Branch Gallery is new to downtown Durham. Chloe Seymore, the owner and director, said her mission is to introduce emerging artistic talent, both national and local, to the Triangle. The gallery began its North Carolina life in Carrboro two years ago and has just moved to Durham, sensing something exciting is about to happen here.
Indeed there is much happening in downtown Durham. There's the American Tobacco project, which has offices, restaurants and lots of public spaces at the foot of the Durham Freeway, next door to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. There are art studios everywhere and there is a noisy rumble that many believe is Durham's inner heart.
Seymore is one of the believers and has gambled a good deal of money that downtown will once again be viable and that the arts will be a big part of that viability.
The gallery is on Foster Street, a stone's throw from the Carolina Theatre and the Durham Arts Council. The block is dominated by a long row building where Seymore is renting space. There is ample parking on the street, and the pristine gallery is inviting.
An inviting scene
Seymore's husband, Harrison Haynes, was born in Durham and grew up in Chapel Hill. They met at the Rhode Island School of Design and after graduation tried their hand at art making and art curating in New York. Seymore said she had acted as a curator for a very successful show of young emerging contemporary artists and it was then she decided she would like to own a gallery. She said the New York scene was just too crowed and they did not want to go to a smaller town near New York, because their hearts and minds would always be turned toward the big city. North Carolina, a place they knew, seemed inviting and had much to offer.
At the Carrboro gallery, she duplicated the New York show as her opening exhibition.
“It was a great success and we were in business,” she said.
Now, however, Durham has beckoned. According to Seymore, she wants to bring out-of-state talent to this area and blend it with local artists, who have had little exposure. “Art that has a commercial potential is not my first goal. Obviously, we need to sell to survive, but I'm looking for art that speaks to me, and, hopefully, to others. This is not a personal project,” she continued. “I'm looking for art that has relevance and deserves to be seen.”
Local - New York merger
Her first show in the new location is a merger between a New Yorker, Joshua Abelow, with abstract paintings of rounded forms, and a Chapel Hill resident, Katy Clove, who etches on glass and does paper silhouettes.
Abelow's large paintings are filled with circles of color repeated in every possible relationship on a stark white background. Although the gallery information equates the artist's forms to sound, they remind me of highway signs. Nothing specific, but directions are suggested. The color palette is clear and bright, mostly greens and beiges. They are all part of a series that bursts into several very large formats. “Van,” for example, is a large painting where balloon-like circles hover over a house form below. Seymore told me that “Van” is a portrait.
Included among his other work are a group of portrait drawings of men in macho situations - a cowboy, a smoker, etc. The gallery information tells us that the landscapes of the paintings could possibly be inhabited by the characters in the drawings. Hence the idea that “Van” is a portrait.
Katy Clove, the other featured artist, works with etched-glass and cut-paper silhouettes. White is her color of choice and because of the white on white, these small images become spectral in nature. Color is used sparingly, in the burned edges of some of the silhouettes, in a bit of horsehair as texture, in a strand of coiled red thread that joins the two figures in “Yoke.”
Because the technique Clove uses quotes Victorian manners, the ghostly veneer is appropriate. Although she dresses her figures in modern clothing, ladies with bustles and layers of lace and men in high silk hats are very close to our consciousness.
Seymore and her husband have done a beautiful job with their space. Half of it is a gallery and the other half is divided into two studios and a small conference area. There is also a small loft that serves as an office.
This is not the first gallery with a plan to mix big city artists and the homegrown variety, but this gallery is the first one in a long time to promote modern contemporary abstract art and that alone is worth supporting.