Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition featuring the work of Christine Heindl, Sherry Markovitz, and James Sterling Pitt. An intimacy of materiality accompanies the artists’ singular approaches to color, form, and composition to create a sense of both the familiar and unknown—a personal language or system of logic and the enigma of time, memory, and emotion in relation to structure.

For many years James Sterling Pitt’s artistic practice has served as an autobiographical image bank, representing particular memories, places, and sensations. Fleeting sightings and experiences are reinterpreted as two and three-dimensional reconstructions; standing as surrogates for images lost during momentary, perceptual shifts. Evoking primitive dwellings, weathered wood and bone, and ancient stone carvings, these works give form to the less concrete and harder to articulate aspects of the mind, such as something sensed or a fading memory.

Sherry Markovitz’s linear wall-sculptures are wrapped in a mixture of thousands of opaque and translucent glass beads, a process evoking a time-microcosm much like a contemporary mandala. The works are rooted in drawing and structure while simultaneously referencing emotion and relationship, especially in the space between the sculptural elements and the subsequent magnetism and repulsion of forms.

Similarly reflecting the artist’s hand and referencing traditions in weaving, the layers of patterns in Christine Heindl’s paintings establish a familiarity and even a comfort with the viewer. They are a pleasure of complex visual rhythms paired with discordant combinations of patterns and color and at times the intrusion of a disparate graphic or element of text. Heindl’s paintings are not exercises in purity, but heuristic meditations marking time in the realm of everyday life.

With shared interests in folk art and craft, specifically weaving and patterning in the case of Christine Heindl, beadwork for Sherry Markovitz, and the handmade for James Sterling Pitt, the contemporary artistic practices represented in this exhibition are imbued with unironic historic references that are not sentimental, but “offer a departure point for all of us to remember as we face the future,” as Sherry Markovitz once said.

Christing Heindl

Christine Heindl lives and works in Queens, NY, and received her bachelor's degree from SUNY Empire State College in 1992 and an M.F.A. in painting from Cornell University in 1994. She was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2001 and an individual artist grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2009. She has exhibited at White Columns, Clementine Gallery, Curt Marcus Gallery, Columbus Museum of Art, Jamaica Center for the Arts, and Gavlak Gallery, among other venues.

Sherry Markovitz

Sherry Markovitz was born in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BA in Ceramics and Art Education from the University of Wisconsin, and her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Washington. Her work is in the permanent collections of The American Craft Museum, New York; The Corning Museum of Glass, New York; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; and The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. In 2019, Marvovitz was awarded the Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

James Sterling Pitt

James Sterling Pitt was born in 1977 in Warwick, New York and earned his BFA from the University of New Mexico and his MFA from Mills College. Pitt’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston, and Berlin, and group exhibitions throughout the Bay Area and New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Berkeley Art Museum. The artist lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.