News Release
December 2000
Payne
Gallery’s holiday show includes works made with, among other things,
nail polish, flocking, magnets, and korectype-materials any of us can
find "at hand." These are also some of the materials that
art education majors at Moravian College use as they learn to demystify
art and privilege creativity.
The materials and methods of the professional painters
and sculptors in this exhibition – Katrin Grotepass, Victoria
Palermo, Michael Rodriguez, and Sidney Tillim – range from the
traditional to the experimental and back again. These artists choose
to invest in immediacy and risk our understanding by creating fine art
with ordinary materials; then, and seemingly without angst, they can
recross the very same media boundaries that they’ve just transgressed,
and work traditionally.
Regardless of materials or methods, what’s really
at hand is creativity and what’s up for grabs are our assumptions
about art. Enjoy!
Katrin Grotepass, sculptor: I am attracted to my materials
– magnets, poured ink, graphite, clear plastic, translucent paper,
wax – because they enable me to achieve a specific kind of gravity
and lightness.
Victoria Palermo, sculptor: A sense of play in the studio
helps me to discover new possibilities for materials and how to use
them. What I choose, be it nail polish, rubber or living matter, is
often essential to the idea of the piece. It is never incidental.
Michael Rodriguez, painter: When I started to use flocking
I was using Golden Matte acrylics on a very smooth illustrators’
canvas, and I found the velvet quality of the flocking related beautifully
to the soft matte of the paint surface. There was also this irresistible
pop reference to the black-velvet black-light posters of my childhood.
My work has always been driven by materiality.
Sidney Tillim, painter: Korectype appeals to me as a medium
because it is both mechanical and manual at once. With it one makes
a mark that is personal and impersonal – surprising and finished,
a unique copy in fact.
Payne Gallery is located in the Priscilla Payne Hurd Center
for Music and Art, on the Church Street Campus of Moravian College,
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The Gallery is open 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
daily, except Mondays, major holidays and during school breaks. At intercession
Payne Gallery will be closed 21 December 2000 to 9 January 2001.
Bethlehem is sixty miles north of Philadelphia and ninety
miles west of New York City. Contact: Art Department Office 610-861-1680.
