You have a few days left to check out Jo-Ann Acey’s solo exhibition Full Circle at The Cluster Gallery in Gowanus. Inspired by nature and memory, the prismatic abstract works burst with buoyant circular shapes that exude energy and spontaneity.
“I just want people to feel happy or feel some sense of beauty when they look at my work,” Acey said at the gallery on Tuesday, noting that her drawings and prints document “childhood memories, good memories.”
“I really like going back to those memories of growing up in the Mohawk Valley,” she said. Much of her work recalls "New York State and the valleys and the rivers. Even though they’re very abstract in a way, that’s where it comes from.”
Full Circle features pastel drawings and monotypes from 2016 that represent the cyclical nature of life, according to Acey. “The title is really the idea that where you start and where you go usually is like a cycle, a circle,” she said. “There’s just something about the continuation of the circle. It doesn’t end,” she continued. “I think it’s about motion, spontaneity, and the symbol that it just keeps going.”
Acey’s work is rife with movement, with line work sweeping over richly hued shapes to indicate energy and activity. “If you really move in your work, that movement becomes part of the piece,” she says.
In her studio—down the hallway from The Cluster Gallery—Acey works vigorously from a large table composing her works. Though loud music is not permitted at the Brooklyn Art Cluster Studios, Acey recalls listening to lots of jazz at her former workspace in Clinton Hill, absorbing the music’s “movement, spontaneity, and freedom.” “Even though my work is not directly related to dance, when I’m watching a dance performance, I just envision what the painting or the drawing will look like while I’m watching the movement of the dancers,” she notes. Her series of acrylic paintings, Swing (2018-2019), was inspired by music and dance.
Full Circle is not Acey's only series featuring a prominent geometric form. Circles can also appear in a celestial guise. “I use that circle, that red moon all the time,” she said, noting her 2017 La Luna series. “That happened because I was walking down 9th Street one night and I turned around and [saw] the biggest red moon in the sky. That just stayed with me for days.... I think that circle, that red moon reoccurs often in my work.” Acey emphasizes particular shapes in other series including squares and rectangles evoking congested cities in her Urban Landscapes and triangular points suggesting towering steeples and spires in her Dwelling series.
Acey notes that the shapes in Full Circle are not consistent. In some of the earlier pieces the circles are housed inside boxes but “as the series continued, the circles and the ovals came out of those box spaces and became much more fluid, they didn’t need to be so contained anymore.... You can go ‘full circle,’ but there’s been a lot of changes throughout that. It’s not always going to be a perfect circle. It’s not always going to be a perfect journey, but it evolves.”
The exhibit also references Acey’s retirement five years ago which allowed her to return to her art full time. “I had recently stopped teaching, so for me it was like, ‘okay, now I’m back where I started and I’m just practicing [art].’”
Acey grew up in Utica, New York and studied painting and drawing with abstract expressionists at Daeman College in Buffalo. She then attended the University of Arizona for one year before receiving a scholarship to Texas Tech where she earned her MFA. While at Texas Tech she took part in a program that brought her to Taos, New Mexico where the vast terrain inspired her to create landscapes in addition to her abstract work. “That was a really good choice that I made,” she recalls. “I think that was a real opening up, a real freedom for me to express my work the way I wanted to, so I’ve never looked back.”
She moved to New York in the late ‘70s and immediately moved to Brooklyn. “I thought right away I was going to move to Manhattan and have a big loft in Soho, but I’ve always lived in Brooklyn,” she said. She worked at Pratt for a time, evaluating painting and drawing portfolios, before finding a position at Studio in a School which had only launched a couple of year prior. After five years of teaching visual art to public school students, she became the organization’s Program Director and supervised the teaching artists. She later moved on to the United Nations International School in Queens where she taught kindergarteners to eighth-graders for 20 years.
“To see a student who really doesn’t think that they have any drawing or painting skills and then they did the most beautiful work that you’ve ever seen…. Some of the most beautiful paintings or sculptures are done by my kindergarteners or first graders just because there’s no inhibition. I love it.”
While teaching, Acey often encountered students who doubted their drawing or painting abilities. “You break it down into shapes for them” tell them to “look at the shape, or look at the line,” she said, comparing this process to the “full circle” referenced in her show. Going back to the basics, “back to the circle and into the shape.”
“Teaching to me was a real joy,” she continued. “Towards the end though, I just felt like I need to be in my studio. If you’re teaching five days a week you can’t go to your studio….” Acey is keeping busy in her retirement and can be found at her studio every day. “The freedom to have a studio and to be able to come to it....”
Acey is currently documenting a new set of childhood memories—a series based on color and light called, The Sunny Side of the Street, after the song “my father used to sing all the time,” she said. The upbeat tune is a fitting impetus for the artist who will undoubtedly create another collection of dynamic and joyous works.
Acey will have works exhibited at 440 Gallery’s Project Space as part of the group exhibit Linked opening November 18. See more of Acey's artwork at aceyart.com.
Full Circle
The Cluster Gallery, 540 President Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn (by appointment)
Exhibition closes November 20, 2020
This really captures Jo Ann and her work! Arthag you are amazing!
Posted by: Olivia Beens | 11/16/2020 at 05:05 PM
An inspiring article!! I love seeing the subtle changes in subject matter from portfolio to portfolio. Even though they use many of the same abstract shapes...the feelings and images they evoke are so different from group to group.
Posted by: Robin Roi | 11/16/2020 at 06:50 AM