The Helmet Project and the Writers Series

An Installation and New Paintings
March 25 to Arpil 25, 2009

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is proud to announce a new exhibition by

Cindy Kane. The exhibition is a unique transformation of the written word into visual art.

For many years Kane has been working with artifacts, incorporating sheet music, road maps, and cursive writing practice sheets from her children’s school work into her paintings. This process led to her thinking about what it might be like to paint on the original notes and manuscripts of writers. Kane was fascinated by the process that every writer has of transmitting thoughts into printed words, to see the raw notes, and the scrawled handwriting in the margins of a hand typed page. Her paintings give us the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing what was never meant to be seen. These original pages provided the "backbone" to this series of paintings which she calls "Mapping Writers." 

The paintings are the outgrowth of Kane's response to the iconography of handwriting and the intimacy of the written word. 

"Here, words are like fossils in the hands of a gifted paleontologist," writes Journalist Ellen Pall in a catalogue essay for the show, " forms that attest to the shape and vision of the vanished bodies that made them. The canvases blaze with Kane’s perception of the concentration and longing, the quick rapture and long manual labor that are a writer’s life." 

Birds on Leslie, original notes: Leslie Day,2008,

18 x 18 inches Mixed media on wood panel

In her artist statement Kane writes: The Helmet Project was born out of my desire to pay tribute to journalists through my work as a visual artist. I began this project by inviting fifty foreign correspondents whose work I admire to join me in a collaboration which involved using their original notes from their travels as journalists.

After years of considering various icons which could support the notes and paper detritus that journalists save, I decided on the military helmet to provide the backbone of the installation. I have always been drawn to the role that journalists play in informing us about the events which shape history, and to the great tradition of the war correspondent. Although I find the handwritten notes from an embattled war zone to be visually fascinating, it is the things that journalists save which will give the installation a sense of intimacy.  Along with their notebooks, the journalists sent me envelopes they had written on, cigarette packets, ear plugs, passport pages, boarding passes.... The small artifacts they were unable to throw away are now permanently embedded onto the surface of the helmets. My intention was to create a space in which one could be enveloped by a community of journalists.

Steel Pot Helmet, original notes: Nelson Bryant, 2008

The installation of fifty steel pot helmets hangs from the ceiling just below eye level in the configuration of a circle. Each helmet is covered with the original handwritten notes of the correspondents. The overall feeling as one walks through the space is one of reflection. The helmets have been used in battles, and the journalists’ notes record the despair of people trapped by war, poverty, and political oppression. Ultimately the helmets encircle the visitor in the journalists’ quests for truth, honoring their ability to bring us stories from embattled places on the earth. "

Clayton Campbell, Artistic Director of the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, writes in his catalogue essay for the "Helmet Project": "I do believe that Cindy Kane is at her peak, in this new but uncertain moment of social and political change, and her work makes a beautiful, poignant, and insightful contribution to the larger cultural conversation in which we must participate."

A catalogue of The Helmet Project which includes photos of all the helmets, and essays by Clayton Campbell, and Ellen Pall is available. Please contact the gallery for further information.

Participating journalists: Lynsey Addario, Hannah Allam, Deborah Amos, Raymond Bonner, Geraldine Brooks, Nelson Bryant, John Burnett, Scott Canon, Neal Conan, Barbara Demick, Richard Dicker, Kimberly Dozier, Steven Erlanger, John Feffer, Tom Gjelten, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Chris Hedges, Tony Horwitz, Charlayne Hunter-Gualt, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, Ward Just, Kiran Khalid, Ellen Knickmeyer, Jeri Laber, Gideon Levy, Jacki Lyden, Jim Macmillan, Serri Mandell, Jared Meader, Steve Mumford, Cayrle Murphy, Asra Nomani, Jacki Northam, Will O’Leary, Jane Perlez, Dana Priest, Martha Raddatz, Sudarsan Raghavan, Jonathan Randal, Danny Rubinstein, Kirk Semple, Charles Sennott, Anthony Shadid, Scott Simon, Jamie Tarabay, Ivan Watson.

December, 2006                                     

New Directions

December 6th to January 13th, 2007

Opening Reception: Wednesday, December 6th, 6 – 8 pm

*2nd Wednesday reception: Wednesday, December 13th, 2007 6-8

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Cindy Kane. Ms Kane draws on personal narrative and experience to create her paintings of maps, home made art magazine covers, and the relics from her children’s youth. Kane works in several visual formats, while maintaining a set of marks and icons that travel between images, uniting the art as a body of work.  A few moments examination rewards the viewer with an intricate visual language, that while speaking to the observer, also carries on  a converstation between the works themselves.

In a review of her work, author and critic John Loughery wrote; Kane leads us into a peculiar netherworld, a hard to place area that’s both reassuringly ancient, and anxiously modern.  This is a painter who is interested in the unconscious and the archetypal, and utilizes her own private, (but not inaccessible) vocabulary and imagery."

The road to Kane’s art is quite distinctive. Looking at it one can see the influence of Arshile Gorky in her linear painting and color, but she also admires the work of Richard Long, with his deep connections to the earth and the way in which his materials reveal his process. Kane is self taught. A true child of the sixties, she grew up in Washington DC absorbing the period's powerful political climate and eschewed college in favor of work in the National Park system. Yosemite and the Grand Canyon offered her the opportunity to study ancient Indian ruins and to document pictographs in pen and ink drawings. These primitive figures drifting across the maps allude to the aboriginal concept of a walk about, or offer a sense of nomadic wanderings.

With regard to her current body of work, Kane says:

These maps are my inner landscapes, reflecting my sense of balance or instability as I observe the political and environmental tumult of our times. They are not about particular places, but rather concern my fascination with migration patterns and the forces of nature. I am also deeply moved by the relics of childhood, and feel compelled to document those artifacts which hold enduring memories from that time.

In 2009 Ms Kane will be exhibiting at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. After many years of travel, the artist is now settled on Martha’s Vineyard, where she has lived with her husband and two daughters for the last 10 years.