Natural Habit
Jim Banks + Leslie Zelamsky
July 3–28, 2019
First Friday Reception: July 5, 6-8 pm
In “Natural Habit”, a wide-ranging show of painting, sculpture, and installation, Jim Banks and Leslie Zelamsky explore decay and renewal. The work ranges from Banks’ meticulously painted “footscapes” to Zelamsky’s sculptural strata made from common building materials. The artists give expression to nature’s elements and cycles by variously planting, painting, scraping, dripping, arranging, gluing, and layering. Viewers will see, in each of their multi-faceted work, both found and created beauty, reflected and constructed form.
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Jim Banks has been studying weeds, otherwise known as “wild urban plants”. He grows them. He paints them in remarkable detail. He photographs them. His exploration covers a lot of ground. In bringing our attention to weeds through various materials, techniques, and imagery, Banks challenges us to look at, rather than look past, this ubiquitous and under-appreciated element of our landscape.
Banks studied math and psychology at UCLA, then transferred to Bard College, where he discovered art, and was home. He has shown in Honolulu, San Antonio, Memphis, and cities in the Boston area, including Cambridge, Lynn, and Provincetown. Awards include Best 3D Award at the Cambridge Art Association National Prize Show 2015 and 2nd in Show at the Boston Biennial, Atlantic Works Gallery in Boston, MA.
Banks statement
Banks biography
Leslie Zelamsky’s sculptures and installations grow from methodically stacking building materials a piece at a time. Layer after layer, the forms reveal themselves. These labor-intensive sculptures coexist with Zelamsky’s intuitive paintings that are born out of the sheer delight of moving paint on a surface. These two vastly different processes merge in the artist’s vision as expressions of chaos and cohesion, noise and solitude, intuition and deliberacy.
Zelamsky studied at the School of Art at Cooper Union, NY and the College of Art at Maryland Institute, MD. She was awarded the Patricia Robert Harris Fellowship and was named School 33 Art Center’s (MD) Artist in Residence. Her work has been mentioned in Confinements, Art Review, and Review. Zelamsky has shown her sculptures and paintings Driven to Abstraction at The Umbrella, Concord, MA, Art in Nature at Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA, among other exhibitions. She works from her studio in Maynard, MA.