Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery
GALLERY HOURS:
Tuesday & Thursday: 10:00am - 4:00pm
Saturday, 11:00am - 1:00pm and by Appointment
EXHIBIT:
"Lineage"
by Penny Guerin and Andrew Seles
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, September 18, 2026, 6:00-8:00pm
On Display: September 19 - October 31, 2026
Penny Guerin
Penny Guerin is a artist based in Storrs, Connecticut. She earned her degree in fine arts in oil painting from the University of Connecticut. She worked from the late 1970s until the early 1990s doing illustration, logo and publications design for UConn, Eastern Connecticut State University and private clients. Her publications experience led to full-time work as the print buyer for UConn where she gained experience in electronic media and information technology.
Guerin is now able to turn her attention back to my original love, oil painting. The human figure is a favorite subject, beginning as representative and segueing to expressionistic and abstract imagery. Her work often incorporates textured materials playing with space, words and figure/ground relationships.
Andrew Seles
Andrew Seles is a painter and artist working in both realist figuration and abstraction, based in South Glastonbury, Connecticut. His practice spans portraiture grounded in observed reality to formal, abstract investigations of geometry, composition and material.
Seles earned a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, He spent two decades in Los Angeles as a visual designer. His current work is the fusion of those two foundations. In figurative painting, classical training grounds a heightened realism concerned with the modern psycho-emotional condition — where the internal experience and the external world meet. In abstraction, precise, geometric forms built by hand and carefully balanced compositions explore the friction between formal rigor and tactile process. The visual language is steeped in the digital, yet the methods and materials are entirely analog: meditations on processing the digital by hand, as if reconstructing a contemporary visual language through ancient means.
The Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery represents a platform for local and regional visual artists to display their original works for public viewing at no cost to the artist. This unique collaborative model allows for artist participation in show design, installation, and supervision.
The Community Gallery derived its name from its historical roots. The physical space that houses the Gallery was once the ground floor of the Dye & Bleach House for the Gardiner Hall Jr Company from 1916 to 1954.
It was here where millions of yards of cotton thread were processed and colored before being spooled for domestic and international distribution.
Each show in the Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery will be on view for the duration of 4 to 8-weeks. Artists are chosen by EC-CHAP and curated to pair with the work of other artists or groups of artists whose work complements one another. We welcome submissions by students or community groups and encourage everyone to visit the gallery. We hope for this Community Gallery will bring awareness to the talent within our regional communities.
If you are interested in learning more about the Dye & Bleach House Gallery, and opportunities to display your work, please contact Gallery Director, Kathleen Zimmerman. Email: kathleenz@ec-chap.org. The Dye & Bleach House Community Gallery is located at The Mill Works, 156 River Road, Willington, CT.