Craft House expands programming with "Kitchen Gallery"

Craft House, a contemporary art gallery on the South Division corridor, is expanding programming by adding six new artists to the live-in end of the studio space aptly named "The Kitchen Gallery:" the work quite literally hangs in the kitchen area. 

"This program came about by not having work to fill the gaps between shows and also really wanting to have a longer term collection available to people who were starting out collecting artwork," says Amanda Carmer, founder. 

Craft House has participated in all major Avenue for the Arts events over the past two years. The gallery was founded on an "occupancy opportunity" model that allows for artists to rent the space for longer periods of time, while also using the space as a studio to create new works. 

The Kitchen Gallery currently represents six artists, all friends or colleagues of Carmer, which she says gives her the advantage of explaining to collectors more in depth the background and thought processes of the artist. 

The lineup consists of Ethan Ross, Kaitlyn Zylstra, Daniel Hojacki, Chase Covell, Steven Rainey and Taylor Greenfield. All are post college or grad school experienced. 

Ross is a formalist photographer who does large format  photography, contact printed for rich and detailed tones. His compositions are combinations of manmade structures and nature depicting the dominance of one over the other. 

Zylstra uses charcoal and watercolor to depict animals and geometric patterns in a collage-like manner, while Greenfield has a pair of self portraits of in bright and colorful watercolors, showing playful images built thematically on the past winter's polar vortex. 

Rainey, a trained printmaker, is showing a couple pieces from his series that was done in residency in Utah with Cabin Time where he took a small silkscreen and used ground pigments such as turmeric and beetroot, collected river silt and plants and printed the impressions onto paper. 

Hojacki has a pair of inkjet archival prints first printed on a window screen before being peeled off, leaving natural and manmade patterns. Covell has created layers of thick ply matte paper to created geographical representations of lakes. 

"We're here to provide the artwork at a reasonable price but are also totally willing to hook up a potential collector with an artist directly if we dont' have something that they want but they like the aesthetic," says Carmer. "We're meant to be a springboard for the artist and collector and the prices are meant to reflect that. Nothing is over 500 dollars and all of the prices are online."