On View September 21 – November 5, 2018 Opening Reception: Friday, September 21, 6:00-8:00pm
ARTISTS
Bill Donnelly, Wax Crayon
By focusing closely on a very small area, Bill Donnelly attempts to create a landscape using wax crayon on black paper that offers a unique way of experiencing what might otherwise be considered an ordinary subject.
Paula Cahill, Painting
Paula Cahill’s paintings strive to extend the conversation around line and shape by mixing and repeatedly laying down up to 100 gradients of color, drawing inspiration from across time as they attempt to contemporize line.
Lisa Fedon, Sculpture
Lisa Fedon’s sculpture emerges from the void where steel and mixed media utilize space to become an integral part of the piece. This play of material and space is allegorical and whimsical as a reflection of life.
Carrie Biegler, Photography (in the Community Arts Gallery; On View until October 26)
Since the summer of 2017, Carrie Biegler has met with and photographed around 120 women in the Philadelphia region for her Strength Source Project. Each woman participating in the project answers the same question, which is “What have you done in the past, or what are you doing now, that has made you feel strong inside?” Sponsored in part by Small But Mighty Arts, a program that gives Philadelphia artists a creative spark to pursue their art.See More
On View April 3 – June 7, 2018 Opening Reception: Friday, April 13, 6:00-8:00pm
ARTISTS
Bronwen Mayer Henry, Painting
After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer 5 years ago, Bronwen Meyer Henry rediscovered her love for painting. Her work is an expression of prayer, meditation, hope, and joy. Her large scale paintings reflect movement away from perfection and are brave, bold, vivid, and playful.
Christina Orthwein, Ceramics
Art Deco design influences many of Christina Orthwein’s ceramics as she finds grace and emotional impact in things we use in our everyday lives.
Mark Dixon, Painting
Mark Dixon’s paintings explore how photographs shape our thoughts of past experiences. Using his own memories of being in nature and photographs taken in high school as source material, he discovers the beauty in the mysterious ways our minds store and recall the past.
On View September 14 – November 11, 2017 Opening Reception: Thursday, September 14, 6:00-8:00pm
Fall Artists: Alan Greenberg, Teresa Shields, Dan Schimmel
Alan Greenberg – Threshold Painting/Sculpture
For over 35 years, Alan Greenberg has created large-scale, site-specific installations and studio-based work. Threshold is a hybrid sculpture linked to painting, composed of thick, built-up plaster pieces. The occasional rough edge, along with the layers of color and texture, strengthen the physical presence of these forms and define them as objects. The relationship between the object, the wall and the floor – as well as to human scale – is a crucial factor. The space behind and between the works, including strong shadows cast on the walls, all become important aspects of experiencing the art.
Teresa Shields – Trending Threads Textile Arts
At the heart of Trending Threads is the element of play. Every element of this work – letters, wood and board – have been painstakingly crafted by hand over a year-long AAC residency. The resulting analog Social Media platform – a pegged wooden board – holds 140 characters, the length of a Twitter post. Approximately three hundred letters were created, each uniquely colorful, made of felt and hand-stitched wool on wood blocks. These letters can then be attached to the board’s pegs, like a giant toddler toy. Viewers are invited to play with the giant board by spelling out words and thoughts and then posting a ‘Tweet’ as an artistic social media intervention. The parameters of this piece are simple, but the options are endless. What will you say? Take a photo of your message and/or include yourself and tweet #TrendingThreads.
Dan Schimmel – Mitochondriac Painting/Collage
Hovering between painting, collage, and three-dimensional assemblage, Dan Schimmel’s work puts spatial position and diverse materials into motion. Through a visual oscillation between multiple perspectives and dynamic flecks of contrasting color, the intensely animated surface ricochets into an unstable state of anti-media. Mitochondriac is a constructed word that links the interior of the energy of the body’s living cells to the exterior world of disturbing physical forces. These lush tapestries mediate inside and outside, micro and macro, personal and social, referencing contemporary events (climate change, warfare, technology, cyborgs, ecocide) through the incorporated commercial packaging that provides each work’s title.
On View May 12 – June 23, 2017 Opening Reception: May 12, 6:00-8:00pm
Artists: Maria G. Albornoz, Maggie Mills, Ron Klein
Maria G. Albornoz, Ceramics & Mixed Media
Maria G. Albornoz’ clay sculpture explores memory through abstract interpretations drawn from her childhood in Caracas, Venezuela. While some memories are transient and others transformed through time, the impressions left behind are distinct. The memories from this city surrounded by mountains are imbued with sensations, textures and smells. Her ordinary, absurd and oddly familiar sculptural objects reflect this reverie, exploring the relationship between line, color, textures, and form.
Maggie Mills, Paintings
Climate change, sprawl, and the exploitation of natural resources are modern plagues that define our environment. Marks made by adults affect the places where children play, learn and develop into future architects of the environment. The fragmentation of time and space due to technology structures our digital spaces and affects how we perceive our literal spaces. Young people navigate these inherited spaces with little guidance. This narrative is articulated through the use of modern iconography, flattened spaces, gold line work, and decorative motifs. These methods reference the art of the Byzantine, an era similar to our own in its struggle to define morality and its feud between iconoclasts and iconolaters.
Ron Klein, Sculpture
Ron Klein’s mixed media works are a result of years of traveling and collecting things in remote equatorial locations. Rainforest habitats, replete with complex repetitive patterns, offer an abundance of artifacts that both inspire and construct his sculpture. These organic materials are then combined with contemporary urban objects, situating both simultaneously in a world of chaos and order.
The conditions of light and color are used are used as a staging device to accentuate the subtle, passive nature or assertive action of the figure in Meghan Cox’s paintings. The attention to formalism and the organic development of design remains in the forefront while narrative is distanced in the background.
Kimberly Stemler
These paintings are densely patterned, color focused, and nostalgic. The process is organic – borrowing memories from the natural world, the recognition of the subtleties of life and environment.
Mary Pinto
Expanding on the language and use of photography, Mary Pinto’s photograms explore the natural world alongside the human relationship to it.
The Fall Solo series features three artists offering a unique perspective on life and art.
Lara Cantu-Hertzler | Book Room Gallery
The oil paintings of Lara Cantu-Hertzler have a dream-like quality, capturing a portrait of both the internal and external. Her images use photographic references to combine differing perspectives within a variety of environments, utilizing color, shape, and line to stitch these various scenes into a full painting.
Lara Cantu-Hertzler attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was awarded a residency at the prestigious Vermont Studio School in 2008. Cantu-Hertzler has exhibited her work at The Rosenfeld Gallery and The Philadelphia Sketch Club.
Oil On Panel, Lara Cantu-Hertzler, 2015
Stuart Fineman | Kellner Gallery
Stuart Fineman‘s current paintings on view at Abington Art Center can best be described as an investigation into the narrow range of possibilities between blue, green and gray. They are quite reduced, pared down to an open field of diluted color that somehow feels endless. What they are during the process and what they look like as the final artifact are two different things, but, Fineman says, “my hope is that the paintings become a source of contemplation, that while they are open for interpretation they will be inspirational and evocative in some way.”
Stuart Fineman earned his B.F.A. at the Philadelphia College of Art and his M.F.A. at Mills College in Oakland, CA. He is an adjunct professor at Drexel University, and has exhibited his works in galleries all around the east and west coast.
untitled (Aqua Blue), Stuart Fineman, 2014
Jesse Harrod | Tile Room Gallery
With her suite of part-objects, appendages, and bodily forms, Jesse Harrod brings into close proximity human and non-human forms, unsettling these distinctions by highlighting the blur between the natural(ized) body, on the one hand, and queer body, on the other. It is her hope that the unconventional and overlapping shapes of the suspended and emergent forms suggest alternative ways of being – or hanging – in space.
Harrod has exhibited across the U.S including “Data/Transfer/Object” Cuchifritos Project Space, NYC; “The Stench of Rotting Flowers” La Esquina, KC; “The Neighbors” AU, DC; “Queer Threads” Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, NYC. “A Tendency Towards Textiles” The Kohler Arts Center, WI. Harrod was interviewed by JD Sampson for “Queer Threads” the book designed by Todd Oldham published by Ammo Books. She has given lectures at Concordia University, MassArt, SAIC. She has held residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Oxbow, Sanskriti, India. She holds an MFA from SAIC and BFA from NSCAD.
