PRESS RELEASE: Todd Sargood at Helen Day Art Center

Artist Todd Sargood to take Residence at Helen Day Art Center for five days in June

Contact:
Alex Keefe, Exhibitions Director
alex@helenday.com
802 253 8358

One artist, five days, and 80 feet of gallery wall: artist Todd Sargood takes up residence at Helen Day Art Center in Stowe on June 6^th, for Complex_simplex, a five-day live painting event that explores civilization and war, scientific concepts like evolution and emergence, as well as surrealism, abstract expressionism, cartography, and graffiti. Sargood's work is exciting to watch unfold: he combines halting lines of oil bar, delicate traceries of ballpoint pen, and overlapping grids of dripped watercolor, to create multi-layered, densely symbolic images of worlds and cultures in collision, caught between order and chaos, undermined and mutated by chance and the forces of nature. Visitors are encouraged to come into the gallery and interact with the artist as the work progresses. When it is completed on June 10^th Complex_simplex will form the centerpiece of a solo exhibition of the artist's work that will run at Helen Day through July 4^th and will feature new and recent abstract drawings and paintings. Todd Sargood, who is currently an adjunct lecturer at the State University of New York at New Paltz, lives and works in New Paltz and Beacon, NY. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at Exit Art Gallery, Work Space Harlem and Chashama in NYC, Van Brunt Ballery in Beacon, NY, the Spencertown Academy Arts Center, the COTA Arts Festival and the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY.

Close-up of Sargood's wall painting which is notably spare and reserved in its use of color. Sargood's artwork is analogous to visual represenations of cultural clashes through history. he uses a system of symbols that are repeated and modified throughout his work to represent different elements of human cultural history.

images: A view of one of Todd Sargood's wall drawings / paintings.
Image of Sargood's mosaic of 12"x12" paintings which he reconfigures for each presentation.