June Kelly Gallery is pleased to begin the year 2020 with presentation of Carl E. Hazlewood in his first show at the gallery.  Drawings and Collages, recent work in which the visual play between minimalist color and form stimulate subliminally.  The exhibition will open at the gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on January 17 and the works will remain on view through March 3, 2020.

Hazlewood says, from childhood, he has been dazzled by the literary and visual arts. “… reading, writing, and making ‘stuff’ was a way to fill that physical and metaphysical ‘hole in the heart’ that kept me confined, mostly solitary, and home-schooled during an instinctually curious childhood.  Art and writing became a way of thinking, seeing, and above all, feeling.  As Bob Marley, the reggae singer, once remarked, “…some people feel the rain…others just get wet.”  For me it’s always the center of a storm…  It’s all about being in the moment, on ‘presentness’, of always being ‘real’— in life as well as how one approaches art with its multiplicity and endless possibilities.

Hazlewood has made art in varied medias as collagist, printmaker, photographer, and poet; more recently, he has been making objects that function somewhere between sculpture, drawing and an installation practice.  His inexhaustible inventiveness allows him to make use of whatever space and materials he has on hand.

In the work, BlackHead Laughs, 2016, at first, straightforward as formal, minimalist arrangement of color and line becomes intriguingly complex with collaged cut papers, plastic mesh shapes and rope of pearls.  Hazlewood even says, the work can occasionally surprise me with its suggestiveness; something about the folding, pleating, and cutting…”

 Quoting the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hazlewood writes, “Things aren’t so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

Art making is always very personal for me, says Hazlewood.  My work and identity is the sum of my trans-cultural, trans-national experience—positive and negative, it's never been an academic or only a social exercise.  I’ve always worked from the inside out, rather than simply respond to what others consider politically necessary or fashionable.  Yes, there are increasingly dire situations in our world that must be addressed; but I also believe poetry heals and is important; fantasy, metaphor, and, yes, ‘beauty’ are consequential...even necessary.

Hazlewood writes, having an imagination that can transcend base concerns of the everyday confirms my humanity and is important to me as a creative being.  Having aspiration to a kind of transcendence and 'rightness' (not perfection) keeps us a few steps away from a numbing banality.

Hazlewood lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York and an MA in Fine Arts from Hunter College of the City University of New York.  Hazlewood’s works have been shown in numerous exhibitions.  He is represented in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA, OMI International Art Center, Ghent, NY, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College; CUNY, New York, Department of the Treasury, State of NJ, Trenton, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Trenton, State Legislative Buildings, Albany, NY, Gensler and Associates, Houston, Texas, The Francis J. Greenberger Collection, New York, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, São Paulo, Brazil, The Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France, The Study Center, Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy, The National Collection of Fine Arts, Castellani House, Guyana, South America and the University of Guyana, South America.  Hazlewood is a member of the American Abstract Artists and Co-founder, Aljira A Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ.