Let your imagination start anew with not one but four beautiful exhibitions that capture the creative nature within you. Haven Gallery invites you to take the journey with them and help celebrate the opening of Adam Oehlers, “The Fabled”, Shannon Bonatakis, “New Life”, Katie Gamb, “Chrysalis” and Marni Fraser, “Arte Praeclara Filia Rex”.
From mystical adventures to once upon time moments you don’t want to miss, escape into the magic and join Haven Gallery this weekend and experience the joy of these wonderful new collections!
Adam Oehlers, Shannon Bonatakis, Katie Gamb, Marni Fraser
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 18, 2021
Exhibition Dates: September 18 – October 17, 2021
Haven Gallery
90 Main St., | Northport, NY 11768 | (631) 757-0500
To inquire, please contact Erica via email info@havengallery.com
Adam Oehlers,“The Fabled”
Haven Gallery is honored to present England based artist Adam Oehlers for his fourth solo show, “The Fabled”, at the gallery. “The Fabled” will feature seventeen watercolor paintings that continue Oehlers’s enchanting tales of his curious female protagonist and her furry, scaly and feathered cohorts, as they explore the mysteries and beauty of the natural world. Through the use of fine linework and a penchant for color and light, Oehlers’s captures both narrative and splendor in all the life that encompasses our animate world.
“The Fabled” blends the reverie and marvel of a young and inquisitive mind with the many microcosms that exist and flourish just beyond human civilization. Animals, insects and flora are relative in size to both the female guide and viewer, balancing the developed world with the natural. An even more keen look opens us up to a world of mythology and metamorphosis, as our newly winged Cicerone, rabbits and fox, explore worlds beyond corporeality. A reminder to us all, that when we look beyond ourselves, there is still much magic, secrets and story to behold.
Artist Statement // Earlier this year I released my book “The Mushroom Garden”. Once I started sending it out into the world my thoughts for my next book started to form. I thought back to the little snippets of stories that had formed from some of my older work and I found that I kept coming back to pieces from my ‘Wilderlands’ collection, which I showed here at Haven back in 2018. I started writing and before I knew it I was lost in this world once again, tying together the pieces of stories that had been sat gathering dust in my head over the years and slowly, one by one, they all began to meet up. They will take place in the wilderness that surrounds the “Mushroom Garden”. This collection that you see here is very much the stepping stones between the “Mushroom Garden” and my new piece “The Wildered Lands”, “The Fabled” is my exploration of the landscapes, the creatures, the legends and the magic that run free in this place.
Shannon Bonatakis, “New Life”
Haven Gallery is honored to present US (Colorado) based artist Shannon Bonatakis for her second solo show, “New Life”, at the gallery. “New Life” will feature a collection of paintings and drawings that honor life’s changes in all of its beauty. Themes of transformation, growth, wonder and edification are highlighted through Bonatakis’s symbolic use of butterflies, birds, flora and the cosmos. Her employ of self-portraiture to personally express, yet universally connect others with deeply understood and felt emotions and journeys, strengthens her continual exploration of the human condition. Each portrait beholds and honors acceptance of life in all of its phases, an aide-mémoire that life finds a way and that the beauty of it in memoriam and now, are always a part of you.
About the Artist // As a painter, Shannon Bonatakis seeks to create emotionally charged visual stories that convey authentic emotional moments. The female form is a consistent focus of her work, largely due to her life experiences growing up in a family of seven sisters and one brother. Her imagery is often autobiographical in some capacity, but is deliberately open for the viewer to find their own story within. Shannon’s pieces live in that weird dreamy space between waking and sleeping, where the melancholy of real life mixes with a dash of magic.
Shannon has a particular obsession with storytelling, preferring the fantastical people and pictures from books as a lens to view our reality. She is fascinated by dreams, where the magical and the absurd are commonplace, and draws inspiration from these fleeting glimpses of an alternate reality that comes from within. Shannon has sought to replicate this same sense of fantastical realism from the first time she created art as a child. As an illustrator, Shannon’s work has been featured primarily in children’s publishing and in galleries celebrating beloved pieces of pop-culture. Beside the aesthetic that is unmistakably hers, she also works in a variety of techniques and styles as a freelance commercial illustrator. In this realm she has worked on projects ranging from character design to package illustration, for clients as large as Disney and Mattel. While Shannon enjoys the challenge of nearly all forms of image making, she finds herself beckoned to her easel nightly to paint with absurdly tiny brushes until the sun rises. Shannon learned to focus her love of all things fictional and imaginative while studying illustration and painting at Columbus College of Art & Design. Since then, she has found success as a commercial illustrator while maintaining a career as a painter, and showing in art galleries across the United States.
Katie Gamb, “Chrysalis”
Haven Gallery is honored to present US (Wisconsin) based artist Katie Gamb for her first solo show “Chrysalis”, at the gallery. “Chrysalis” will feature seventeen oil paintings that imaginatively intertwine the artists youthful and furry protagonists with elements of nature and metamorphosis. Themes of adaption and change can be seen throughout the works as humans, animals and plant life are transmogrified to become symbiotic amalgamations, unifying the human and natural world. Gamb’s use of pastel and jewel tones highlight the sense of nostalgia, sweetness and hope, commonly found in the artists works. Her sitters are never alone; whether the are embraced by insects, flowers or animals, one is always comforted by the exquisite animate connections that surround us all. “Chrysalis” is a lighthearted reminder of the continued movement and perseverance of life, as beings continue to metamorphoses and evolve even in the most darkest of times.
About the Artist // Katie Gamb is an illustrator living and painting in a small, cozy corner of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her love of narrative and the natural world informs her artwork, which is strongly influenced by the fairy tales she immersed herself in as a shy, bookish child, as well as the forests she wandered growing up in the rural Midwest. She particularly enjoyed studying tiny worlds that often went unnoticed, creating backstories and personalities for the creatures she came across. She moved to Milwaukee to pursue her BFA in Illustration from the Institute of Art and Design. Katie primarily works in oils, painting small-scale narrative and dream-like scenarios of both animals and humans. She teaches illustration part-time at MIAD, and shows her work in galleries throughout the US. Although most of her time is spent drawing and painting, she still reads voraciously and wanders among the trees whenever she gets the chance.
Artist Statement // The past year has been a bewildering time for most of us. The ideas for most of these pieces came to me in early spring 2021, after almost a year of quarantining, worrying, disinfecting. While they all contain a fair amount of yearning to be free from confines, their creation has been an act of comfort during a year of great uncertainty.
Marni Fraser, “Arte Praeclara Filia Rex”
Haven Gallery is honored to present US based artist Marni Fraser for her first solo show “Arte Praeclara Filia Rex” at the gallery. “Arte Praeclara Filia Rex” will feature seven mixed media works that exhibit Fraser’s delicately hand drawn and painted females of strength, adorned with exquisite detail of the natural world, as well as medium. Ink, watercolor, graphite, 24kt gold leaf and wine are used harmoniously to embrace and convey a balance of grace and power found in these decorated deities. Always encompassed by nature, these females share and evolve to take on the forms and tendencies of the flora and animal kingdoms in which they co-exist with respect and symbiosis.
Fraser’s delicate approach to technique results in a stunning contrast of feminine elegance with determination and might. Embracing both minimalist and maximalist compositions, the artists pursuit of dualistic expression pulsates mellifluously. The depicted find their inspiration from mythologies, history and wildlife, spanning the globe. The title of the series itself, is an old latin one, “Arte Praeclara Filia Rex”, which translates to “Transcendent art of the daughter of the king.” A nod to the past in both literal and visual forms, that remind us of our connections to the bygone while reinventing ourselves in the present.
About the Artist // Marni is a self taught figurative fine artist from Southern California. Her inspirations have included both classical and contemporary artists, fairy and folk tales, as well as world religions, philosophy and various mythologies. As a result, the work is continuously evolving in style, technique, and theme, as she feels the human experience is a continual work in progress. Other influences have included classic and traditional African and Indian cultures, Asian classical art, and wildlife and nature programs. Her themes focus on feminine expression in connection to the physical world. She uses various techniques in her work, using the tools she feels work best in the moment.
