ACT ONE
Harriet Moore Ballard
Wed June 18-Sun July 13
Opening reception Fri June 20, 6-8pm.

"My images are fragments of life composed into my own landscape. When the process of painting begins, the adventure unfolds and the fragments become the vehicle to play out all the visual fascinations of color and space." Harriet Moore Ballard

Harriet Moore Ballard, an artist who resides in Cleveland Heights, is fascinated by the juxtaposition between ordered structure and randomness. She starts a painting with random lines, shapes and colors, laying out possibilities and options finding that "order needs chaos, and chaos needs order." It is not predetermined; when she paints, in the process, she says she seeks the freedom she seeks in everyday life. She says "I start a painting with a fragment, a beginning statement, or a sketch. After that, there are no boundaries, and no expectation of what will happen." She knows she is done when there is nothing left to say, and she regards the finish piece as a conversation recorded in time.

Harriet Moore Ballard lives both in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, an area heavily entrenched in arts and culture. She says artists such as Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn and Ben Nicholson influence her; however, time spent in Mexico has influenced her recent work including her home, which she designed and built.. She received her MFA from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and a BA in Political Science from Chatham College.

"In Harriet Moore Ballard's complex, richly layered, ultimately mysterious paintings, the events of a life and the actions of painting float together, as if on or just below the surface of a clear stream. Her barely outlined pictorial elements are like objects glimpsed in a room at twilight, just as the shadows of things mix with intimations of transcendent form." Free Times

Click here for more information about Harriet Moore Ballard.



ACT TWO
Kim Bissett
Sat July 19-Sun Aug 17
Opening reception Sat July 19, 6-8pm.

Sculpture was the original specialty of Cleveland Institute of Art graduate Kim Bissett. She has exhibited at the Butler Institute Of Art, National City Bank, Sandusky Cultural Center, Stocker Arts Center, Beck Center for the Arts, Lake Erie College, Wasmer Gallery at Ursuline College and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Bissett does not plan before approaching a new work: "Like free jazz, I begin by laying down a few strokes-large, sweeping-I work to the scale of my body," she writes in her artist's statement. "Gradually, the piece begins to take on its identity, then that identity leads. I'm especially excited about finding that balance where things just hang together-one little push and they would fall apart."

She holds a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art, and a M.A from Case Western Reserve University. She has taught at many schools across the Cleveland area, such as The Cleveland Institute of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and Beaumont School for Girls.