Artist Statements from the
Mary Culbertson-Stark and Randie Snow...Mirror Play
June 2010 exhibit STATEMENT My forms are like successive layers of skin that I shed to mark the stages along my road. Magdalena Abakanowicz I first met Modigliani when I was nine. It was1962. In this chance meeting, he was resting on my mother’s coffee table in the front room of the little Mexican brick house we lived in on Alton Drive. I was sitting on the living room couch in the late afternoon when I picked up the oversized volume. I cracked it open, setting his spine on my lap. Out flowed a curious world of people with long necks, angular bodies, and averted gazes. As I thumbed through the pages, I was riveted. I was in love. I was going to be an artist. I was going to be a Modigliani. Fast forward to July 2009. I was at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. It was my first visit. I was meandering through the exhibit spaces minding the documentation of the lives of our nation’s most indigenous inhabitants. Turning a corner, I was drawn by a shock of bright color in a distant room. I arrived to find the contemporary gallery housing a retrospective of the works of Fritz Scholder. I drew a deep breath. Scholder’s work was not new to me. We had met in the 1970’s. Back then, I was slugging away in my artistic infancy at the University of South Carolina and Fritz was already making a stylish splash in the American Southwest. He never knew of his influence on me. I never got the chance to tell him. Over the years, he escaped my consciousness; like many an artist for whom I had harbored a crush. Yet, at that moment, in the darkened galleries, we were wildly reunited. I was enthralled with his angst. I fawned over his folding figures, his haunting faces, and his carefully crafted color fields. Through his brilliantly conceived compositional spaces, he was again larger than life and his work blazed before me beyond containment. I had again, fallen hard. The crosscurrents of artistic fermentation of years past began to rise. I returned to Pittsburgh. And after two years absence from the studio, I began to paint. As a teacher, there’s an adage, “one never knows where one’s influence ends.” Seeing Scholder’s work again reminded me I still had much more to say. But in order to say it, I had to do a little cosmic shedding. To shed literally means to pour forth. Not a pretty word, but one with a bounty of promise. My life to that date had become clouded with responsibility for which I perceived a fleeting control. But, I yielded to the cosmic call. And shedding soon became an evocative mistress and ultimately, the true provocateur of this series of images. This show is about loss, loyalty, love, intuition, guilt, remembrance and acceptance. To shed in order to move forward is a gift. How lucky I am to learn this. One might say I got my Modigliani back.STATEMENT I’ve been collecting things my entire life. A lot of them are seemingly innocuous, mundane little objects with no apparent meaning. But when I discovered assemblage, I instantly knew why all of these things had come into my life. Each of these objects is like a new friend—a friend that needs a new home, maybe some direction, and a new purpose. Often we meet during my everyday routine; they’re lying in the middle of the street, hiding in dark corners at flea markets, or cowering at the bottom of drawers in my house. It’s not always clear why we cross paths. It takes time for me to get to know them, and it takes a while for them to be comfortable with me. But when that mutual recognition happens, it’s powerful. Each one of them has a story, a history, and when the time is right, they tell me what they want to say. And so, instead of an artist, I've become a medium of sorts... helping them find their voice, and together, telling our newly discovered story. |
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| For More Information Contact: Ellen Chisdes Neuberg, Owner/Director GalleriE CHIZ 5831 Ellsworth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15232 Tel: 412-441-6005 FAX: 412-661-5662 Internet: galchiz@hotmail.com |
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