Exhibitions > Upcoming
Sandra Stephens Inside/Out
2x2 Collective: Ben Altman, Christine Heller, Maria Driscoll McMahon, Sandra Stephens
Main Gallery and New Media Room
March 10 - April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM
From nameless nudes to portraits of monarchs, the figure in art has served to codify power. So have art objects, splitting viewer from viewed. Our figures have agency. Our work empowers viewers as complicit participants, as centers of process and experience. We complicate and push against dichotomies and hierarchies: self/other, rural/urban, black/white, perpetrator/victim, family/stranger,
performer/observer.
We are a collaboration: four artists who met through NYFA’s MARK program. We quickly found common ground in our disparate uses of the figure at intersections of the social/political/personal.
Our collaboration will create interactive environments, inside Gallery Aferro and spilling out of the white box – into the surrounding neighborhood and over the internet. The show will evolve as visitors add/rearrange. The viewer will also become art maker with special rigs that allow them to reveal and rework aspects of the show.
Christine Heller of Cooperstown, NY is a painter and installation artist. Her anti-war installations, suspended shroud-like figures of cut, twisted, and knotted muslin and wire were shown at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and in Hudson and Troy, NY.
Maria Driscoll McMahon of Lockwood, NY explores rural stereotypes in her small town with wearable sculpture – body-suits of aggressive burdock burrs – video, and drawings.Venues: Brooklyn, Berlin, Binghamton.
Sandra Stephens of Utica, NY uses videos and video installations to explore internal and external constructions of identity. Her work has been exhibited in various locations including Utica, NY, the Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY, Madrid, Barcelona and Berlin.
Ben Altman of Ithaca, NY works with photographs. Recently he has combined political self-portraits with 3-D elements and assembled them into interactive installations. He has shown his work mainly in the Ithaca area.
The Other Ken Weathersby
Project Room
March 10 - April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM
Ken Weathersby’s exhibition includes easel-sized, patterned abstract paintings, photographic works, and several wall-mounted boxes containing tiny, crafted objects resembling miniature paintings.
The works in the show shuffle the traditional given stuff of pictures and picture-making. The paintings are subtly pulled apart, or have pieces cut out and removed, or their painted faces refuse to be seen. The wall-mounted boxes may be mere models for groupings of larger works, or may be works in themselves. This intentional ambiguity extends to photographs included in the show, paired portraits, where false resemblance and mistaken identity might seriously undermine what a profile picture is supposed to do.
In all these works there is a shuffling of the traditional given stuff of pictures and picture-making. The paintings are subtly pulled apart, or have pieces cut out and removed, or their painted faces refuse to be seen. The wall-mounted boxes are both models for groupings of larger works, and are works in themselves. This intentional ambiguity extends to photographs here too, where false resemblance and mistaken identity undermine what a profile picture is supposed to do.
Ken Weathersby's paintings were seen in 2011 in Time Is the Diamond, at Some Walls in Oakland, California, and a 2010 solo exhibition, Perfect Mismatch, at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. Group shows that exhibited his works in 2011 took place at the art galleries of the University of Maryland, Kent State University, University of Delaware, University of Dayton, and the College of St. Elizabeth. His paintings were shown in the National Academy of Art Museum’s 183rd Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of
Contemporary American Art in New York, and in the exhibition Continuing Color Abstraction at The Painting Center in New York. He is the recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts / New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a Gallery Aferro Studio Residency.
Weathersby received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has lived in or near New York City since 1990.
Ann LePore
Mapping for Empathy (The Landscape is Deadly)
Liminal Space
March 10 - April 14, 2012
Opening Reception March 10, 7-10 PM
Social activism, American history, and a love of technology and science collide in the exhibit Mapping For Empathy (The Landscape Is Deadly). I used to think that landscape images were innocuous, boring even, until I was 16 and had re- occurring nightmares about being trapped inside a Wyeth painting. Now during my research trips to historical societies, environmental research centers and
even aboard the research vessel SeaWolf, I keep one eye on the landscape, looking for correlations between my findings and their immediate natural surroundings.
I have been conducting historical research for the past few years at WWII POW sites in New York and New Jersey. At these locations I have examined photographs, recorded statements, and diaries or other ephemera from the prisoners at these camps and from residents of the communities that these camps were in. One of the highlights of this research is a piece of historical fiction from author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock about a camp where the prisoners and the townspeople worked together to save a flock of Scarlet Tanagers from a spring ice storm.
There are often subtle indicators in our landscape which can be interpreted to reveal what divides or unifies us. In the series Due North, I reflect on my time as an artist in residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin home in Wisconsin. While there I found myself a part of two communities at odds with each other: the utopian Fellowship made of up Mr. Wright’s apprentices and their architecture
school, and the nearby town of Spring Green, whose elders could still recall in great detail the unpaid debts and bad behavior Mr. Wright left in his wake. I couldn’t help but be influenced by this divide in the maps I created this past year which were made from interviews with Fellowship members and other videos I created during my stay.
With the Mapping Toxins series, a work in progress, I'm especially interested in how the landfills that are being closed impact the immediate surrounding area of the Meadowlands Environmental Center. In this project I use environmental data collected by MERI scientists and other researchers to create unusual maps. In some cases, the color keys or lack thereof obscure actual sensitive data,
which is still hinted at through the maps' titles and color associations.
Ann LePore (b.1974) was raised in the garage under her father's car and continued tinkering with analog video and kinetics in Western New York and later with computer- driven electronics and animation in New York City.
A New Leonardo artist (2003) and Geraldine R Dodge Foundation grant recipient, (2002) Ann has exhibited at events such as Digital Salon, the Free Biennial, and La Superette, in New York City and Internationally. She has completed residencies at Engine 27 Sound Space (2003), the Taliesin Artist Residency Program (2006, 2007) and was awarded a year-long studio residency at Gallery Aferro in Newark (2010-2011).
Recent projects include Metanoia, a three-story time-lapse projection of chrysalis hatching on the outside of the Museo de las Casas Reales in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Water Projector, an electronic device built project water on the outside of the Pequannock Gate in Newark, NJ, Expanding Animation, an exhibition of animation and interactive work curated for the Pascal Gallery at Ramapo College, and Due North, a large-scale projected video in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at Taliesin in Wisconsin.
The images and installations she creates as a result of her tinkering are heavily influenced by her experiences not just as an artist, but as a member of several communities that are defined by the physical assertions and limitations of a very specific environment.
Ann received her BFA from Alfred University and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently Assistant Professor of 3D Design and Animation at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
