Cosmoscope @ Forge Gallery, Milford, PA June 2013

So happy to be including "Firewoman" in this show. The bright abstracts of Cosmoscope came about after I'd worked on a series of goddess imagery around Y2k called "Dreammother". I'll be posting more of these as I get the scans, and offering them as 8 x 10 framed artist finished prints for $48.

"Cosmoscope" at Forge Gallery, Milford, PA June 8- July 8, 2013

He's still at it! LYRICAL COMPLEXITIES, the sculptures of Charles Fahlen.

The Philadelphia great remains in our lives!

The Quicksilver Mine Co.
6671 Front St. (Hwy. 116), Downtown Forestville, P.O. Box 844  Forestville, CA 95436 p 707.887.0799 f 707.887.0146

 Hours 11-6  Thursday-Monday  

"Urbanism" at PAFA

Urbanism: Reimagining the Lived Environment
July 2- September 4, 2011, Fisher Brooks Gallery
Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts
118-128 N. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA

    “Urbanism”, at the Fisher Brooks Gallery through September 4, 2011, speaks to social priorities and cultural tendencies in the postmodern age. The genius of the exhibition is in the cumulative dynamism of the four iconic artist/teams. Brilliantly curated by Julien Robson, the themes are exquisitely relevant and intellectually engaging. The work is stylistically diverse, with broad emotional and aesthetic range.

Arden Bendler Brown

   Arden Bendler Browning’s paintings are sweepingly gestural. The artist tactilly encompasses a distinctly  contemporary urban experience via semi abstract, expressionist landscapes. Immersed in the composition and color and energy of these highly emotive, visually compelling environments, the viewer is transported by the energy of the city.

     Amy Walsh’s minutely detailed architectonic sculptural installation incorporates deception, discovery and surprise. A pathway through coarsely veneered walls of cardboard and detritus leads to peepholes through which four minute, personalized, layered, private spaces are revealed. Each is its own painstakingly constructed, miniature model urban environment, simultaneously literal, referential and surreal.

Amy Walsh's Installation

         The Dufala Brothers play with the aesthetics of urban “bling”, creating compelling, repurposed metaphor. One example is the upholstered cavity of a giant green dumpster; “Twenty Yard Dumpster Coffin”  is a luxury-limo, padded lounge, “contained” in an impenetrable, steel industrial shell.

             Ben Peterson’s elaborately imagined cartoons carefully illustrate managed chaos. Disintegrating environments are cheerfully propped with scaffold. Elements of whimsy and leisure are interjected amongst cantilevered decay. Buckled turf, reinforced to support multiple layers of tilted structure, shelters intricate sub-terranean cities. Peterson addresses human reaction to external forces, incorporating themes of evolution, decay, denial, and persistence.

           This exhibition invites the viewer to consider scale, intimacy, and materialism in  the context of the constructed environment, addressing social context, dynamic reinvention, and the sustainability of a material obsessed culture.

Find out more: http://www.pafa.org/Museum/Exhibitions/Currently-On-View/Urbanism-Reimagining-the-Lived-Environment/989/
   

2005 Cosmoscope

"2005 Blue" 28 x 36, mixed media, detritus, on archival cotton rag paper, scored and articulated, mounted on panel

Cosmoscope 2003

Above: "2003 Virgo", "2003 Leo" mixed media on archival cotton paper, each 28 x 40

2004 Hearts, Hands and Homes of Bangor

            This stained glass mosaic was designed with Bangor Middle School Eighth graders in 2004 as an exploration and synthesis of their community's heritage and values. Known as the "Slate Belt" we incorporated "slate roofs" over the yellow doorways of the "houses". The students chose to make the "roofs" slightly curved, like the points of the arrowheads used by the Woodland Era Munsee Lenape tribe, that inhabited the region in pre colonial times. At the center is a daffodil, a symbol of life, longevity and hope to the Welsh early settlers, whose livelihood was in the slate mines. A symbol of Christianity  eternal life, and sustenance, two fish, signifying the purifying aspects of the Delaware River nearby, and the creek that runs through town, surround the daffodil.

Pictured above are the "Hands" and "Hearts" of Bangor. The adage "Many hands make light work" was true of this mosaic. I worked with the eighth graders to develop the themes, choose the imagery, and work them into a symmetric, mandala like design. The cutting and assembly of the glass was expertly done by "Expressions in Glass" on Johnsonville Road in Bangor, PA

                                 The five petals of this daffodil remind me of the head, hands and legs of the human figure, with the red center like a  heart, a central touchstone for the entire piece.