The Show Opens!

Feasting Eyes opened on Friday (Aug 29) on a perfectly beautiful evening when summer finally graced our region. The exhibit brought many of our friends from across the county border including a number of artists--both those in the show and those who wanted to come out and support their colleagues. Curator Jerry Mead even brought along packages of Skittles for artist James Paulsen to sign. A public tour with Mead takes place Saturday, Sept. 20 at 2:30pm and it promises to be fascinating. You really want to get the low-down on the video inside the refrigerator and what the story is behind Courtney Grim's 6 foot long photo of bacon. And it's free--come and join us!

Anatomy of An Exhibit, Part III: Making Sense of It

It's installation week for the Feasting Eyes exhibit. Our gallery space is challenging because it's a former residence and that means grouping works into some semblance of relationship and meaning. Curator Jerry Mead mulled over the possibilities and came up with a placement that has cohesiveness. As you enter the main doors, you're immediately confronted by a talking refrigerator that houses a video inside, two oversized paintings featuring Skittles packages and a trio of plastic containers on a pedestal. What connects them is the theme of packaging and what we know (and don't know) about what's in food. Step into the Living Room and the works are more recognizable--food in it's natural state, sans processing and additives. The Dining Room--the place next to the kitchen most associated with the ritual of eating--features traditional still lifes deftly and intricately painted by three local artists who, by anyone's estimation, are masters of the technique--John Yerger, Thomas Kegler and Coni Mennici. Here, food is glorified, even metaphorical. If you visit on Friday night when the exhibit opens, you'll spend a lot of time here as it's also where the food and wine are served.

The exhibit continues on the second floor where your first sight as you come up the winding staircase is of a larger-than-life photo of bacon slices by Courtney Grim. This space is given over to photographic imagery in which the artists play with scale, color and materials, using food as a subject. Take a left into the first of three bedrooms where you'll find another collection of photos that capture food's natural life cycle from farm to edible product to decay. Mixed media and assemblages are just across the hall, and are characterized by a sense of whimsy and a little ecopolitics. Finally, the last room holds some of the most thought-provoking pieces--a dining table of mixed parts and pieces, stark photos of fruit bearing the scars of surgical alteration, humorous takes on the ubiquitous take-out container, and another video focusing on what people eat.

Truly a buffet of visual intrigue.....come and see it! Feasting Eyes is on through October 5th.

Anatomy of an Exhibit, Part II

How the curator organizes a show and the common threads that unite the pieces are a thought process I doubt many gallery visitors get to glimpse. The curator's introduction tends to be the key illuminator, and I hope people take the time to read what a curator states about an exhibition as a prelude to seeing the work. A work taken out of context can be perplexing. You wonder what the artist is trying to say, or at worst, what was the curator thinking when they chose that piece? It would be like stepping mid-way into a movie and trying to understand why the characters all hated each other. So, following, is the intoduction to Feasting Eyes: Artists Take On Food by Gerald Mead: (then I strongly suggest you come and see the show so that the words take on meaning)

"The centuries spanning relationship between food and art has yielded artworks ranging from exquisitely rendered still lifes to conceptual works that address the multifarious roles that food and food products play in our lives. This exhibition consists of work by 23 established and emerging artists working in all media who have used food as reference in their artistic practice.

There are a number of artists in Western New York whose names have become synonymous with food themed work. These include photographer Biff Henrich who has used images of food and its consumption in various series over the years, Marion Faller, well known for her photo documents of cultural food displays, and A. J. Fries, widely recognized for his pop art inspired, vibrant paintings of pies and cakes. Fruit and vegetable use in the genre of still life is well represented through the exacting oil paintings of Thomas Kegler and John Yerger and luminous watercolors by Rita Argen Auerbach and Norine Spurling. The plastic fruit assemblages of Doreen DeBoth and whimsical ceramic works by Katherine Gullo share with Jackie Felix’s bold acrylic paintings an idiosyncratic, playful sensibility. In a related vein, Courtney Grim and James Paulsen use exaggerated scale to explore the commodification of food products. Michael Morgulis's digital scans of familiar (and some unfamiliar) foods, Priscilla Bowen’s atmospherically rendered drawings of root vegetables, Nancy Parisi’s artfully composed photographs and the delicate embroidered fiber “lettuce” sculptures by Barbara Murak all celebrate the textural beauty inherent in foods we often use in meal preparation. John Pfahl, through his iconic images of the compost pile, demonstrates that even the remnants of that preparation can be highly aesthetic.

Food's ability to function as a means of portraiture is a theme addressed in various ways by Coni Minneci, Kevin Charles Kline and Stefani Bardin. Minneci and Kline each use a single fruit as a “model.” Minneci’s pears in her A to Z Women Artists Series each represent the work/life of a single woman artist and Kline’s apples comment on human body image obsessions and related procedures such as abdominoplasty. Bardin’s “you are what you eat” thesis is expressed through her video portraits of individuals via the contents of their refrigerators, aptly projected from within an actual refrigerator.

Finally, Christy Rupp’s fictitious containers for genetically altered foods and Christopher Stangler’s fish paintings/assemblages both deal with serious environmental issues affecting what we eat, and sculptor Ryan Legassicke’s hybridized dining table (absent food) intersects the natural with the artificial and calls to mind the social aspects of food consumption.

Food is ubiquitous and contemporary artists continue to depict, define and interpret its nature and meaning. As a result, they offer unique commentaries on our visual and physical relationship with something we quite literally need to survive. "--Gerald Mead

Anatomy of an Exhibit, Part I

A year ago we began talking in-house about doing a food-themed exhibit. In part, it was a theme we felt people could relate to—who can’t understand food? Secondly, it was a relevant theme given the fact that Lockport is surrounded by farms and wineries.

We had an initial conversation with Jerry Mead who has curated exhibitions for years at the Burchfield Penney and now is teaching while exhibiting his work and curating exhibits in various locations around the area. Jerry threw out names of some artists he knew that had created series or collections of work that were food-themed such as John Yerger, Coni Mennici, Biff Henrich and Tom Kegler--his gorgeous traditional still lifes were shown here in March. Eventually, Mead narrowed his selection down to a list of twenty-three artists that gave us a broad range of media, styles, and perspectives. To see who they are, you can go to the Gallery page on the website.

This is the second time in recent years that Mead has guest curated a show for the Kenan Center. In 2007, he assisted us on what we frequently refer to as the “clay show,” more formally named “Extraordinary Forms.” It was an outstanding collection of work, and Jerry helped us narrow down the exhaustive list of potential artists by focusing on ceramic professors at a selection of Western New York colleges and universities plus the noted Sheridan School of Design in Ontario, Canada. This gave us an incredible collection of contemporary and traditional work, including a piece nearly the size of a small dinosaur by Alfred’s Chris Miller which had its own room.

This exhibit was intended to have the same eclectic and high quality feel. We mulled over the common phrase “feast for the eyes,” and Jerry gave it little twist that would suggest the two ways that artists approach food as a thematic—as subject and as experience—calling it “Feasting Eyes: Artists Take on Food.” The title suggests “a take” as being perspective and the way that artists respond to food as a theme as well as “taking on,” as meeting the challenge of translating their own relationship to food through an artistic medium. Food for the stomach; food for the brain. A nice place to start. By Elaine Harrigan, Marketing Director.

Niagara Frontier Art Exhibit, July 13

The Niagara Frontier Art Exhibit has been around at the Kenan Center for 39 years to showcase the newest works of artists in the greater Niagara region. Since becoming involved in binational tourism, we've come to understand that the "Niagara region" encompasses a much larger landscape that includes the Rochester area, which sits on Lake Ontario, and Southern Ontario which lies across the lake in Canada. This year we encouraged artists from these areas to apply and several from outside of Rochester are included in this show. The exhibition also became biennial this year--the next NFAE takes place in 2010, and we look forward to the new work we'll see in two years! Shown in the photo are some of this year's award winners including recent Alfred University grad Allison Wilton (2nd from left) who showed off her innovative "book art," that sports a cover done in latchhook, and pages that focus on emoticons--those funky icons we use in the virtual world of online communication but rarely think about as art. Allison received an Honorable Mention for her design selected by juror Nancy Weekly (Burchfield-Penney Art Center). Also shown, l to r: Christine Heuer Schnepf, Honorable Mention, Len Kagelmacher, Honorable Mention, and Walter Garver, Award of Excellence.