle Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT, among other venues in the northeast. She is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In addition to being an exhibiting fine artist, Kelly Bigelow Becerra is also a filmmaker. She is the co-writer and co-producer of the short film "Dear Beautiful" which was chosen as an official selection of The Sundance Film Festival 2009. Collaborating with her partner and husband Roland Becerra (director and animator of the film) Bigelow Becerra worked as assistant director, designed the distinctive "look" of the monsters seen in the film, and co-wrote the screenplay for the animated feature length version of "Dear Beautiful", which is in production. "Dear Beautiful" was winner of the Moving Pictures Magazine Animated Short Film competition and screened during The Cannes Film Festival 2007.

New York Times review 1/2/09 of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition Full Circle: 10 Years of Radius which features Becerra’s archival digital work

Connecticut Post review 1/9/09 of Becerra’s film “Dear Beautiful”

Becerra’s film “Dear Beautiful” is one of 96 short films selected to screen at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival

Sundance was amazing!

photo credit: nathan lewis

The New York Times

The New York Times has a review of the Full Circle Show in the Connecticut section...




We all know how commemorative group shows work. They don’t, for the most part, since the artworks are often hung randomly about a room. Not so with “Full Circle: Ten Years of Radius,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The guest curator, Regine Basha, from Arthouse in Austin, Tex., has made a valiant effort to group works by 14 alumni of Radius, an artist development program run by the museum and the Ridgefield Guild of Artists, by medium and subject. But in the end, the show as a whole is so beautiful and thought-provoking, the arrangement doesn’t really matter.

The art is installed throughout the first few rooms of the museum’s big, open upstairs galleries. It is not under-hung, but there is certainly enough white wall around the 20 or so works, pretty much one per artist, to give you enough space to contemplate them without the faintest possibility of distraction. Two works by each participating artist might have helped to fill things out.

Given that our understanding of art has undergone tremendous upheaval in the past couple of decades, it is surprising to find so much painting in this show. It is painting, what’s more, that uses traditional art materials, mostly oil on linen, and adheres to centuries-old genres, including landscape, history painting and portraiture. It is 2009, right?

I am curious about this focus because digital technologies have radically altered how images are made and experienced. Meanwhile, our understanding of visual art has been torn from its roots in ritual and tradition and thrust into the context of mass media and cultural studies. Art today has a very different look, purpose and social position than it did a century ago, or even four decades back.

This is not to say that the work here is reactionary, for much of the painting in this show suggests a nuanced awareness of the world in which we live. For instance, Jaclyn Conley’s dramatic, skillfully painted mis-en-scènes possess a real cinematic quality, while paintings by Joseph Smolinski, Ben Weiner, Christopher Mir and Bryan Jones touch on environmental issues and concerns.

These paintings belong to our time. It is just that they look backward as much as they look forward in their ideas and influence, suggesting the possibility of a new shift toward reclaiming some of the qualities that distinguish visual art from other imagery.

Whatever the outcome of these efforts, art today is now part of a broader visual culture. This, too, is reflected in the works here — from Paul Favello’s digital photographs of appropriated war-related imagery to Kelly Bigelow Becerra’s collage prints made of scanned imagery cut and combined into pictorial vignettes that re-create memorable scenes from the artist’s childhood.

Art as a form of writing seems to lie behind much of the abstract art that is assembled for the exhibition, some of it quite good. Jim Hett’s eye-popping, odd mixed-media drawing, “They’re All the Same Except They’re All Different” (1998-2008), presents a dense accretion of colored lines slowly built up in a cumulative process over long periods of time. It is casual yet obsessive; art as daily ritual.

The same calligraphic quality underlies Beth Gilfilen’s abstract painting, “The Big Hunch” (2008), which is based on exploratory, expressionistic drawing. She paints with no fixed or prescribed ideas in mind, simply allowing the imagery to develop and unravel intuitively. The results are lyrical, colorful and fun, but also startlingly strange. They even suggest an alchemical process.

There is some video art in the show, as might be expected, but not much. “Blue Plasma” (2008) by Robert Federico magnifies simple scenes — fresh water flowing freely over a rock, the flickering of a flame — to the point of abstraction. He makes the familiar strange, a technique that also harks back to the past,specifically the early-20th-century Russian Modernist avant garde.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of the cultural moment, but on the face of many of the works assembled for this show, art seems to be heading back to the future.