Lauren Bergman In this series of paintings Lauren Bergman has created a group of mid-twentieth century domestic scenes that refer to advertising imagery and old family snapshots. These narrative paintings simultaneously provoke feelings of nostalgia for a mythicized American lifestyle and confront the idealized female icon through the lens of irony. This exhibition, entitled “American Dream” is set in the context of a home that represents abundance, prosperity and the emotional center of the universe. The image of the perfect, smiling housewife/mother who resides primarily and blissfully in the kitchen remains an emotionally charged symbol. Even though from a twenty-first century perspective the domestic goddess icon seems irrelevant she continues to lurk in our subconscious as an ideal that women have left behind, or can’t live up to. The paintings use this image as a vehicle to examine a cultural shift from a time period that seemed to see the future as brimming with great possibilities to one where we now look to the future with a heightened sense of insecurity. Lauren Bergman, 2002
Arsen Roje
BODYSCAPES
I see a man and woman trapped inside their bodies and at the mercy of time. To express this idea I eliminate what’s associated with the body, space and environment, the outside world. Alone, a single body occupies the whole picture. It’s a field of flesh, a bodyscape.
Starting with a trigger image I make a number of thumbnail sketches until the idea becomes clear to me. The idea always evolves around a discomforting state of the body, physically limited but emotionally rich. Flesh struggles, a spasm in the shoulder, a nervous pull of the stomach, tension of the turning hip, a twisting spine.
My working process is instinctual and I never know how it is going to evolve or end. Emotionally charged and free of rational control, I let my brushwork distill what is useful until the body becomes one dynamic unit.
For me painting is not a way of knowing but a way of being in the moment, a promise of expression. There are no arrivals, only departures, an inconclusive monologue in paint.
Arsen Roje, Fall 2002
Marilynn Gelfman The Life & Times of S. (Anti) Claus Each sculpture is an amalgam of small familiar material elements which transform into siamese couplings of characters from our rich collective history. These 10 constructions address the life and times of Santa Claus, his relationships to Old Nick, Goldilocks, Ms. Liberty, Mrs. Claus, his parents, his costumer. They are a fusion of mind and eye, the extreme and the improbable, humor and ritual, memory and present. Each pair is suspended at an edge boundary, in a hobbled love dance, between the realm of ideas and the object world.
Marilynn Gelfman, 2002
Ron Weis
These small paintings represent everything I love about oil paint. It is a medium which allows for a wide range of subtly-varying applications from thick opaque layers to the thinnest of glazes. Its flexibility endows small and often overlooked objects with expressive possibility, and I can think of none more suited to such exploration than the simple, elegant, and entirely utilitarian tube of paint.
Ron Weis, 2002
Jay W. Shoots
CONTEMPORARY ARTIFACTS
By combining hand crafted traditional methods with documentary, formalist and conceptualist concerns, I am attempting to create photographs of utilitarian objects which transcend the realm of the purely descriptive.
My hope is to transform artifacts of man to photographic symbols that pay homage to his work ethic, heritage and spirit.
Jay W. Shoots, 2002
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