“MIXED MESSAGES”

Paintings, Photography and Installations
April 22nd to May 27th 2006

Louis Ulman, Sheila Elias, Debra Holt,
Arlene Berrie

Opening Reception, 7pm to 11 pm
Saturday, April 22nd, 2006

And please join us for

Wynwood Art Walk, 7 pm to 11 pm
Saturday, May 13th, 2006

Debra Holt masterfully engages the viewer through large-scale works, each with sensuous detail and color. Energetic and dynamic, Debra creates a harmony between light and color giving her works an internal glow. With hidden meanings and spiritual symbols, her organic wood installations highlight the surface rhythms and textures unique within each piece.

Sheila Elias likes to portray a perception of urban tension, raw emotions and harsh realities tempered with gentle optimism and beauty, countering an American dream that has gone a bit astray.

In "Nightfall" Louis Ulman chooses a tightrope performer, a heroic female presence, to maintain the balance of hope and perseverance with time. Always the Romantic Realist, he plays the life-death struggle against hope and renewal in "Annunciation." The hanger for the florid robe set upward against a new dawn forms a question mark for today's art world: "Can visual beauty and optimism still have a role in painting?"

With Arlene Berrie's creature comforts we so enjoy in life; stuffed animals, well-known cartoon characters, she looks for two qualities; comfort and substantiality. She feels best when painting things into then out... eliminating sections of a figure allows her to concentrate on what is real about its presence. One perceives this reality in Greek sculptures when one recognizes the beauty of the foot, that remains, or the torso. The fragment before us seems very whole and truthful.