“In and Out” by Pam Glick is among the works featured in the exhibition “New Shapes from Old Tropes.”
The Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery will host the exhibition “New Shapes from Old Tropes" from Feb. 22 through April 10.
The exhibition features paintings, sculptures, collages and drawings by artists from the Buffalo area. Participating artists are: Bruce Adams, Nando Alvarez-Perez, Julia Bottoms, Kyle Butler, A.J. Fries, Pam Glick, George Afedzi Hughes, Richard Huntington, Joan Linder, Margaret Schrecongost, virocode and Rebecca Wing.
The artists and exhibition guest curator John Massier will be present at a reception on Friday, Feb. 25, from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.
The exhibition title refers to the artists’ novel approach to landscape and figuration. Massier writes, “Yet, even when we might presume their absence, landscape and figuration are often there, layered unexpectedly within even the most contemporary artworks. They slyly and often emphatically resist the dustbin of art history, revealing themselves not merely as tropes against which newer ideas are contrasted but as the sustenance that lays a foundation for even the newest approaches to art making.”
Massier is the Visual Arts Curator at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo. He has been a curator and writer of contemporary art since 1988, during which he has worked with hundreds of national and international artists to present their work to the public through solo, group, and residency exhibitions.
Below are additional excerpts from Massier’s essay in the exhibition catalog regarding the artists participating in the exhibition:
Long presumed to be a figurative painter — because every painting he has made has included figuration — Bruce Adams ably illustrates the stronghold an old trope can have over new work. Adams has always maintained that he was a conceptual artist using figuration as a device within a more malleable and open-ended approach.
Nando Alvarez-Perez has adopted the extruded aluminum framing from the interior landscapes of conventions and trade shows as a format within which to recontextualize images, symbols, and texts from Western history, both avant-garde and kitsch. This physical structure flattens all the components utilized onto the same plane while also replicating the flattening of imagery across our virtual desktops, where every mode of reality and all references get smoothed into a singular field of experience.
Julia Bottoms' skill as a painter resides firmly within longstanding figurative traditions, but cannot be viewed outside of our present context. What is radically disarming about her works are their emphatic vulnerability.
Kyle Butler has never employed figuration, except in its absence. His depictions of darkened city streets are notable for the deep vacancy of their spaces, the rich darkness of their darks. The total absence of figures within these landscapes turns the built environment into an allegorical stand-in for the personal psyche, sharpening the sense of lostness and vacancy within these contemporary locations.
A.J. Fries' paintings have often featured still objects — sex toys, Monopoly pieces, toy cars, Buffalo Bills memorabilia, kitschy glassware — rendered with hyper-realism in the service of metaphorical or allegorical underpinnings.
Pam Glick’s “Niagara-USA-Canada” series, often rendered in fast-sweeping, even messy, chunks of lines and colors, gives the false impression of paintings made easily and quickly. In reality, their compositions are sophisticated and thoughtful.
In the work of George Afedzi Hughes, colonialism and its brutal history are interpreted through contemporary spectacle and popular culture such as sports. Hughes manages to make works that are mysterious and oblique in their aspect while also rendering details with intense specificity and directness.
More than capable of capturing realism and lifelike drawing, Richard Huntington more often than not prefers to let loose the line, literally following it wherever it trails. In doing so, he gives preference to his own low-brow ways and undermines the pretensions of the long history of portraiture and painting.
In the works included here, Joan Linder has set her fastidious eye upon the natural world. In “Ground III,” measuring roughly eight feet square, Linder has composed a maddeningly elegant portrait of a portion of grass, one half drawn from her backyard, the other from the land at Love Canal. The effect is perceived as though we are floating above the ground.
In the paintings of Margaret Schrecongost, figurative forms serve multiple purposes from articulating identity, to describing narrative and detailing life through portraiture… She is adeptly channeling acute anxieties through paintings that alternately employ dark surrealism, ambiguous narrative, and sardonic portraiture.
In “Seedlings,” virocode observes the nascent and radically swift development of cell phone towers sprouting from the environment to nourish us in a manner not dissimilar from wheat or corn or anything else that springs from the ground. While many may apply ethical concerns to the growth of cell towers (or windmills), virocode (Andrea Mancuso and Peter D’Auria) smartly situate themselves at an objective distance.
The sculptural work of Rebecca Wing appropriates landscape references and readapts them into formal components within her work, not in an effort to make "landscape sculptures" but to concoct objects of ambiguity that resonate with the mystery of their own thingness, objects with specific though undefined identities.
The Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery is located on the main level of Rockefeller Arts Center on the Fredonia campus at 280 Central Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 4 p.m., Friday and Saturday from noon to 6 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. The exhibition will be open regular hours during the campus spring break from March 14 through 18.
Contact Marion Art Gallery Director Barbara Räcker via email or call 716-673-4897 for more information, to schedule a group tour of the exhibition or to request a free exhibition catalog.
Funding for "New Shapes from Old Tropes” is provided by the Fredonia College Foundation’s Cathy and Jesse Marion Endowment Fund and Friends of Rockefeller Arts Center.
