The Public is invited to attend the Opening Reception of two exciting exhibitions at the Watchung Center in January. The Opening Artist Reception will take place on Sunday, January 8, 2012 from 1–4 pm with the exhibitions running January 8 through January 28, 2012.
The Upper Gallery will feature “Pictorial Constructions” featuring four artists, Pasquale Cuppari, Joe Freeman, Jr., Patti Jordan & Wayne Charles Roth . “Pictorial Constructions” presents work by three New Jersey artists and a Rhode Island artist who are engaged in the careful or improvisational assembly of elements to create dynamic and probing compositions in a variety of media. Like architects and excavators, these four artists are fabricating fascinating worlds and structures in their art.
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Pasquale Cuppari (Roselle Park, NJ) has added a new dimension to his brilliantly hued paint and glitter encrusted canvases. Through heavy daubs of oil and enamel as well as other mixed media elements, he has been interpreting the beauty of the world and the expansiveness of the universe in his organic abstractions, part of his Mondo Bello series. Recently, he has allowed massive paint drips to form projecting rock- like formations on his works, extending his tactile surfaces, nature metaphors and literal and illusionistic space.
Joe Freeman, Jr. (Providence, RI), a recent graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, has been producing a superb series of hand developed silver gelatin photographs that explore and document actual constructions that he sets up both in nature and in the studio and then photographs. Using string, wood, glass pieces, duct tape, rolled and inked paper and/or other found and chosen objects and materials, Freeman intrudes on rocks and trees or completely reformulates a two-dimensional surface to play with light, shadow and illusion in the spaces he constructs. The result is altered landscapes, anthropomorphic objects, and geometric designs that confound, flabbergast and entrance the viewer.
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Working with ink, water, graphite and solvent, Patti Jordan (Montclair, NJ) squeegees and brushes ink across the surface of large sheets of Fabriano paper. Jordan pushes and pulls her medium, coaxing, building and diluting the black liquid to formulate bold, textured and abstractly pooled and rippled layers. Creatures, bones, eyes, limbs and orifices appear, collide and condense on her horizontal and vertical scroll-like pieces, constructions of the imagination, psyche and random gesture.
Wayne Charles Roth (Mountain Lakes, NJ) shapes and builds thousands of computer images to create his cascading, rushing digital concoctions of color and form. Painting on the computer in a unique and astonishing manner, Roth’s build-up of swooping and soaring abstract forms almost defies our ability to follow the rapid movements in his art. Metaphors for 21st century life, his digital paintings capture the complicated frenzy and experience we all create and design for ourselves even as we hunt for the corners of respite both visually and mentally in life as well as art.
Guest curator of the exhibition, Virginia Fabbri Butera, Ph.D. (Summit, NJ), is the Director of the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery at the College of Saint Elizabeth in Morristown, NJ, where she is also Professor of Art History and chairs the Art and Music Programs.
The Lower Gallery will showcase the works of artist Kelly Vetter. Born in Jersey City, named after Dad’s favorite pub, studied at Pratt Institute earning an MFA in Painting, Kelly Vetter is a lifelong Jersey artist and resident. Creating miniature works on wood, paper and other ephemera, the artist creates vignettes into a fractured fairytale full of folklore, American icons and ideals, and personal narrative amid allegorical imagery.
The exhibit entitled “Sugar and Spice” is a body of work that explores love, loss and memory, with a bittersweet dose of nostalgia. Reworked vintage photographs and everyday objects, once loved and treasured but discarded, allow the ghosts of the past a new life, while also serving as a modern day memento mori. Images familiar in the everyday visual vernacular transform into new messages from a personal painterly perspective, a saccharine free yet sentimental view.
The Watchung Arts Center, a multi-disciplinary arts facility serving Long Hill Township, Warren, Watchung, the surrounding communities and the Tri-State Area.
For more information visit their website at www.watchungarts.org or to place a reservation call 908-753-0190 or email at wacenter@optonline.net. The Watchung Arts Center is located at 18 Stirling Road, Watchung, NJ 07069.
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