Seven: Out of the World ::

Opening Reception:
October 12th, 2008, 1-4pm

curated by Daly Flanagan and Lynn Stein
October 12 - December 21, 2008

Seven: Out of the World, an exhibition of contemporary artists whose work focuses on the unconscious mind and alternative realities. The participating artists are: Gabe Brown, Richard Deon, Michael Lucero, Portia Munson, Charlotte Schulz, Glynis Sweeney and Ruth Waldman. Seven is RoCA's biannual exhibition, celebrating the artists who live and work in the Hudson Valley region, curated by Daly Flanagan and Lynn Stein.

While these artists may not necessarily consider themselves surrealists, their ideas and motives can be compared to the surrealists' intent of connecting to the subconscious mind and challenging our preconceptions of reality. They use irony and surprise in their work, allowing viewers to see what is beyond the ordinary.

The participating artists are:
Charlotte Schulz, Portia Munson, Michael Lucero, Ruth Waldman, Richard Deon, Gabe Brown, Glynis Sweeny.

Charlotte Schulz ::
"Forgiving of an Inexactness" 2007, 55" x 120", charcoal on paper.

Charlotte Schulz's (Cold Spring) large-scale, intricate charcoal drawings construct a melancholic world, illuminated by foreboding light and weather. Informed by extensive reading and an encyclopedic collection of images of cities, houses, and events, she gradually evolves her narratives as she works, incorporating and transforming sad or haunting private memories and larger world events, such as 9/11 or the assassination of Martin Luther King. Architectural vignettes are interwoven into expansive, enfolded spaces (sometimes the paper is actually folded) inspired by the spatial strategies of Chinese landscape painting.

A world is created where a plane flies through a room, a sheep stands elevated on a platform, a book gives off vapor, and a city lies on a stretched piece of cloth.

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Portia Munson ::
"The Garden", installation

Portia Munson's(Catskill) large-scale installation entitled The Garden is made up of thousands of mass-produced garden related objects, resulting in an full-throttle sensory experience.

The carefully collected objects in this dense installation are transformed into a fantastical, suffocating visual environment that reflects on our manufactured perceptions of beauty and nature. Munson uses as her resource the refuse of consumer culture that eventually ends up in landfills.

The Garden, like other installations by Portia Munson, initiates a dialogue into who we are as a culture, as defined by the objects we mass-produce, consume and throw-away.

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Michael Lucero ::

Michael Lucero's (Nyack) ceramic sculptures bring surrealism into three dimensions. Lucero combines production pottery and found objects with his own ceramic work to create sculptures that borrows from the history of art and various cultures. Using objects, like a horse or a house as a head on top a garden statue in combination with detailed underglaze painting, Lucero's final work:"comes with its own set of information and meaning.

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Richard Deon ::
"Reseller" 2006, 77.5" x 96", acrylic on canvas

"In many ways, an artist or storyteller is not much different. I have a predilection for infusing social issues with a personal perspective, along with an intense use of color and a bold graphic drawing style. I'll reuse characters from old history textbooks and refabricate history as it was not told. By shuffling and enfolding scholastic imagery into ordinary, everyday and oddly mundane situations, my work travels between absurdity, commentary, and high art."

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Glynis Sweeny ::

Glynis Sweeny (Nyack) is an illustrator and caricaturist, who is known for lampooning political and business figures in weekly news magazines. She uses sharp angles and overemphasized curved lines to create cartoon-realist illustrations. Many of her illustrations portray the human experience through images of our own time and myths of the past; giving us a new, and often ironic, look into the human condition.

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Rockland Center for the Arts (RoCA) gratefully acknowledges support from the Arts Fund for Rockland, a project of the Arts Council of Rockland, as well as the County of Rockland, the Town of Clarkstown, NY Council for the Humanities, Orange & Rockland Utilities, 1-866-I Don't Know, Center Members and Donors.