Adam Welch

Vlad Basarab - The Archaeology of Memory

Solo exhibition consisting of two installations, a single channel video projection, one looping video piece on monitor and two objects.

02/13-05/3/2015   Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

The past plays an important part in my creative process. My role as an artist is to dig through layers of history like an archaeologist. The Archaeology of Memory series has been influenced by the loss of collective culture and memory. The act of remembering becomes the only vehicle for keeping history alive.

I have chosen to reference books because they are historic symbols of knowledge and collective memory. The videos in the series The Archaeology of Memory are time-lapse recordings of clay books being dissolved over the course of seven days by dripping water. The deconstructive aspect present in the disintegration of clay books, references on a metaphoric level the breaking down of the mind and memory through the vicissitudes of life and time. The geologic-like changes that the clay books undergo reference loss of collective memory. The overlapping and layered patterns of memory are represented by the process of making the individual book pages out of clay resembling geologic strata. Undoing the book in seven days, also references the creation of the world. Through the erosion of the clay books, I am comparing the process of memory and its disappearance to geological transformations.

From the beginning of history, there has been a connection between words and clay as the first forms of written knowledge were on clay tablets. While the loss of collective memory seems like a natural occurrence that one cannot stop, it is never too late to try to revitalize culture and language. Books have always seemed to make knowledge more tangible, yet in these videos they are crumbling away, dissolving in what appears to be a natural process. There is a sense of nostalgia for knowledge and culture.

Akiko Kotani  -  Soft Walls

A survey style exhibition of Kotani's recent works displayed across four galleries.

09/07 - 11/03/2013   Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Kotani’s sensitivity to space, form and line is ever-present in this dynamic and subtle body of work. By co-opting the rudimentary aspects of drawing, crochet and sewing she has seamlessly contemporized ancient processes into a new lexicon of material and spatial relationships. Cohering both the cognitive and intuitive within a personal language of mark making, she has distilled the implicit strengths from both gestural expedience and methodological production to create pieces of arresting complexity. Each piece singularly presents itself as a codified interpretation of a particular environment, brought into dimension with a distinctive, minimized economy of strokes, knots, or stitches. As a presented body, the pieces resonate reflexively, as if they serve as arrival or departure points within an environment characterized by both calmness and fervor. 

I personally find a great quietness within myself as I dwell through the four galleries that compose this exhibition. The lightness, grace, maturity, playfulness and poignancy of the works generate an entrance point for me to meditate on seminal relationships between environment and observation. Through the simple nature of a line and the abyss in which the line resides, Kontani constructs the rudimentary matrix fundamental in all physical representations. In essence she has set forth a framework, offering itself as a mirror and or vessel to what I bring as an interpreter.

Adam Welch 

Lenka Clayton  -  Artist Residency in Motherhood

Two gallery solo exhibition of new works generated from Clayton's Artist Residency in Motherhood--a duration based project constructed around her self administrated residency taking place within her house and time of raising two children.

09/07 - 11/03/2013    Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

In 2012 I founded An Artist Residency in Motherhood — a structured, fully-funded artist residency that takes place inside my own home and life as a mother of two young children.

Artist residencies are usually designed as a way to allow artists to escape from the routines and responsibilities of their everyday lives. An Artist Residency in Motherhood is different. Set firmly inside the traditionally “inhospitable” environment of a family home, it subverts the art-world’s romanticization of the unattached artist, and frames motherhood as a valuable site, rather than an invisible labour for exploration and artistic production.

As the first artist-in-resident-in-motherhood I aim to embrace the fragmented mental focus, exhaustion, nap-length studio time and countless distractions of parenthood as well as the absurd poetry of time spent with young children as my working materials and situation, rather than obstacles to be overcome.

Eric Charlton & Ian F. Thomas & Eli Blasko

Inter-subjectivity

  An immersive installation with three access portholes leading to independent dioramas reflecting on hierarchy, socials structures and education.

02/01 - 04/07/2013  -  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Inter-Subjectivity discusses contemporary American ideology as an archetype for the notion that interrelated subjective viewpoints supersede a perceived objectivity. Traditionally, America has always been referred to as a “melting pot,” a land where a multitude of viewpoints, beliefs, and opinions may all coalesce to form an amalgamated culture. The mere belief in such a multifarious system antiquates simple descriptive terms like singularity or objectivity, replacing them with something entirely new and more dynamic: an inter-subjective perception of existence. A consumerist culture has become the primary attempt at creating a leveled field on which such a diverse culture can meet. Ideally, buying into goods should be the most readily available means for expressing one’s own feelings toward the truth in this system; however, many social, economic, and ethical items put the American construct into question and may make it inaccessible entirely. Inter-Subjectivity traces this concept of commercialism as a multi-faceted entity, and brings unseen items to light, such as the historical allocation of resources, the shallow interpretation of wealth, and what happens at the end of the consumerist cycle, all of which remain invisible to a certain degree to many Americans. The installation articulates the fact that a multitude of different viewpoints all coexist to form a cohesive whole, while questioning the potential physical, ethical, and social imprints left behind by the current structure in place.

Megan Biddle  -  Gravitational Pull

09/27 - 12/06/2013  -  Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Statement:

While I work in a variety of materials, my practice is rooted in glass. My interests lie in material transformation and the visual language of science and geology, blurring the two, creating a context where the microcosm and the macrocosm become visually interchangeable. Strategies include site-specific installations, drawing, video, and sculpture. I am inspired by phenomena in the natural world and use it as a catalyst for my work. My intention is to generate a sense of curiosity in the viewer reminiscent of my own curiosity while creating the work.

I employ facts specific to my life—the cracks that grow along my bedroom wall in a span of three years are transferred into a sprawling wall drawing, increasing and decreasing in scale to symbolically represent a map of my existence. The texture of my skin is printed directly onto blank super 8 film, creating a rapid moving image of black and white of lines and texture. This short film blurs the line between recognition of the familiar and anonymity. Shifting between scales, my work examines the map like quality of a fingerprint to the cross section of an invented landscape based on the texture of my skin. It is a constant movement toward and away from a finished thing.

Jeremy Boyle & Mark Franchino   -  Untitled I

Central to this collaborative exhibition is a new installation, which combines elements of drawing, sculptural forms, and the integration of electronic elements and sound. A series of works, simultaneously imaginative and cynical, grounded in reference from the global housing crisis to building trades, from dumpsters to playhouses flank mixtures of work ranging widely from drawing to sculpture to video and electronic elements addressing themes of system, definition and communication. 

02/01 - 04/07/2013  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Untitled I is a first collaboration between artists Jeremy Boyle and Mark Franchino. The central work, also titled Untitled I, combines their decade long creative interests (systems, communication, definition, context and value) into a sculptural installation. With the conflation of cheap material, careful construction, high and low tech, the work arrives in a simultaneous space of cynical observation and playful/imaginative thought. In addition to the central collaborative installation, both artists have included bodies of independent work in a wide range of media (drawing, sound, video, sculpture) that reinforces the broad range of thematic interest investigated within Untitled I.

Blaine Siegal  -  Saint ----- God of last things

02/10 - 04/22/2012  -  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Living with the specter of death creates a heightened sensitivity to the everyday world. Meaning and symbolism can be extruded from the simplest of objects and ideas. A spiritual map is painted upon all that you see. I use this perspective to guide my use of quotidian objects to create sculptures that are allegorical of metamorphosis, exploring the idea of death as transformation.

Stephanie Armbruster  -  Hungry Ghosts

Single gallery installation of 8 abstract encaustic on panel works.

Statement:

“Everything that can be said, can be said clearly. And what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

The subject of these paintings is something that we cannot speak about. In Buddhist folklore, the hungry ghosts are spectral creatures that roam the Earth, tormented by cravings that they can never satisfy. These hungry ghosts cannot be seen, but their presence can be felt.

This series began as an attempt to illustrate the purely subjective portions of memory – the private experiences that we feel and sometimes share, but which evaporate the moment we try to articulate them. We live through our experiences, moment to moment, chasing them, trying to capture them and hold on to them like hungry ghosts – but all we are ever left with are memories. The negative spaces in our public reality.

Composed of encaustic on panel, these emotive works represent a developing vocabulary of gesture and color, exploring the language-less nature of transition and uncertainty. With their floating, atmospheric presence, at times both beautiful and malign, each depicts the texture and feel of a memory. They document the anticipation of possibilities, and the obsession with events that have already transpired, seen through the lens of synesthesia. Formless and devoid of literal language, these memories are stories that must be shown and cannot be told. Fragments of a greater reality; whole, yet incomplete.

The transitory nature of memory speaks to the ephemeral nature of encaustic as a medium. Each gestural mark is created by reworking layers of material – wax and graphite - scraped from the works themselves to then be reintroduced back into the surfaces of the paintings. Like layers of memory, certain elements become obscured, while others are exposed, rising ominously to the surface as if paused between actions. A series of moments frozen in time as experiences transition into memory.

Christopher McGinnis  -  Greenhouse 1

02/10 - 04/22/2012  -  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

The Greenhouse 1 installation was inspired by a period in photographic history following the American Civil War, when albumen glass negatives were reused as greenhouse windows. These negatives contained imagery from the war that many people were unable to confront and consequently the plates were repurposed. Eventually, over-exposure to the sunlight destroyed the images but their sacrifice brought new life to the plants inside.

Greenhouse 1 visualizes the potential for creative new growth in struggling local communities including Braddock and Homestead, Pennsylvania. The exhibit is comprised of 78 silkscreen prints on clear Plexiglas and live Poplar saplings, a symbol of continued growth in the wake of collapse.

Initial inspiration for this project came from the discovery of a sixteen-foot Poplar tree growing one-hundred feet from the ground atop the “Carrie” Blast Furnace in Rankin, Pennsylvania. The Poplar tree is one of North America’s most determined species of plant thriving from Pennsylvania to Arizona and serves as a striking example of perseverance under harsh conditions.

Chris McGinnis is a contemporary artist inspired by America’s urban-industrial heritage and the endless pursuit of technological efficiency. His work visualizes this drive to progress and its effect on all facets of society, ranging from industry to entertainment. Iconography representing the abundance and promise of industrial modernism now evokes nostalgia for a time when American optimism was specifically manifested in large-scale construction and the industrial environment.

Greenhouse 1 was sponsored in part by the following organizations and individuals. Thank you for your generous donation of time and money as well as your continued support of contemporary art. A special thanks to The Rivers of Steel Heritage Foundation in Homestead, PA for opening their archives and providing access to the "Carrie Furnace" Historical site.

Chris Beauregaurd  -  Long Play in the Video Isles

Single Gallery exhibition consisting of 6 sculptural works.

02/10 - 04/22/2012  - Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

"I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole"

-Umberto Eco

Much of my work is made in response to the conventions of cult cinema, B-films, and VHS culture. The mondo, the grotesque and the bizarre resonate as fractured moments throughout the objects that I make. I also have a genuine affection for many of these films.

Cult film and its modes of consumption contain ready-made strategies for both critically engaging cinema and connecting with an audience. It has the rich potential to generate a level of audience participation that can extend cinema beyond the narrative frame of the screen. As the house lights dim and the first spectral images illuminate a screen which dominates the visual plane, time is blurred and extended. For the cinema-goer the suspension of disbelief is a voluntary surrender, a giving in to a projected narrative and another world. At its core the cult event is this deeply personal experience, shared as an audience. I am interested in making objects that isolate fragments from film, a 'cult object' that extends the fictional universe outside of the film itself. The cult object speaks to a narrative and history beyond its physical presence. It can invoke associations and impart a sense of belonging. The objects that I make comprise my own relationship and response to cult cinema. But like the films themselves, these are experiences that must be shared in order to be realized.

Jerstin Crosby  -  Painted Bones and Hyperlinks

02/10 - 4/22/2012  -  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Painted Bones & Hyperlinks, an exhibition of new works, explores themes such as fear, primitivism, conceptual proximity, and free form research as related to technology, and the online ‘self’. This exhibit consists mostly of multimedia sculptures made from materials such as porcelain, stained glass, wax, and fabric, accompanied with audio, video, and light components. The seemingly random mash-ups of subject matter, such as Vegan Pizza Party, a slice of day-old vegan pizza with a built-in miniature rave cave and disco ball, and the defiantly terrified creature hiding under a psychedelic video rug in Fear the Cursor, Not the Curse, reflect Crosby’s perspective on the objective randomness we experience through web search algorithms and targeted online advertising.

Johnathan Chamberlain  -  Slo Poke

02/01 - 04/07/2013  -  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

I've heard my father tell the same jokes for decades, which leaves me to wonder: if there ever was a time they were actually funny.  Has the subsequent retelling of this dad-joke material shed any new light on meaning?  Are the jokes excusable because they are so firmly embedded in a cultural past?  Is the fact that he tells the jokes over and over actually the punchline?  This exhibition SLO POKE is about a situation like I've just described.  Do the motifs that interest me in the past, that I employ to slow down my present, carry any weight?  The eye moves over them in a familiar way - sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a labored chuckle. 

The past has a golden patina.  Something about it is a little slower, and perhaps more significant.


 

Lenore Thomas  -  Somewhere In Between 

Single gallery installation consisting of 2 framed prints across from a single channel video projected on hand painted wall drawing.

2/1/2013 - 4/7/2013 Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 

Statement:

My current work is a melding of observed reality with the imaginary.  In a desire to escape the truth of the everyday world, I create fantastical, abstract environments via the realm of video games, pop culture, television, and contemporary design. By reworking found imagery into a language of mark making, color, and design while allowing the process of chance to alter the art, I compose a personal language that is rooted in a vocabulary of geometry and space. I am in essence allowing viewers a moment to forget about their reality and enter a landscape that transcends their own.

With printmaking I can interchange and combine information in a variety of ways to create and identify new patterns and images.  Through painting, drawing, layers of wax, traditional and digital prints, I begin to obscure, alter, and sometimes delete information. Through the process of artificial selection I choose colors and create compositions.  Those elements that are selected continue on through an attraction that I have to them.  This attraction may be one associated with beauty, ugliness, or nostalgia.  In part these landscapes are a formal examination of color and design that are created through the principles of artificial selection, chance, and observation.

Anna E. Mikolay  -  The Space Between

Gallery installation of recent works composed of acrylic and tape on canvas.

02/11 - 03/20/2011  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

In my exhibit, The Space Between I am exploring what happens to the mind during the time it takes a human being to glance at a given space or object.

Each painting represents a slice of “data”, with many slices of data needed to make a thought become part of our consciousness. While working in this mindset I found myself creating paintings that seemed to represent bits of floating data, then paintings that started to associate with prior experience, and finally paintings that represented something deeper that surrounds us and is in us; something that is not subjective or associative and has no beginning or end.

Heidi Bender - Motherlands

Performance and wall based works

02/11 - 02/20/2011Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

My projects are an examination of how areas of definition—of identity, separation, and connectedness to others—are constructed in daily life.  I use existing parameters of space, class, and culture as identification categories that I overlay, distort, appropriate, and blend.  Most often these largely social explorations take the form of art interventions in which I insert the body or self into interstices between different types of created spaces such as public/private, government/individual, socio-temporal/geographic, etc. Using the self as a wedge between these constructed terrains, I am able to explore the liminal space where distinctions and entities begin to emerge. 

This exhibition, Motherlands, navigates the space mediating the realms between one’s social person and civic identity. If commerce is footloose and personal exchanges are facilitated more by technology than by geographical proximity, then how do our social networks and therefore our allegiances to people, cultural spaces, and geographical places shift? Here I use my own daily networks as a means of engaging these questions. The Associated States and Remaking the Motherland emerge here as personal spaces that indicate states of becoming as opposed to states with capitals.

In The Associated States of Bitacora I log the personal interactions that I have on a particular day, form a territory for each person in the log based on their known range of movement throughout the world, piece the territories together via the currents that move through them—the water and roadways present—then scan the entire new map into the computer, where it is finalized and printed.  Each map represents a different day of my life. V 9865.  V 9871.  V9882. As the maps amass, the new versions are pinned over the old, creating both a layered visual history of these constructed territories and a critique of my social network as it changes. The Associated States of Bitacora is presented at PCA in installation form displaying the remnants of this on-going performance.

In conjunction with The Associated States of Bitacora is a sister piece, Remaking the Motherland.  This work is created by a similar process as but explores the network of those whom I intentionally choose to populate my social network. This project bears the territories of 102 friends, family, and acquaintances. I chose the people in this project based on the importance I felt they each held in my life.  Some had significantly impacted my path in life, while others had less impacting but more functional roles, and still others are those that I didn’t know as well but who were so familiar that their faces and personas become synonymous with my daily routine.

Seth Clark - Ruination

Solo exhibition of recent collages/mixed media works on paper.

02/11/ - 03/20/2011  Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Abandoned houses have served as the central subject in my work for over two years. These enormous man-made assemblages--these huge forces of permanence-- are deteriorating and collapsing in on themselves. Somehow however, among all of the clutter, there remains the most gentle resolve--it's as if the buildings were content with their circumstance. Dignity remains, as they turn inside out.

I collect a considerable amount of collage material from daily life in Pittsburgh. Just about anything that is flat and clean enough to be adhered to paper is layered, to create a dimensional foundation. As my work progresses, charcoal, pastel, paint, ink, and graphite bring definition and tremendous depth to these raw materials.

Kerry Skarbakka  -  Anxiety and Redemption

Two gallery exhibit of new and recent large scale photographic prints mounted on gator board.

11/1 - 12/5/2010  Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Statement:

Many of the photographs featured in this show are images of Skarbakka falling, and are from his series called The Struggle to Right Oneself. The constructed images are in response to, he says, the shifting human conditions of the world that we inhabit.

Another series is underwater images from Fluid. Again he uses himself as a model and then constructs the images in all types of water, from swamps and bathtubs, to sewers and oceans. He explores the complex meaning of water in our world and the environmental impact of humanity.

Kenneth Batista - Recent Works

02/10 - 04/22/2012 Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Travel has always had an important influence on my work, but in the past that influence has been either understated or implied. However this work began after a trip to Kenya in 2007 and embraced what I saw (and felt) as we bounded across the Masai Mara in our Landrover on safari. I was immediately taken by the light and color of the high plains, but also the iconic acacia tree that stood in stark contrast to the sparse landscape. Each tree was a center of life – a phenomenon I also found fascinating.

I pored over the hundreds of photographs I had taken on the trip and started playing with them in the computer. I found the pixilated photos I came up with captured the feeling of color and movement I was looking for. While the paintings get their start with these images, they take on a life of their own as they develop on the canvas. I am not bound by the limitations of the photograph and am free to explore possibilities inherent within the process.

The work lives in the realm between abstraction and realism that seems to change according to the interaction of the viewer. On close examination, the paintings may seem to be just a series of random squares or rectangles, but as the viewer steps back, they morph into a recognizable image. This duality creates a space for the viewer to delve into the transition between the two “realities” and experience the big picture. In my view, the paintings share sensibilities with Impressionism, which is one of my favorite periods of art history.

It is my hope the work in this exhibit provides the viewer with a sense of place and time. As I embarked on this series, I also turned my lens on other locations such as Pittsburgh’s own Frick Park, a Katrina-ravaged Mississippi Gulf Coast, Niagra Falls and Indonesia to name of few. The world is a big place providing an endless source of beauty – it’s all in how you look at it.

Lizzy DeVita - Homographies

Single channel video installation.

02/01 - 04/07/2013   Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

Lizzy De Vita often uses the body or a text as the structural framework for an exploration. That is, the process not only begins and ends with bodies and/or words, but also resides within them for a time. On their own and through direct intervention, these structures are misread, abbreviated, multiplied, or (re)processed. Setting the parameters and abandoning the Self to a Process, De Vita allows layered, variable situations to emerge in time and space – often mesmeric, but dissonant. Where in these situations does meaning endure? Where does it fail, and where does it become something other?

The works for this show started with the love of a song: an abridged, traditional spiritual called “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” De Vita traveled to two different states in order to teach her mother’s mother and then her mother the song – which she, herself, had learned on YouTube. Then, she filmed them each separately, alone in their empty homes, singing it over and over – until they’d had enough. She shot her grandmother for eight hours in one day, her mother for four. Then she returned to her own home and shot herself singing the song for the combined time it had taken to shoot them.

The primary video in this show isolates the last takes from each long shoot, almost cruelly amputating the long, ritualized and deeply personal process behind its making. Sutured digitally, the video stages a multi-generational chorus of a tragic narrative – and a real performance of isolation, loss and love – against homogenizing white suburban décor.

David Bernabo & Emily Walley - This May Not Take That Long

A two-channel installation of larger than scale projections loop performed actions documented by the artists within a contained studio setting. Along with a two-channel audio set up, the projections resided directly across from one another on opposing gallery walls, filling the space with dynamic relationships echoed within the short performative vignettes.

02/01 - 04/07/2013   Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Statement:

David Bernabo and Emily Walley are an artist team focused on examining and defining the inner workings of the studio. This May Not Take That Long is a video piece that reflects on the process of creating collaborative artwork. The concept is not determined from the start, but derived from constant editing and reflection of the captured documentation. The audio track is a narration culled from edited conversations recorded during the creative process. The artists’ vulnerability is present in the voice-over as they discuss ideas for the final work. Despite contextual trickery, the piece attempts to be an honest, albeit absurd, portrayal of creating.