The Adventures of S(anti) Claus
S(anti) Claus is the other side of the Santa Claus coin. While jolly St. Nicholas dispenses material rewards along strict guidelines, Old Nick pursues his customary cheeky capers. S(anti) Claus, that rogue, is untamable. In place of a crozier, gifts and good will, he carries a rod, coal and devilry. Hard bargains follow his visits. He's the blare of the horn in the hospital zone, the drunk at the wedding dinner, uninvited, unavoidable, a one-man raid on felicity, a snatcher of opportunity. He's the rascal in paschal clothing. He's been caught in the act and hermetically sealed in fifteen mixed media sculptures.

In 2005, photographer Mark Perrott gained access to recently closed Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Western Penitentiary, and especially E BLOCK, a series of cells, reserved for first time prisoners and returning parole violators. The whitewashed walls of these cells were covered with graffiti; raw words, mostly about rage, longing, hurt, and remorse, accompanied sometimes, by child-like drawings that depicted bigotry, abuse, sex, and adult violence. His photographs of this place include images of these surfaces, and photographs of Western Penitentiary's architecture of confinement.

Architecture and functional objects inform the vocabulary of Richard Bottwin's work. The planes of the birch plywood sculptures, folding inward, parallel to each other, or lying flat againts the wall are shaped to change alignments and appear to move as one walks around them. The surfaces, laminated with wood veneers or painted with acrylic colors, are configured to reveal surprising shapes and patterns with shifts in the viewer's perspective. A sense of disorientation, implied weightlessness and the element of surprise are created by the reductive forms and subvert the modernist vocabulary of the simple constructions.

The drawings in this exhibition have been developed from a daily process during which the artist Leonard Dufresne extemporaneously creates forms and imagery pulled from his stream of consciousness. They begin as unplanned doodles, and slowly coalesce into distinct, substantial, narrative scenes.