PHOTOS BY HEATHER N. GRIMMER/CONTRIBUTOR - Amy Greenan discusses one of her paintings at the opening of her art exhibition at the Kenan Center on Feb. 23. The exhibit runs through March 30.

Greenan@ Kenan has a catchy ring to it, but  Niagara Falls artist Amy Greenan said the word play was a very small part of the reason she decided to air her exhibit at Lockport's Kenan Center.

A patron at the Greenan @ Kenan exhibit takes in one  of Amy Greenan's paintings.

"I had been talking to Dean Brownrout ... who, we were working together for a little while. He proposed the show to me and to the Kenan. The similarity in the names, I think is novel, but also that he felt that my work would be a nice fit for the Kenan Center, which, I think it worked."

The dozens of people at the Kenan Center Gallery on Sunday for the opening of Greenan's exhibit, which runs through March 30.

Greenan was born in 1970, and raised in Alden. From the very beginning, art was a huge part of her life.

"Since I could hold a pencil, pretty much, I was always very interested in art. ... It's what I always wanted to do ever since I was little," she said Sunday.

Her work has since been shown internationally, and has been accessioned into the permanent collections of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, the Gibson Art Gallery at SUNY Potsdam, and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kan.

Where does Greenan's inspiration come from? Her own mind.

"I have a very active mind," she said. "And when I'm alone in the studio, I don't listen to music. And so I'm listening to what's going on in there, including songs playing and old conversations and memories, etc. etc."

The Kenan exhibit features a mixture of acrylic on canvas, gouache on paper, and collages on paper. There are also a few acrylic on wood pieces and an ink on paper.

There are several paintings of buildings in the Greenan exhibit. The artist says the paintings "kind of happened accidentally."

The "living room" gallery features several paintings of buildings.

"These house paintings kind of happened accidentally," she said. "I'd been painting a lot of figurative work and portraits. And there was one house in particular that I just stopped and took photographs of, not intending to make a painting ... and then I ended up trying it. And I really enjoyed working with the geometry and the hard edges. And they also spoke to me in a more conceptual way, too. As far as analogies between the structures and our own lives."

The "dining room" gallery features about a dozen text-based paintings. The gouache on paper words and phrases are an "ode to (her) love for graphic design."

Upstairs in "Mr. Kenan's Bedroom" gallery are numerous collages on paper. The collages take two or more buildings and put them together as one.

Greenan described it to one of the opening's attendees: "I love to play with collage. And I had some photocopies of some photographs I took, and I started picking them up and kind of piecing them together. It was kind of like a little puzzle. ... So then I took some studio scraps. It felt like it made sense."

Amy Greenan pauses to pose for a photo at the opening of her art exhibition at the Kenan Center on Feb. 23.

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