May 1 - May 29, 2005

The use of cast-off materials and the sensitivity these artists have towards the cultural and environmental landscapes calls us to question the relationship between the industrial and the natural, consumption and waste, creation and destruction.

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		JOAN BANKEMPER is a cultivar of community-based art gardens that are often filled with healing herb plants and her unique birdhouses. In the gallery, her garden-inspired shard vases incorporate ceramic flowers, birds, kitsch figurines and teapots. Exuberant and colorful, these vases bring to mind the fertile and overabundant, late-summer garden. Bankemper thinks of each vase as having a unique narrative that is often related to the ideas of growth, spirituality, and change. A story might also be sparked by the found objects she incorporates into the sculpture such as a collection of teapot lids she found in an antique shop, originally excavated from latrines in rural New York (Lotus Woman With Teapot Lids, 2004).
		DEBORAH BRACKENBURY searches for delicate thrift shop china that serves to hold and memorialize images of the natural world. Her commemorative plate series, Forbidden Mourning and Wannabes reference what is the most final, and for many the most difficult of transformations. Brackenbury states "I am concerned with the ways people deal with the conflict and confusion they feel toward death - their desire to keep the dead alive but at the same time to push death away." She explores ways that we "preserve the subject" such as in natural history displays, taxidermy and photography. The photographic images are transferred either by light-sensitive emulsion or decal onto the plates. The results are the delicate, surprising, often ironic and sometimes frightening.
		JOSEPH FUCIGNA has long been using industrial and recycled materials such as rubber inner tubes, scrap metal and aluminum printing plates. His rubber sculptures are made from black rubber inner tubes that are sliced open and draped from wooden or metal supports, creating elegant, provocative abstractions that play with dualities such as soft/rigid and inside/outside. Fucigna says, "I look for formal qualities in ordinary material we see but overlook everyday. Some of my sculptures humorously represent the figure; others are conceptual landscapes symbolizing community. All come from my examination of the human condition."
		DEBORAH HESSE has created an installation that seems to grow on the wall. The artist uses a variety of unusual materials such as her own hair, wire, plastic tubing and discarded industrial oddities to create odd hybrid-organic looking environments. An important element in her piece, Landscape Vignette, is the use of light to create shadows and a deeper dimensionality to the work. It is not always clear whether a shape is a delicate drawing upon the wall or a wispy shadow. The careful use of light /shadow, the translucent quality of the paper she uses and the combination of flatness and shape in space has resulted in a complex dialogue pertaining to growth, materiality and the ethereal.
		JUDY HOFFMAN collects materials from city streets, beaches and woods for her complex created "ecosystems". The act of gathering is in itself a creative process for her in that she works intuitively, looking first at the shape, line and color of the piece. Concurrent with the gathering of found materials, Hoffman makes her own paper from the tough and resilient abaca fiber. The texture and form of the paper can be altered depending on the amount of time the fibers are processed and the way pulp is formed to dry. The final collaboration of often skin-like paper and found materials embodies many references to the natural world - sea plants, jellyfish, and seedpods ready to burst. In her installation, Off Spring II Hoffman has transformed our leftovers, creating a wild, visual playground underscored with cultural oddities and subtle humor.
		KATHLEEN HOLMES comes from a long line of Southern women who created needlework. Referencing this family tradition, she searches second hand shops and auctions for pieces of crochet and embroidered work that she then uses to create iconic, witty dress form sculptures. The incorporation of found objects such as a metal pudding mold intentionally evokes the domesticated space. Other dress forms humorously reference female stereotypes (Fast Girl, 1998) while others are portraits of specific women the artist has known. Holmes plays with gender stereotypes as well, combining female handcraft with industrial metal and rusted remnants, most often associated with the male.
		JANE MILLER is exhibiting a collection of sticks, all of which were found and then altered. These were ordinary sticks that might have been found lying along a path or attached to a shovel, a mop or a broom. They were once useful as a tree limb or as a post or a handle, each with a unique history and a different story. Miller imagines what they once were and she creates stories imagining the past and informing the present. The sticks are wrapped, swathed, painted, extended and carved into quite extraordinary objects, far removed from their original (found) state. Sticks is an ongoing project; while some individual pieces have been sold or given away, new ones are created. Miller states, "The story is changeable, like history and it is rewritten continually".
		SARAH HOLLIS PERRY utilizes traditional handcraft methods associated with women's work such as weaving, knitting and sewing. She investigates issues of consumption and waste generation in an ironic, yet endearing way. For the series Tree Sweaters she has collected newspaper daily home delivery bags that she then re-uses to knit plastic sweaters that wrap and enclose the limbs of a tree. This humanizing gesture suggests protection of the tree, while reminding us that from the tree comes the paper on which we print the news, which is then delivered in the plastic bags from which she knits her tree sweaters. Here the normal course of production is skewed just enough to make strange the familiar, surprising the viewer into taking a second look.
		DONNA RUFF writes that her "work expands on the book as an object and as a container of ideas. It is meant to suggest bodies, landscapes, sacred spaces; what can be read and what is unreadable; what we bring to the act of reading and how we internalize words. Words (as are the pages on which they are printed) come into being, become part of the discourse, and are circulated. They also age, become archaic, and are eliminated from common usage." Ruff grew up spending time in her grandparents' scrap paper business where books were deposited, pages slashed and sold by the pound as scrap paper. She likes to think of her works as elegies; they resonate with memories unknown, aesthetically interpreted anew.
		Wonderful Life by STEVEN SIEGEL is a series of sculptures that are ordered in alphabetical sequence, with two pieces for each letter. The named titles are gendered, such as Pam,2005 and Peter, 2005. Siegel has dedicated the series to the life and work of scientist Stephen Jay Gould, and sites evolutionary theory and the idea of the "primordial soup" as a basis for the work (how does form/life evolve?). Using materials such as twine, polyester, beads, yarn, wire and string the artist will have fifty-two pieces in Wonderful Life when it is complete in a few years from now. He states "the series is meant to be linear and cyclical at the same time... things move forward, but other things - pattern, form, technique - get recycled." The sculptures are pod-like, multi-layered forms that subtlety shift shape while maintaining a dialogue from one to the other.
		RACHEL PERRY WELTY uses cash register receipts, twist-ties, grocery lists, medical charts and other artifacts of the mundane and overlooked to create her wry sophisticated art. Interested in "the arbitrary nature of language" the artists states that she explores "letterforms, symbols, and jargon, particularly as represented in the ephemerae which passes through and accounts for my life." In the installation dailybread, 2004 the artist has used seven years of collected bread tags from her kitchen that she has arranged on the gallery wall in a grid of "sell by" dates. Welty explains that "through ritual and repetition I collect, accumulate, and re-present the forgotten reminders of consumption. These leftovers form a language of modern life."