MEMBER SHOW PROFILE // Science Class with Painter Joana Ricou

"Our Self Portrait"

"I'm kind of a biology geek," Joana Ricou tells us. The Portuguese-born painter spent high school on a heavily science-oriented track, eventually to become biology major at Carnegie Mellon--until she discovered there could be a happy co-existence between science and art.

Now, Ricou works mostly in oil painting, doing BioArt and figure painting (in addition to line sketches and a bit pf photography)--her work for the upcoming 3rd Ward Member Show on November 18th is a bit of both. "I read this neurology book with a Walt Whitman quote 'I contain multitudes,'" she says. "The pieces I proposed for the member show are kind of a representation of that." 

Her particular brand of BioArt is gaining quite a following--she's part of an online exhibit at the Arte Institute, and she's showing in the Eclectic Chaos series in New Jersey this month. Ricou's had her work selected as the cover for Journal of Neuroscience and has given talks about art as education.

While Ricou says she still loves to read biology journals and stay up on the research ("the really exciting stuff"), she doesn't see herself returning to the lab anytime soon. "I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing," she tells us. Amen. ...Now hit the jump to catch a couple more glimpses of Ricou's work.

"Hum Hum Together""Other Self"

-- Layla Schlack

BEAT NITE // TONIGHT: 3rd Ward Teacher Robin Grearson Presents 'Is Between' During Bushwick Art Crawl

Artworks by Sarah McDougald Kohn (left) and Liz Ainslie (right).

Tonight the Bushwick art scene will stay up late for the fifth installment of Beat Nite, a bi-annual "half art stroll, half bar crawl," with local galleries and art spaces open from 6-10pm. There's lots of cool stuff going on, but we're particularly excited about Is Between, an exhibition curated by 3rd Ward teacher Robin Grearson at The Active Space.

The follow-up to Grearson's curatorial debut during Bushwick Open Studios back in June, Is Between will feature work by Brooklyn artists Liz Ainslie and Sarah McDougald Kohn. We caught up with Grearson before she headed off to start installing the exhibition and asked her what's in store for tonight. Hit the jump to find out.

The choice of pairing Ainslie and McDougald Kohn was a natural one, not merely because they went to grad school together, but because they share similar creative approaches. "Liz and Sarah work intuitively and make decisions in the moment, but what's exciting to me is having the opportunity to show the results of their decisions, side by side," Grearson says. "The relationships the artists discovered between their work was found, not created, and I think it will be interesting for a viewer to discover these relationships too."

Both artists deal with objects in unconventional and unexpected ways. "Sarah’s sculptures are really fun; to me, many of them challenge our either/or thinking about objects as being either artistic or functional," Grearson says. "And Liz’s paintings invest shapes and lines with a sense of volume, despite the fact that the shapes are actually abstract and incompletely rendered, "she adds. "This forces me to consider the source of my impressions."

That unique, intuitive and artistic approach is also reflected in the title of the exhibition. "Is Between describes the liminal nature of the objects depicted and created by the artists," Grearson says. "It is a sentence fragment that exists in the present tense but is unresolved. This language felt right to all of us as a way to communicate something specific about the paintings and sculptures."

Look at a couple more images of work by Ainslie and McDougald Kohn below and check out the exhibition tonight from 6-10pm at The Active Space (566 Johnson Ave). Also, Grearson will be at 3rd Ward next month to teach the class Learn to Love Your Artist Statement (or at least make friends).

Liz Ainslie

Sarah McDougald Kohn

-- John Ruscher