Opening and Reception: August 28, 6 – 8 PM Gallery Talk: 7 PM … Laurence Gartel
The exhibit, titled AUTO MOTION, will include one of a kind Iris prints, multimedia video/animation DVDs, a three-dimensional Ferrari sculpture, as well as other prints based on the inspiration of the Ferrari automobile.
Laurence Gartel has been considered the "father" of the Digital Art medium for over 34-years. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Princeton Art Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum of Art, and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History, Bibliothque Nationale, and most recently the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London.
Blane De St. Croix works in sculpture, drawing and installation. His work articulates humankind’s desire to take command over the earth -- alluding to conflicts with ecology, politics and ourselves. The work also reveals conflicts with nature, while asking us to reflect on our precarious relationship with our surroundings. De St. Croix’s work draws from painting and sculpture’s historical use of the landscape as subject, entering it into the contemporary consciousness of the conflicted landscape; certainly paying homage to land artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer and the painter Anselm Kiefer.
This exhibit will consist of both sculpture and drawings. Included will be works created in the past few years exploring the forest fire as subject and new work created especially for the gallery reflecting upon the subliminal landscape imagery of the Florida Everglades and how it ties into encroachment, conservation and restoration.
Blane De St. Croix was born in Boston, Massachusetts and educated at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (M.F.A. - Sculpture) and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts (B.F.A. - Sculpture with distinction). Previously De St. Croix was a visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College, Whittier, California. Currently he is an Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. He lives and works in both South Florida and Brooklyn, New York.
Thomas Lyon Mills …. January 8 – February 13, 2010
In Rome over the years, Thomas Lyon Mills has obtained permission to pass countless hours in places that are not always accessible to the public: Early Christian catacombs long under lock and key; a large ancient Mithraeum adjoining tunnels under the Baths of Caracalla; passageways beneath the Colosseum; the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua on the Roman Forum. In his native New York State, he retreats to a hidden spot in the Adirondacks, a natural sanctuary where, as in Rome, he absorbs the spiritual energies of the locale. For Mills, these sites invite contemplation, coalescing time, memory and other intangibles. He records in copious notes his impressions of these places and of the pre-16th-century art that deeply moves him, along with transcriptions each morning of his dreams. All find their way into his dense, middling- to large-scale mixed-medium drawings, which reveal their multilayered secrets slowly and incompletely to the beholder. The drawings may be worked on for a period of years. Shapes materialize as if through a process of geological accretion and erosion, with old marks erased to make room for new ones on what become heavily abraded surfaces. The images are generally dark dream spaces with forms dissolving into amorphous browns and blacks. Occasionally, mists of acrid hues waft by or bright light shines in through a chink. In his damp and silent places, weird fauna and flora appear, of unusual shapes and colors. Some seem to glow in the dark. – From Art in America, by Michael Amy
Thomas Lyon Mills received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills Michigan. He has exhibited his work since the early 80’s and has been a guest lecturer/visiting artist at Harvard, The Bauhaus in Germany, Parsons School of Design in NYC, Tyler School of Art, Auburn University and Cranbrook Academy of Art to list a few.
Jan-Ru Wan …. February 26 – April 10, 2010
Jan-Ru Wan, born in Taipei, Taiwan, first studied and worked as a fashion designer, but soon wanted to express something deeper with her work, something she calls "the power of thread." That concept, for her, encompasses symbolic and literal imageries of thread as a connector and mender of whatever has been torn. Brought up within the Taoist and Buddhist traditions, Wan’s work melds influences of both East and West, and often the words of the Heart Sutra, from Buddhist text, are found printed on the fabrics in her artwork. Her aesthetic embraces both positive and negative spaces, with ethereal volumes suspended on monofilament to create enveloping structures, seemingly arising from the void.
Wan came to the United States in 1990 to attend The School of Art Institute of Chicago. After receiving her BFA she went to The University of Wisconsin where she received an MFA in 1996. Since receiving her MFA, Wan has participated in 19 solo exhibitions, 40 group exhibitions and she has been awarded three important artist residencies; both national and international. In 2008 Wan was the keynote speaker for “Imagination as National Competiveness “, held in Seoul, Korea. That same year, she received a North Carolina Visual Art Fellowship, and also was the keynote speaker at the 2008 World Creativity Summit, Taipei, Taiwan. In 2010 alone Wan has solo exhibits scheduled in Canada, California and Florida. Currently, Wan is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University in Greenville.
Annual Student Art Show … April 22 – 30, 2010
This exhibitionfeatures the work from Edison State College art students and includes painting, drawing, design, ceramics and photography.
