Surface Play at AMZehnder Gallery
Patte Ormsby, Ingrid Scheibler, and Rosalie Acinapura bring an exploratory interest in surface to their respective works at the AMZehnder Gallery in Wellfleet. Acinapura’s photographs, installed on the bottom floor, use the surface of rain-streaked windows to frame her images of urban street scenes.
Ormsby, who has a concurrent show at Wellfleet Preservation Hall, creates surfaces that suggest oxidizing copper or cracking ceramic glazes. Her work vacillates between abstraction and suggestive landscapes.
In Scheibler’s playful abstract paintings, the artist builds up some areas with opaque passages of paint, scrapes away other portions, and in places lets paint drip or dance across the surface in fluid strokes. Her painting Big Top uses the primary colors of a circus and its swooping forms to joyful effect. In Full of Sound and Fury, she proves to be acrobatic herself, carefully balancing a range of daring painting moves.
The exhibition runs through July 12 with a reception scheduled for Saturday, July 9 from 6 to 8 p.m. at 25 Bank St.
Romolo Del Deo at Berta Walker Gallery
Provincetown’s Romolo Del Deo, in the spirit of Harry Kemp, brings the souls out of pieces of driftwood.
“Humans are fascinating,” says the sculptor. “If you give somebody a piece of burnt toast and it’s got two dots on it, they see a face.” He thinks of that distinctly human quality when he makes his art.
In his studio — a tall, white, barn-like structure he built himself — he looks lovingly upon the fragments of bronze faces, wings, and chests that seem to grow from abstract tangles of metal. One sculpture in progress presents the face of a woman delicately connected to the rest of her tattered body. A red line runs from the center of her forehead to her chin.
“The piece is not done until it tells me it’s done,” says Del Deo. He will cut her face in half when he feels the urge.
Born in Provincetown, Del Deo didn’t leave until he was 18. Then he went to New York City, then Italy, then back to New York. He moved his studio seven times. Eventually he grew tired of moving. “I wanted to set down roots, and so I came home,” he says.
In Provincetown, he could realize his vision for art: influenced by the work of Edwin Dickinson, the archeological ruins of his own Italian heritage, and a childhood spent playing with things the ocean spit out, he sculpts “long art.”
What he means by that, Del Deo says, is art that endures. He uses natural materials like bronze, clay, and stone and heirloom processes. His art will last for thousands of years, he says: “I’m in a partnership with geological time.”
Del Deo’s work is on display at the Berta Walker Gallery at 208 Bradford St. through July 23. Some pieces are models for his 14-foot-tall sculpture The Tree of Life Which Is Ours at the 2022 Venice Biennale. That piece is molded from Outer Cape ghost trees that die because of the rising sea level. Twisted bronze supports the bust of Daphne, a mythological figure who turned into a tree.
“As artists, we want to reach people,” says Del Deo. “We want to send something, say something, be something for others. The goal is to make some kind of enduring memory.” —Dorothea Samaha
Provincetown, Friday Night: The Stroll
Greg Salvatori Gallery, 366 Commercial St.
“This large-scale photograph [Spilt Tea] features four different people holding either teacups or, in one case, a tea pot,” says Rennie Harrison. “It looks like there are really thick, chunky man hands. There’s some beautiful older-lady hands with lots of bangles and bracelets, holding some pink tea. There are some beautiful, femme, Black hands with long, long, long nails pouring tea into a glass that’s overfilling into other glasses. And then, there’s what looks like a priest’s hands stirring his tea with a spoon. I like the idea of a tea party with some disparate-seeming folks.”
Four Eleven Gallery, 411 Commercial St.
“It’s called There Is a Little Hope and that’s how I feel right now,” says Constance Clare-Newman of Liz Carney’s painting. “When I look at that painting, I feel a little hope. It’s all pink and purply and beautiful.”
Packard Gallery, 418 Commercial St.
“I was drawn to it because it’s a heap of energy crashing toward us,” says Cody Joseph Sullivan of Anne Packard’s painting Crashing Waves. “It’s cool to see Anne get so much movement into what she’s doing. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like that from her. Not to make everything about the pandemic, but it leaves me with a feeling of internal turmoil in our little seaside town.”
Alden Gallery, 423 Commercial St.
“It was a controversial race because people were battling over the outcome,” says Jeff Peters of Robert Morgan’s painting of the Harvard-Yale Regatta. “It’s perfect for Provincetown because everything is depicted quite beautifully, if you know what I mean: the muscular men about to get in the boat.”
William Scott Gallery, 439 Commercial St.
Bowie is three and a half and is doing the Provincetown gallery stroll with his twin sister and his dad. About John Dowd’s First Snow, he says, “I like the house and the storm.” —Paul Sullivan
