Wallace Gallery - Paradox of Constructed Nature: The Faculty Show 2020

Art exhibit flyer for Paradox of Constructed Nature: The Faculty Show 2020
Date
to
Location
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, Campus Center

 

The works of Liz Atz / Chris Bors / Jude Broughan / Ronnie Burrage / Michael Capobianco / Lizzy De Vita / Anthony Hamboussi  Hong Seon Jang / Maxine Montilus

February 6 –March 12, 2020
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury 

  • Opening Reception: Thursday, February 6, 2020, 4 – 7 p.m.;  Artist Talk: 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
  • Closing Reception with Musical Performance by RoBurrage Productions: Monday, March 9, 2020, 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery is pleased to announce “Paradox of Constructed Nature: The Faculty Show 2020,” with works by nine adjunct faculty members of the Visual Arts Department at SUNY Old Westbury. The title of the exhibition refers to the seeming contradictions and incongruities revealed in the constructed nature of these artists’ subjects and the materials. This impressive collection of works showcases the significant contribution these artists make to the Visual Arts Department and the role models they offer to our would-be artist students. Equally impressive is the diversity of these faculty members’ personal identities, as they represent multiple cultures, ethnicities, and countries of origin.
 
Liz Atz (Liz Atzberger)’s work evolved from her experimental interdisciplinary approach to process, material, and abstraction. She mines the materials of consumer culture to create painting, drawing, installation, and photography. Her recent work employs plastics, textiles, and other materials acquired from dollar stores and industrial sources. Industrial plastics arranged in repeated patterns become gestural, forming color clouds and spirals as they phase through states of order and disorder. Rather than simply employing an additive process, the works are marked by erasures, revisions, blind alleys, and spills that result from a painterly mode of working that uses uncertainty and doubt as its guiding principle. Atzberger was born in Columbus, Ohio, and holds a BFA from Ohio State University and an MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art. She has exhibited nationally and is a co-director and co-curator of AIRPLANE, an artist-run gallery space in Brooklyn. Atzberger teaches Introduction to Creative Thinking (Honors College) and Introduction to Color at SUNY Old Westbury. 

Chris Bors’ post-Pop conceptual paintings feature mash-ups of images in which anything visual is fair game for repurposing. He works with bold graphics and text, commenting on commodification, trash culture, and personal obsessions. His works are meticulously painted to resemble silkscreen prints or t-shirt graphics, and often deploy logos from hardcore punk rock bands and circles of color from children’s Paint-with-Water activity books. Bors incorporates drips of color that enliven the surface to create jarring contrasts that reference the stain paintings of 1950s and ‘60s Abstraction, while the juxtaposition of appropriated and original images mimics the tactics used in political messaging. Born in Ithaca, New York, Bors was educated at the University of Albany and RISD, and received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Bors had a solo show at Randall Scott Projects in Washington, D.C., and has exhibited at PS1 MoMA, White Columns, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. At SUNY Old Westbury, he teaches Introduction to Creative Thinking and Drawing. 

New Zealand-born, Brooklyn-based artist Jude Broughan presents three large loose-hanging works and two smaller mixed-media panels that reveal her interest in travel and its resultant instability of place. Broughan draws on the languages of painting and printmaking alongside those of photography and collage to play with space and form, line and color. Her photographs of things that signify travel and relocation (e.g., her grandmother’s travel coat or a heavy duty panel cart) are stitched to materials such as denim, vinyl, and canvas. Juxtaposing illusions of depth and reality with physicality and flat materiality is central practice to this artist. Broughan received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts nd an MFA from Hunter College, and is a 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient. She has had solo exhibitions at Marisa Newman Projects, Benrubi Galelry, and Calder and Lawson Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand. Broughan, who joined the department last semester, teaches Basic Design and Introduction to Creative Thinking.
 
Ronnie Burrage, MFAIA, drummer, artist, producer, and composer, has performed with Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, McCoy Tyner, Jackie McLean, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, and Archie Shepp among many other innovators of America's classical art from Jazz. Burrage has taught at Pennsylvania State University, and the University of the Arts, and presently teaches at CUNY Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and SUNY Old Westbury College where he teaches Music of Global Cultures and History of Jazz. A founding member of Men of Valor in St. Louis helping fathers of color to reintegrate into productive community building, Burrage is also CEO of the World Rhythm Academy, founder of RoBurrage Productions, and a board member of Global Youth Connect, which enables youth to study abroad. At the closing reception on March 9th, RoBurrage Productions will offer a live musical performance. 
 
An alumnus of SUNY Old Westbury, Michael Capobianco teaches Introduction to Creative Thinking and Drawing. He offers Hard, Shrunken, and Plush, a new series of mundane objects that have been crushed, coated, and condensed to be fossilized and preserved for future generations. These "trapped-in-amber" objects question the real and imagined relationship between the viewer and the artifacts of our shared cultural history. Reminiscent of, yet unlike, radical compression sculptures by César, a proponent of Nouveau Réalisme, Capobianco’s soft objects of childhood are compressed into hardened taxidermy, losing their essential nature. Following his career as an audio engineer and recording studio designer, Capobianco earned a BFA from our Visual Arts Department and an MFA from City College. In addition to teaching classes, Capobianco is the Department’s Visual Arts FabLab Manager.
 
Lizzy De Vita, an artist, writer, and educator who lives and works in Brooklyn, works in performance, text, sound, drawing, installation, video, and sculpture unified by her interest in “viral moments” where interpersonal boundaries are blurred. De Vita will present Edging (2015), a video of a manicurist painting the nails of a client in a scene that takes an unexpected turn to make the viewer re-examine the relationship between client and low-paid personal services worker. De Vita earned her BA in Art History and English Literature from Barnard College, and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. She has shown at NurtureArt, the Connelly Theater, the National Museum of the Moving Image, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Chimney, and the Invisible Dog. 
 
Brooklyn-born Egyptian-American Anthony Hamboussi teaches Introduction to Photography and Digital Imaging at SUNY Old Westbury. Hamboussi presents “Arab Republic of Egypt,” a photographic project documented in Egypt between 2009 and 2016. This series of street photographs was made within the framework of the “state of emergency” under which Egyptians have lived for most years since 1956. Government surveillance and military presence are signaled throughout Hamboussi’s work, reflecting the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms that create an environment of fear. Hamboussi has exhibited at Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, International Center of Photography, MoMA/PS1, Americas Society, Queens Museum, and SculptureCenter. He published Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York’s Industrial Waterway and Cairo Ring Road and co-authored What is Affordable Housing? and LIC in Context. Hamboussi has received grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts in Architecture, Planning, & Design. In 2019, he curated Our Land at Wallace Gallery, an exhibition presenting Arab artists based in or having ancestral ties to the MENA. 
 
Korean-born Hong Seon Jang, known for his sculptural installations, will present Ghost (2018), an ivory tusk in a Plexiglas box made of Ivory soap bars and a wooden pallet, representing the paradoxes of the marketplace: Ivory soap was once hard to obtain in Korea, so despite its low price in the US it was a black-market luxury item of the wealthy, and ivory tusks are very expensive as they are carved into religious artifacts despite the cruelty of illegal wildlife poaching. Pied Piper (2016) is an old police baton carved to create a musical flute representing the oppressive violence of authority, inspired by the artist’s memories of the 1980s protest against the South Korean military government. Jang received his MFA at Rochester Institute of Technology and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. A new faculty member, Jang will teach Drawing and Introduction to Creative Thinking. 
 
Maxine Montilus, a first-generation Haitian-American dancer and choreographer­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ from Brooklyn, founded MV Dance Project, which had its debut at Brooklyn Studios for Dance in 2019 with its first evening-length work "Strength in Spirit".  In 2014, Montilus choreographed BallyBeg Production's third play and Equity-approved showcase, "The Taste Of It," She was a 2015 nominee for Outstanding Choreography/Movement in The New York Innovative Theater Awards for her work in the production. In 2017, Montilus served as the Afro Cuban/Haitian Folklore consultant to choreographer Camille A. Brown for the Tony-winning musical “Once On This Island.” Montilus has a BFA in Modern Dance Performance from the University of the Arts, an MA in Arts Management from City University London, and an MA in Dance Education from Hunter College via the Lincoln Center Scholars program. She teaches Cultural Diverse Language of Dance at SUNY Old Westbury. For this exhibition, Boutiliers, a solo work choreographed and performed by Montilus at Gelsey Kirkland Academy in June 2016 as part of Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE's New Traditions Showcase, will be screened.
 
Gallery Hours:
Mondays – Fridays: 12pm – 5pm, and by appointment.
 
Location: 
Campus Center, Main Level
SUNY College at Old Westbury
Route 107, Old Westbury, NY 11568
  
Contact Info:
Director: Hyewon Yi, Ph.D. 516-876-2709/3056
yih@oldwestbury.edu.

 

About the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery:
The Gallery was formally dedicated to Amelie Alexanderson Wallace on May 22, 1979, in recognition of her unflagging support of the College and her personal commitment to the arts at Old Westbury. The Gallery exhibits Contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists, as well as works by faculty and students of the Visual Arts Department. Public programs designed to accompany exhibitions comprise lectures and discussions led by artists and curators, as well as live performances and video presentations.