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Intimate Textures

Nancy Belfer and Sylvia Rosen are currently showing new work in the Daemen College Fanette Goldman/ Carolyn Greenfield Gallery. Belfer, formerly Chair of the Department of Design Arts at Buffalo State College, has moved into mixed media collage works recently that utilize bits and pieces of the many woven materials she created while on the faculty. Rosen is not only a ceramic artist, but also a patron of the arts, and is a long supporter of exhibitions of craft art at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. She attended the Design Arts program at Buffalo State. Rosen is showing three still-life-like collections of porcelain objects with a celadon glaze with Belfer’s still-life-sized mixed media works.

Nancy Belfer’s small mixed media works (some no more than nine inches across) display her wonderful skill; they transform into giant, torqued landscapes when you walk up to them, as in “Transient Landscape II.” Magazine clippings, remnants of fabric and threads and acrylic paint are thoroughly worked all over, and brushed to make image and paint into something touchable (though it is behind glass). Cardboard painted gold is the backdrop for “Near the Ledge.” The piece reaches back into a brighter space at its middle. Like peering out a distant window, this opening is surrounded with jewels and tidbits that weave around the light source like a nest.

“Transient Landscape III” has a very distinct fore- and background with curved objects looking like they are three-dimensional coming off a jewelry box-like form. “Near the Wall” looks like it could be a representation of a ledge or the top of a fireplace decorated or littered with personal belongings. They touch the edge of a mirror or picture that rests on the ledge, creating an intimate feeling of a memoir space. “Quilt Fields – November” is gorgeous with the complex bits of fabric woven throughout the surface, making a second coming in their artistic lives and transforming into a rich web of fanciful threads.

The traditional celadon glaze Sylvia Rosen uses creates areas of green when it gathers in impressions made on the surface of the porcelain. A sophisticated grouping of vases, pots, teapots and a plate is at the center of the Daemen College Gallery. The plate really stands out for the concentric circles of rectangles pressed into the surface that create a graphic quality with the varying thicknesses and darknesses of the green glaze, reaching a black in some instances. A vase uses a similar process, where the rectangles create a surface entirely covered with shallow marks that resemble the scales of a fish.

This exhibition of two of Buffalo’s prominent women in the arts remains on view through January 17.