Three new painters, DANA OLDFATHER, SUSAN DANKO, and LAURA SANDERS, explore “environment”. Their work will be displayed at The Bonfoey Gallery, 1710 Euclid Avenue, from March 28 through April 26, 2008, in an exhibition entitled EXURBS: A COLLECTED ENVIRONMENT. The exhibition is opening with a reception at The Bonfoey Gallery on Friday, March 28, from 5 to 8 pm.

DANA OLDFATHER, a Cleveland native and resident, is a self-taught oil painter. She has been involved in solo, numerous group and juried shows in Cleveland as well as having shown work in Santa Fe, NM, Detroit, MI, and Columbus, OH. Oldfather was recently granted 2nd Place in Miami University’s 9th Annual National Young Painters Competition by renowned New York painter and art critic Peter Plagens. Her new expressionistic figurescapes maintain a dialogue between abstraction and representation. Single brushstrokes or color fields indicate a chaotic organic environment. Crude line invents a hovering, entity that exists only in that plane. The image vacillates between an abstract arrangement of thick slats of paint and recognizable subjects – creating an undulating hum of anxiety and tension. The pallet mirrors the subjects in their combined state of tranquil and tremulous, as the colors are reminiscent of dyed Easter eggs and summer storms. Oldfather states, “Throughout my career as an oil painter I have maintained a feeling for the monumentality of the human form. I aim to reflect attitude, indifference and sometimes despair, through the recreation of the figure and abstraction as a collaborative expression.”

SUSAN DANKO, a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, currently works as a Painting Instructor at the Institute, at the Brecksville Center for the Arts, and is an Assistant Preparator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. She was a recipient of a Jurors Mention at the 64th Annual Butler Midyear Exhibition and the Battell Stoeckel Painting Fellowship for Yale University. Danko has had numerous shows in Cleveland including locations such as Spaces and the Cleveland Foundation. She has also shown work in Columbus, Toledo, OH, the Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, IL, the Huntington Museum of Art in Huntington, WV, and participated in the Scope Art Fair in New York City in 2006. Danko’s acrylic abstracts take place at the intersection of reality and fantasy. Here, trees coexist with impasto paint blobs doubling as stones and forest ground. Decorative fields manifest themselves as delicate shrubbery. Danko states, “The disparate qualities within the paintings cause the viewer to pause and question their discord while simultaneously being engaged by their beauty.” She goes on to explain, “These half-imagined, half-realistic environments are familiar and mysterious, disquieting but comforting. I strive to make the familiar extraordinary.”

LAURA SANDERS, a Columbus resident, graduated from The Columbus College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She has participated in many group and juried shows in Columbus, including the Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition. She also has shown work in the Ohio Art League Fall Exhibition juried by Megan Lykins Reich, Assistant Curator, of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Southern Ohio Museum of Art in Portsmouth, Ohio, and had a solo exhibition at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA. Sanders received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Ohio Arts Council Purchase Award and Jurors Choice Award at the Ohio State Fair Fine Arts Exhibition. In Laura Sanders’ oil paintings the figures are effected, and conversely, are a force upon the fluid environments they reside in. She tries to see the human animal – in a raw form, and view them purely objectively. Sanders “looks for reflexive gestures and moments where humans may not be so disconnected to the habitat that sustains them, or on the contrary, when they may be actively altering or protecting themselves from that environment.” Water is a dominant element in her work. Sanders believes the water she paints has an “equalizing power over all immersed. Whether human or animal, basic breath is at the surface of consciousness and individual movement is at the pleasure of the water.”

For more information about the Exurbs: A Collected Environment and upcoming exhibitions, please contact The Bonfoey Gallery, 216.621.0178.