UnSmoke Systems Artspace

An exhibition of new paintings by Ange Gagnon

About the Artist:
Ange Gagnon is a rustbelt sweetheart who has been obsessed with ghost signs, peeling wallpaper, chipping paint and the stories behind them her entire life. 

With an original background in ceramics, she quickly realized that glazes weren’t the desired finish she wanted for her sculptures. She abandoned clay and started salvaging all of the boards and canvas she could find to start painting. 

She’s been compiling layers of acrylic and paper into paintings ever since. Remembering all of her rustbelt favorites, these elements often make their way into her finished pieces.

Opening reception: Saturday, July 20th from 6-9pm - free and open to all

Uncovered will be on display at Unsmoke through August, 2024 - viewings by appointment at Unsmoke@gmail.com

A two person exhibition of new work and collaborations by Rachel McFarlane David and John Lee, whose art is known by Clohn Art

More Heat Than Light examines the balance, or perhaps more accurately, the imbalance between light and heat. Society has shifted value of these qualities throughout time. For those dependent on fire for warmth or cooking, heat over light is treasured. However, as a torch, to show the way, light from fire far exceeds heat in value. A perfect light bulb, in fact, would generate pure light with no heat. Heat, in this sense, is the result of impurity, of waste. Rachel and John’s art forces into the light the inevitable heat of art and human nature in this world. While striving for perfect, efficient light may seem the goal, this show reveals the beauty and necessity of embracing imperfections and accepting more heat than light. Rachel’s pieces here have literally relied upon scorching heat in their creation.

John and Rachel, at first glance, may appear to be unlikely collaborators with their art methods in stark contrast. Rachel's intricate, disciplined patterns using pyrography with paints or inks versus John’s acrylic creations with thick, bold, unpredictable strokes and humanized animals. However, as with their other two shows, Follow the Brush and Honest Collusions, once their art is together, obvious connections arise. Using found, scavenged materials as their foundation, they both bring forth unexpected, often whimsical, scenes which transform items that had been considered waste, discarded by-products of our society. They both allow the original material to provide color or shape to the art, offering redemption to this waste. Unexpected color combinations add joy to the works. Their collaborations display the struggling balance of heat and light, perfection and imperfection both in art, between humans, and the world around us. Sometimes that which we see as more heat than light, far from perfection, is the start of a beautiful creation.

About the Artists:
Rachel McFarlane David works on repurposed wood that she finds, thrifts, and scavenges. After cutting and resurfacing the wood, She hand-burns original images onto these pieces with a pyrography tool, often adding bright paints or inks to the surfaces and then adding hardware to the work.

She lives and works in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where she is constantly on the hunt for used wood. Although she studied printmaking and glass at OSU, she began focusing on pyrography (wood-burning) in 2018. She loves cutting, hand-burning and painting images into wood that she’s found, and is delighted in the process of transforming unwanted or unused wood into intricate wall hangings and ornaments. She also enjoys drawing and painting with inks and watercolors. Her artwork can be seen at juried art festivals and shows in central Ohio and beyond.

John Lee does not consider himself self-taught despite not having a university arts education. Over the years, he has left over a thousand cardboard ClohnArt pieces “free for the taking” in various public spaces including the Bilbo Baggins Hobbit house in New Zealand, the house of the Dalai Lama in Nepal, and next to Rembrandts in various museums. He has drawn and painted over 6000 such pieces of ClohnArt.

Even as a kid, John enjoyed art, imagining and creating new things. He and a friend founded ClohnArt in the late 1990’s. He branched out on his own with a separate studio in 2008. His first professional art festival was in 2013, as an Emerging Artist at Three Rivers Art Festival in Pittsburgh. In 2014, John received the emerging artist second year award at Three River and participates in several art festivals annually. He became a member of the Artist Association of Pittsburgh in 2019.

Opening Reception: Saturday May 11th, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

A new 10 channel digital video installation by Sarah Katherine Moore

Artist Statement:
”I always looked at the vast landscapes of the American West from a clinical distance — as featureless metaphors, really. Then I moved to Pittsburgh, where the sky closes in on you across narrow ridges and valleys, and broad landscapes are harder to find. Smaller bursts of nature became a part of my life — micro doses of browns and greens.”

”My interest in the Pittsburgh bioregion began when my husband and I bought a house across the street from Churchill Valley Greenway. This 150-acre site was a private golf course for nearly a century. The golf course, like many others across the country, closed. The space was allowed to revert back to nature. Then in 2021, the Allegheny Land Trust bought the greenway, permanently protecting it for the public and allowing it to remain untouched and undeveloped.”

”I walk in the greenway every day. This has changed my relationship with landscapes and the ecosystems within landscapes. I pay more attention to the natural world, noticing intricate details and new forms. The greenway gives me a chance to see landscapes as places — places I live among, full of tiny details, small enough to comprehend, but rich enough to get lost in.”

”Through a series of videos and the physical installation of the UnSmoke space, I have recreated a version of my greenway for you. Depending on when you enter the space and how long you stay, you will notice different things. I hope you enjoy spending a day in the greenway as much as I do.”
- Sarah Moore

About the Artist:
Sarah Katherine Moore is a video artist, born and raised in South Dakota. She received her BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Montana. Sarah is interested in landscapes and memories -- how they form, morph, and can disappear. Her photography and video works have been shown across the country and internationally -- particularly in spaces she can transform into immersive video installations. Sarah currently lives across from a 150-acre greenway with her husband and two dogs in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Film & Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches film production classes.
http://www.sarahkatherinemoore.com/

Opening Reception: April 6th, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Open hours: April 13, 17, 20, & 24, 1-3pm

Buff started as a message on Instagram from Lenore to Ivette: “I love these photographs, I want to print on them!”  While it took them a few years to actually start the project, this quick message turned into their second collaboration. The work is about conversations: ones that Ivette has with the environment, buildings, and painted out graffiti buffs as she walks throughout the city; conversations Lenore has with Ivette’s photographs, color, patterns, light, scale, collage; and conversations we have with one another while making the work. The resulting unique mixed media pieces are the material result of these exchanges. They invite viewers to see the buffs as something like a found color field painting that has been removed from its original context and then physically and conceptually extended through material interventions.

Buff explores and challenges our perceived categories of masculine vs. feminine. The spaces are often abandoned or industrial, associated with masculine work, and the Buff pieces have decorative, and what are historically considered more feminine media - sewing, and patterning.  Buff allows these associations to intersect, creating subtle tensions that draw attention to these gendering practices. Buff also highlights the way that the space bears the traces of those who inhabit and pass through it; by commenting on it, they reimagine and insert themselves into that space.
@bufffoto

Opening reception - Friday, Sept. 8, 6-9pm
Free and open to all
On display through late October by appointment only

About the Artists:
Lenore Thomas
Thomas is an artist, friend, partner, sister, aunt, teacher and lover of puppies who is working on being more vulnerable in order to get the most out of life. If she isn’t in the studio, teaching, or doing dreaded paperwork – you will find her traveling, learning new hobbies, spending time with friends, her dog Kenobi, buying art (a very good/bad habit!), watching movies or trashy shows on Netflix and of course watching puppy videos. Her current solo work reflects on grief and the messy feelings we experience and finding moments of beauty tucked in between what feels like conflicting emotions. Since 2015 Thomas has worked with collaborator Ivette Spradlin under the name Buff. With three different projects, the duo has been in national exhibitions, screenings and publications and are working on upcoming solo exhibitions in 2023. Thomas received her MFA in Fine Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BA’s in Religious Studies and Fine Art from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Studio Arts. But let’s face it – trashy Netflix shows, and puppy videos are so much more fun to talk about!
@crunchshark

Ivette Spradlin
Spradlin is an award winning, Cuban-American artist whose work centers around the emotional aspects of transition, adaptation and communal ties. She holds a MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BFA from the University of Georgia. Since the 1990’s she has photographed and recorded the stories of members of different subcultures and their environs, such as punks and skateboarders, Cuban exiles in the United States, female-identifying artists, elderly jazz musicians in Pittsburgh, those who have experienced a Bigfoot sighting and her friends and neighbors during the 2020 lockdown.  In 2015, Spradlin and Lenore Thomas formed a collaborative team called Buff.  Buff has created three bodies of work, shown in several exhibitions and publications, and is currently working on a new body of installation work for a solo exhibition at Seton Hill University that opens in September. 

Spradlin has shown her work nationally and internationally,and has taught photography and art at colleges and universities in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, including Carnegie Mellon University for the last eleven years. In addition to the Buff exhibition at Seton Hill, Spradlin will have a solo exhibition during Foto Focus in Cincinnati this October. She recently relocated back to the Atlanta area where she is working on an oral history project, reconnecting with her former punk community, taking long night walks, and enjoying being an aunt. 
@evieknevie

Wet Squelching on the Dancefloor by is an exhibition of new work by Kenneth Nicholson

With this series of paintings, drawings, and etchings Nicholson explores his fascination with the human body by disassembling and reanimating it via the process of collage. The additional step of drawing and painting this cut-up collection of images allows him to indulge in the gap between initial fragmentation and completion. In this stage, new suggestions emerge from the collision of images, creating compositional and descriptive possibilities for Kenneth to follow. A rhythmic push and pull develops as he digs back into the surface and erases or scratches off layers of rendered form, leaving areas more static, and ghost-like. The end result is uncanny imagery both viscerally familiar and unsettling.

About the Artist:
Born in Latrobe Pennsylvania, Kenneth Nicholson received his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016, BFA from Seton Hill University in 2014, and his AFA from Westmoreland County Community College in 2010. He currently teaches as an adjunct instructor at University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Seton Hill University, and Westmoreland County Community College. His work has been exhibited in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Ohio, Washington DC, New Jersey, and New York.
https://kennethnicholsonart.com/about

Opening reception: Thursday, July 8, 6-9pm.
Free and open to all.

Wet Squelching on the Dancefloor on display through July by appointment only by emailing unsmoke@gmail.com

re·fu·gi·um
noun
an area in which a population of organisms can survive through a period of unfavorable conditions
 
Frick Park was once the private estate of Henry Clay Frick, industrialist and robber baron, who donated the land – or gave it back – to the city of Pittsburgh, apparently reluctantly, on his death in 1919. They say you can still see the outlines of the tees and fairways of his golf course in the fields below Beechwood Boulevard. Nowadays, Frick Park is still a playground, of sorts, only not private. Frick Park today is a community space. It is a woodland and a wetland; it is playing fields and bike trails. It is a refuge from urban living, and a home for wildlife. Frick Park is one square mile, rolling downhill from Squirrel Hill to Regent Square, and south from Point Breeze to Swissvale. As a place of recreation and refuge, it is not unlike many urban parks across the United States. And, as Pittsburghers will tell you, it is unique.
 
Like many people in the spring of 2020, as conditions were becoming increasingly unfavorable, I found myself, unexpectedly, with time to spare. Much of that time I spent in Frick Park, which became a kind of refuge from the turmoil of the world outside. Though I had thought I was fairly familiar with it, over the months and then years that followed, the park offered a series of frequent, small revelations; a continually changing landscape, simultaneously predictable and surprising, delicate and overbearing, managed and wild. The photographs in this exhibit represent at least a partial reflection of my experience of the park as it continues to unfold. I suspect it will never end, but here is where I am right now.

About the Artist:
Brian Cohen is a Pittsburgh-based photographer and teacher, specializing in documentary and editorial photography. Brian studied at the Royal College of Art, where he earned his Master’s degree in photography. He is the founder and director of The Documentary Works (TDW), an ad hoc collaborative project bringing together photographers, designers, and other creative people who wish to create justice-oriented photographic content.

Brian spends most of his time in Frick Park, returning occasionally to his home in Squirrel Hill.

Opening reception: Thursday, June 15, 5-8pm.
Free and open to all.

Refugium on display through June by appointment only by emailing unsmoke@gmail.com

Art-i-Facts of a Wonderful Life in Art

How does one transmit the depth and commitment of a person dedicated to exploring life through art and living it fully?

How does one do this by putting a bunch of art-i-facts from the person’s life in a room? The hope is that this exhibition begins to answer these questions. We shall see.

May what we present here begin to give you a sense of the life full of wonder that was the life of Bruce Breland.

About the Artist:
Bruce Breland, 1924-2014, was an artist and teacher who made stuff from the late 1940’s thru the aughts. Breland found inspiration in basically everything. The breadth of his curiosity is reflected in the thousands of 35mm color slides he made. There are images of flowers, decaying buildings, gravestones, airplanes, custom painted hot rods and motorcycles, street scenes, boats, landscapes, city-scapes, water, factories, trees, other artist’s works, television images, clouds, country music artists, semi-trucks, and helicopters amongst other myriad subjects.

Breland’s extraordinary curiosity is further evident in the ephemera he gathered. The candy wrappers, coins, stamps, wind-up toys, political buttons, tree branches, rocks, model airplanes, glass insulators, toy cars, rubber stamps, antique boxes, brass buttons, plastic mesh, yo-yos, lenticular materials, colored rope, baseball cards, movable wooden type, glass marbles, styrofoam packaging, ball bearings, African art, antique glass bottles, antique soda bottles, balloons, cans of spray paint, inflatable objects, music (CDs, cassettes, reel-to-reel tape, vinyl), empty coffee creamer containers, bottle lids, driftwood, antique photographs, packaging printer’s color blocks, and books, so many books.

His formal teaching career began in 1950 as the head of the Department of Industrial Design at the Kansas City Art Institute and concluded in 1991 at Carnegie Mellon University where he created the video art department as well as other courses that explored “time arts." It was at CMU he formed The Digital Art Exchange, also known as The DAX Group. DAX was a collection of engineers, artists, and other like-minded people who explored technological methods of collaborating with other artists in “real time"on a global scale before there was the World Wide Web.

Breland was an interdisciplinary artist of exceptional skill and craftsmanship whose work included painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic design, industrial design, sound, collage, jewelry, furniture, photography, film, documentary film, video, and pioneering pre-internet electronic image exchange.

This last category of work led to his invitation to the 1986 Venice Biennale.

Opening reception: Friday, May 5, 5-8pm
Exhibition on display by appointment through the month of May

Burnout is a two person exhibition of new work by Ashley A. Jones and Brandon McDonald.

Opening reception Saturday, April 8th, 5-8pm. Free and open to all. On display through the month of April by appointment only.

’Burnout’ is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress.

In today's society, we constantly feel the need to do more to make progress in our lives. Because of this, we feel worn down and "burnt out" and we react to this feeling in several ways. Brandon McDonald and Ashley A. Jones have come together to show their visual interpretation and perspective on what "Burnout" means to them. The series of artworks in this exhibition show people the physical and mental representation of burning out. In addition, this exhibition showcases a variety of mediums and techniques to convey the feelings of fatigue, frustration, and emptiness that come with the feeling of burnout. Everyone has a different threshold for handling everyday life stressors and this exhibition speaks to the widespread issue of burnout in today's society.

About the Artists:
Brandon McDonald is a visual artist working out of southwestern Pennsylvania. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with a focus in Drawing and minor in Woodworking. Using mostly graphite and charcoal for the majority of his work, Brandon uses a variety of drawing materials and tools to create life-like representations of the figure and portrait to convey his thoughts and ideas to the viewer.

Ashley A. Jones is a mixed-media visual artist and educator, best known for her illustrations and portraits which have evolved to speak to the histories and contemporary challenges of Black identity in America. Jones’s identity as an educator directly shapes her practice as she uses her work to incorporate personal experiences of her own and the experiences of other African Americans while also demonstrating the intersection of art and education. Jones’s goal is to create an artistic representation to honor and tell the stories of people that have often been ignored and marginalized and to offer a different visual perspective of Black life.

Jones is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a BA in studio art from Central State University in Ohio and an MFA in drawing from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She served as an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts and the Director of the Kipp Gallery. Jones is a faculty member at St. Edmund’s Academy in Pittsburgh. Her art has been featured and exhibited nationally and internationally in various galleries, museums, and traveling exhibits and held in numerous collections. Jones’s artwork and continued research on identity and colorism in the African American community have been reviewed and recognized in several publications.

Run of the Mill is a two person show of new work by artists Jason LaCroix and Matthew Van Asselt.

Run of the Mill presents ordinary, domestic scenes and landscapes. Views from porches, from kitchen and car windows, from daily rituals and of the places traveled to. The artists have made monuments out of fast food signs and window frames, and celebrities out of houseplants and pets. There is a warm, palpable joy in the rendering of objects in these spaces. They both seek to capture fleeting lighting or a fleeting event, rendered quickly with brush and paint by Jason or photographed for future translations and layering through screen printing by Matt. Art making in this way is a celebration of the mundane. By exploring the ordinary what, they work to reveal the extraordinary how and why.

About the Artists:
Jason LaCroix was born in 1979 in rural Massachusetts. After receiving his BFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2002, he taught printmaking classes at Red Horse Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason moved to Pittsburgh, Pa in 2008. His painting subjects alternate between geometric abstraction and observational representation. Jason has been featured on Radiolab’s 2012 episode “Colors”, and has shown his work at the Boston Center for the Arts and Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, Ma., Bertrand Productions Gallery in Philadelphia, Pa., and at SPACE and ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pa. He lives and works in Penn Hills with his wife, children and dog.
@jdlacroix

Matthew Van Asselt lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, where he co-founded Pullproof Studio, a community silkscreen studio. He received his BFA in printmaking from Purchase College, SUNY. Matthew has shown work at International Print Center New York, Planthouse, NY, the New York State Museum, and locally at 707 Gallery, and more. He has work in the collection of the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. He has attended residencies in Vancouver, Canada, and Grinnel, Iowa and has had work published by Fourth Estate.
@mvanasselt

Opening reception: Saturday, October 1st 6-9pm.
This event is free and open to all.

The exhibition will be available for viewing by appointment at unsmoke@gmail.com through October, 2022.
Additional open hours to be posted as scheduled.

Bound by Blight is an exhibition of new work by Nathan Van Patter about the areas surrounding the 15104 zip code. Constructed over three years with wood pieces, plumbers glue, caulking, and acrylic paint, the paintings are an attempt by the artist to depict North Braddock and Braddock on a quasi-cosmic scale. The work features a wide range of subjects including abandoned houses, Mon Valley residents, spaceships composed of local buildings, the apocalypse happening over an abandoned church, a blight monster eating a chess board, and a wooden ship with blooming trees for sails. The show is a hopeful meditation on the strange present and potential future of a disinvested area.

About the Artist:
Nathan Van Patter is a self trained artist who moved to North Braddock in 2018. Nathan has developed a style of making “paintings” through building them with easily accessed materials. The painting techniques Nathan uses have been developed in part by trying to reverse engineer the dynamic elements of great paintings with materials purchased at Home Depot. The artist’s style is a consequence of experimentation heavily influenced by post impressionism and comic books. The themes of his paintings often revolve around the beauty of urban decay; more and more frequently fantastic elements are present as attempts at representing the psychological and spiritual. Nathan loves living in North Braddock and believes a sense of place is essential to art- that the way to shared experience is through specificity.

Opening reception: Saturday, August 6, 6-9pm
Exhibition on display by appointment through August 28

Bag Lunch is a group show, organized by Helen Jones, featuring eight non-Texan artists recently or currently residing in Texas, who, with some awkwardness, traversed solitary habits to get know each other's work over the last two restless years. The artists take Unsmoke’s gallery—a former auditorium in a repurposed school building—as a jumping-off point to reflect on their wide-ranging practices. Through gestures, both tender and unruly, they explore exercise, repetition, reuse, learning, vulnerability, play, and rebellion as themes that trouble and inspire their practice. The works span multiple media, including sculpture, painting, photography, video, and papermaking.

Exhibiting Artists:
Aishwarya Arumbakkam
Bee Gray
Helen Jones
Emma Rossoff
Anthony Rundblade
Joy Scanlon
Brendan Shea
Anna Teiche

Zine produced for exhibition available for viewing here: Bag Lunch Zine

Bag Lunch opens Saturday, July 9th, with a reception from 6-9 pm; Fet-Fisk will be serving up snacks and spiked punch.
Additional viewings will be available by appointment by emailing unsmoke@gmail.com.
Closing reception on July 30th, featuring music by Pam Reyes.

About the Artists:
Aishwarya Arumbakkam
Aishwarya Arumbakkam is a multidisciplinary visual artist working with photography, filmmaking, and drawing to create narrative installations and artist books. Produced in grayscale, her prints, drawings, publications, and projections are patient and intimate, slowly revealing political subtexts. In her research, systematic collecting, and image-making, she collaborates long-term with communities around whom her work is centered. Her work interweaves cultural, mythological, and personal narratives to unravel sociocultural complexities. An artist from Chennai, India, Aishwarya is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at The University of Texas, Austin. Arumbakkam was honored as one of the ‘Ones to Watch’ by the British Journal of Photography in 2019. In 2020, she was awarded the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at various places including Ishara Art Foundation (UAE), Chobimela International Festival of photography (Bangladesh), Ffotogallery (UK), and the Visual Arts Center (USA).
aishwarya-arumbakkam.com
@aishwaryaarumbakkam

Bee Gray
Bee Gray is a multimedia artist who stitches together personal memoir with American cultural fragments to create humorous and critical soundscapes, installations, performances, video, prints, wearables, and text. Her work invites viewers to joyfully disobey dominant culture’s prescriptions—its coherence, its cleanliness, its hegemony. She was born in Los Angeles in 1988, holds a BA in Modern Literature.
Beegrayart.com

@carabiner_size_queen

Helen Jones
Helen Jones holds a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art. In 2010 she started a photography publication, Incandescent, with a couple of friends. Lately, she runs it on her own and recently released the twentieth issue. Helen's work explores interactions between people, places, and landscapes, her aesthetic is one of things built up unintentionally and of imprints left behind. Her work has been featured online on sites such as Ain't—Bad, Nowhere Diary, Lenscratch, F-stop Magazine, and Float Magazine; and in print in Subjectively, Objective's Monthly Monograph Magazine. She has exhibited in group shows at the Visual Art Center (Austin, Texas), Vermont Center for Photography (Brattleboro, Vermont), and was included in the Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers at Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, Oregon).
helenjonesphotography.com
@helenjonesphotographs

Emma Rossoff
Emma Rossoff creates allegorical installations where ancient mythology and religious symbolism are interwoven with personal narrative. In her work, Rossoff employs traditional craft techniques in wood and fiber in order to investigate the moral and devotional facets of the handmade, as well as the labor embedded in domestic environments. Rossoff received a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Columbia University in 2016 and is an MFA candidate in Sculpture & Extended Media at University of Texas, Austin (2022). Before attending Columbia she completed her foundation year at the Rhode Island School of Design and studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in London. She attended a residency at Vermont Studio Center (2019), and has been included in group exhibitions in New York City, Washington D.C., and Austin, Texas.
emmarossoff.com

@emmalouiserossoff

Anthony Rundblade
Anthony Rundblade is an artist who lives and works in San Antonio and Austin, TX. He creates sculptural installations in search of joyous anarchy and an un-poetic absurd. He received his BFA from The University of Texas at San Antonio, with a focus in printmaking. Rundblade is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas –Austin where he is expanding his skills through sculpture and installation. In the last five years, Rundblade worked as a Studio Technician and Studio Manager at the Artpace Residency Program (2014-2019) and held several solo exhibitions in Texas, exploring the relationship between print media, sculpture, and installation.
Rundbladeworks.com

@anthonyrundblade

Joy Scanlon
Joy Scanlon translates, distorts, and reproduces patterns drawn from domestic objects. Scanlon employs papermaking and collage techniques to create paintings that both resist and submit to an underlying, grid-based composition. The paintings are torn between harmony and chaos—from afar, they read as unified and controlled. Upon approach, the contrasts in their units assert themselves. On the painting plane, contradiction can be aestheticized to the point of eliciting pleasure, integrating conflict without sacrificing discord.
Joyscanlon.com

Brendan Shea
Brendan Shea is an artist whose work explores popular sentiment, affect and mechanisms of painting. Brendan received his BFA in painting from Maine College of Art in 2018. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a recipient of the David Bruton Jr. Endowment Graduate Fellowship. Brendan has attended residencies at the Pace House and Hewnoaks. He has exhibited work across the U.S., including Ortega Y Gasset Projects (NYC), Visual Arts Center (Austin, TX.), Grant Wahlquist Gallery (Portland, Me.), B.U. Gallery (Boston, MA.), Good Luck Have Fun (Austin, TX.), SaveArtSpace (Los Angeles, CA.), Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, Me.), SOIL Gallery (Seattle, Washington), and SPACE Gallery (Portland ME.).
Brendan-shea.com

@brendan_r_shea

Anna Teiche
Anna Teiche is an oil painter and drawer based in Austin, Texas, where she has recently earned her MFA in painting + drawing from UT Austin. Her work explores intersections between landscape, climate change, and illness, using textural experimentations with oil paint to create beautiful and haunting interpretations of natural environments. Teiche's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2020 her first solo show "Anna Teiche: Fragments" opened at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (WA). She has attended residencies including NES (Iceland), Rockland Woods (WA), and Kintai Arts (Lithuania), and will attend Vermont Studio Center this summer on fellowship. She recently completed a large-scale site specific installation with the Facebook Open Arts Seattle office in summer of 2021. Her work is featured online and in publications such as Friend of the Artist, Youngspace.com, and New American Paintings (Issue 151).
teiche.art 

@annateiche

Notes from the River Nadir by Tony Havrilla is a solo show of new work by the artist. The exhibition features coinciding bodies of work produced between 2018 and 2022 capturing the artist’s unique aesthetic and experience with loss. Notes from the River Nadir highlights Havrilla’s relationship to family, fable, and philosophy. The show spans introspective portraiture to meticulously crafted surrealist landscape. Through his oil painting, Havrilla creates windows into memories and shared illusory experiences. These works seek to steep the viewer in pools of color and lush brush strokes; leaving dregs for reflection.

About the Artist:
Tony Havrilla is an oil painter from Pittsburgh, Pa. He earned his Bachelor of Art with a minor in Art history from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Since graduation he has pursued his career through participation in solo, group and juried shows in and around the Pittsburgh area. In 2017 he was selected to be an artist in residence at the Brew House Association in the Distillery 8 program. Currently he lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
www.tonyhavrilla.com
IG: @dahavrilla

This exhibition will be on display through June. An Opening Reception will take place Friday, June 3rd, from 5-8 pm with a Closing Reception and Artist Talk on Saturday, June 25th, 11-2pm. Appointments to see work can also be made by emailing
unsmoke@gmail.com

Paths is a solo show of new works by Christopher Boring.

Paths explores urban sidewalks and intimate stairs throughout Pittsburgh. Sidewalks and stairs are physical connectors that bridge the gap of private and public life. Centering on these images helps us to contemplate our viewpoints on decay and safety, equality of our neighborhoods, the passage of time, and creative reuse.

About the Artist:
Christopher Boring was born and raised just outside Pittsburgh. He received his BFA at Edinboro University in 2012 and currently shares a studio with his talented partner at Radiant Hall in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood. He focuses primarily a painting but enjoys creating with any material at hand.
www.christopherboring.com
@cboringart

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 7th 5-8pm
Gallery Open Hours: Friday, May 13th & Saturday, May 14th, 2-5
Closing Reception: May 28th 2-5pm

Free and open to all.

Drawn Together: A Coming of Middle Age Story in 62 Portraits

Drawn Together is an exhibition by Pittsburgh artists Kirsten Ervin and Suzanne Werder, who drew each other every day during January, 2022. The show features 31 unique portraits of each artist drawn by the other. Acting as both observer and subject, the two women met in person to draw at Ervin’s studio over 14 days of January. On other days, the artists worked from selfies sent to one another. The show is an investigation into the artists’ everyday lives, and the nuances and slight changes in each person over time.

The 62 portraits in Drawn Together depict two sets of experiences common to the pandemic: fleeting moments of togetherness and social isolation. The in-person portraits of the two artists show interaction and shared experience, contrasting sharply with the disconnected nature of the selfie-generated portraits. Both sets of drawings show a deliberately raw and unfiltered look at everyday life, an antidote to the aspirational, heavily doctored imagery of social media. Werder and Ervin sent each other selfies at random times during the day: upon waking up, driving, working in the community or art studio. The drawings reflect a variety of moods from any given day: grumpy, tired, playful, serious.

Drawn Together is both a representation of the joy in creative collaboration and an exercise in self-awareness. “For me, the process became a confrontation of who I am now, and a self-acceptance of myself as I age”, said Ervin, who is 54. Werder is 44. “Suzanne’s portraits enabled me to look more closely at myself, directly and respectfully. And I found it fascinating to observe Suzanne, both in real life and in photographs, because I consider drawing a way of learning about people.”

“In a world where middle-aged women and those who inhabit larger bodies seem invisible, this project provides a unique experience of seeing and being seen”, says Werder. “I was taught as a nine year old to dress defensively and hide my fat. Even though I am no longer able to hide my fat, this experience offered an opportunity to be unmasked without shame or embarrassment. Working together during this process was an opportunity for frivolity, inspiration, therapy and deepening friendship with one of my favorite people.”

Throughout art history, representations of women in figurative art have primarily been young, sexualized, often nude, and created by men for the male gaze. As an exhibit entirely powered by women, the male gaze is absent here. “The mere act of placing ourselves as the subjects of portraits is radical,” says Ervin. Drawn Together counteracts the invisibility of “women of a certain age” in art and everyday culture with 62 powerful, intimate portraits of the everyday lives of two artists in January, 2022, a snapshot in time.

About the Artists:
Kirsten Ervin is a Pittsburgh-based fiber artist and illustrator focused on building community and promoting joy. She has created large scale portrait and fiber projects during residencies with Project Art, The Children’s Museum, the Kelly Strayhorn Theater and The Pittsburgh International Airport. Ervin has taught art and craft at Contemporary Craft, Artsmiths of Pittsburgh, Propel Schools, Project Art, Irma Freeman Center for the Imagination, Creative Citizen Studios, Achieva, Milestone, CLASS and CCAC. Kirsten co-founded Creative Citizen Studios, an arts organization supporting artists with disabilities. She and her husband Willard Simmons run The Silver Apple Gallery, one of Pittsburgh’s smallest art venues.
kirstenervin.org

Suzanne Werder's multidisciplinary work has been exhibited/performed in numerous galleries. Her award winning couture has also been shown extensively. She is the creator of the Busnegie Museum of Art and is currently a teaching artist in residence with ProjectArt, an adjunct professor at Duquesne University, a facepainter, and The Dream Lab Maker Space Coordinator with The Pittsburgh Project. Her art seeks to elevate the profile of marginalized materials, places, and people in order to reveal the miraculous within the mundane, the extraordinary within the ordinary.
@suzanne_werder

Hazard Pay is a group show curated by Paul Mullins who assembled eight area artists doing interesting work in drawing.

Participating artists:
Andrew W Allison
Matthew Constant
Eriko Hattori
Marianne Hoffmeister Castro
Sarah Kim
Paul Peng
Rosabel Rosalind
Shori Sims

This grouping postulates drawing as evidence of the mind.
It imagines a drawing corpus where one can have the pleasant retinal experience of seeing images made, and materials lovingly handled; but also observe the probing of memory, identity, lived experience, imagined worlds, and whatever else an inner life may instantiate.

During our last eighteen months or so, we can suppose that there may have been widespread retreat into the convenience, necessity, and solace that is available in this way of working.
Or perhaps many taking renewed pleasure in a solitary act of putting our minds onto paper - an action that was among our earliest mediums, or rather, one of our first disciplines.
Hazard Pay is unconcerned with whether drawing is identified as the primary practice of any of the participants. Rather, it looks for the underpinning of drawing, the basic need of our head, where our cognition unites with direct movement of our hands.

In addition to offering a satiating quantity of drawn brainwaves, and acknowledgment of the breadth of that undertaking, the exhibition also underscores a once-again confirmed truism: that drawing is good compensation, and both practitioner and viewer are being sustained.

Opening reception: Saturday, Sept. 4th 6-9pm
Free and open to all
Exhibition on display through Sunday, Sept. 26th - by appointment only

About the Artists:
Andrew Allison
Andrew W. Allison is an American multidisciplinary artist, poet and experimental musician, born in Wichita, Kansas and raised in Pittsburgh. He graduated with an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2013 and has shown nationally throughout the United States, in places and events such as: The Pittsburgh Biennial, The Mine Factory, Bunker Projects and The Carnegie Museum of Art.
@andrew.william.allison

Matthew Constant
Matthew Constant was born in Ames, Iowa in 1996 and attended Ames Senior High School. He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University School of Art in 2018. Matthew has attended a residency at the Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and shown work in the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Pullproof Studio and the CHART Gallery. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh.
https://www.matthewconstantart.com

Eriko Hattori
Eriko Hattori (they/them) is a Pittsburgh-based artist. Hattori uses imagery, symbolism, and folklore to investigate the tension between their queer identity and Japanese heritage.
http://erikohattori.com

@_erikohattori_


Marianne Hoffmeister-Castro
Marianne holds a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2014) and has exhibited in Chile, Perú, Ecuador and the United States. She explores the place of language to perform new ways to inhabit nature and engage with the nonhuman and also as a vehicle to unveil the cues of animal perception and natural phenomena that permeate our poetic and mundane fantasies. These explorations have led her to participate in diverse international residency programs such as Cow House Studios in Ireland (2017), NWOSU AiR via Molten Capital Residencies Chile (2018), Bibliothek Andreas Züst in Switzerland (2018) and the Pimoa Cthulhu Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies in Madrid (2020). She is now a second-year MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.
https://mariannehoffmeister.com/

Sarah Kim
Sarah Kim is an artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Working predominantly in drawing and collaging, her 2D works are mainly about humoring the tension of her identity of being a Korean American.
@_keemsy_

Rosabel Rosalind
Rosabel was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a conservative Jewish community in the San Fernando Valley. Upon graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, she went on to pursue a research project funded by a Fulbright Austria Combined Research Grant in 2018-2019. Working with the Jewish Museum Vienna’s Schlaff Collection of anti-Semitic objects and postcards, Rosabel produced a series of intimate vignettes, exaggerated portraiture, and darkly humorous comics in response to the visual history of anti-Jewish hate-imagery, thus reclaiming her heritage and reconnecting to her Jewish identity. Today Rosabel’s work continues to celebrate uncanny representations of the body through satire. Fascinated by the absurdity of religious iconography and theological manifestations dominated by Christian male perspectives, Rosabel sees these patriarchal traditions as fertile ground for feminist recontextualization and adaptation.
https://rosabelrosalind.com/

Paul Peng
Paul Peng (b. 1994) is a drawing-based contemporary artist whose work combines formal mark-making with cartoon figuration, the latter being rooted in his upbringing around internet-based folk art in communities surrounding furry culture and mass media fandoms. He holds a BCSA in Computer Science and Art from Carnegie Mellon University and has also studied classical drawing at Barnstone Studios in Coplay, PA and experimental drawing at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI.
https://www.paulpengdotcom.com/

Shori Sims
Shori Sims is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, 2D and 3D media, and written works: though she finds herself grounded in drawing and painting. Essential themes of her work include the black female body as a site of resistance, African American identity, and the symbolic language shared amongst Black womxn/queers: especially as propagated through online space. Shori is fascinated by the possibilities found within alternate universes and liminal space: both through and beyond the body. References in Shori’s work include shoujo anime, beauty-supply stores, bodegas and gas-stations: combining to form an autobiography of her girlhood experience.
https://shori.cargo.site/

Murmuration is a group exhibition of new works by the #notwhite collective, a group of 13 femme artists who use their art to make their stories visible as they excavate histories, expose realities, and exorcise oppression.

Artist and Exhibition Statement:
BIRD
It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.
- excerpt Pablo Neruda

As the incubation of a simple egg, a bird’s beginning is perfection; a new voice in life is possible.

In the Spring of 2020, we sisters of the Collective began finding dead birds on the ground during our walks, during the everyday. We shared photos of these birds via text, remarking on the species, our feelings and the surrounding environment. Wondering why they lay dead beneath our feet. Wondering about the spirits of the elders and the land crying out to us beneath the concrete and stones.

These conversations about birds and their meaning deepened. The proverbial "canary in the coalmine" has so many connotations - for the history of those sorts of industries, including coal in this region, the history of people of color playing guinea pig/canary roles in the history of white supremacy in the medical industry, and in workplaces (like Chinese immigrants doing most of the dangerous work in building the railroad across the country). Parallel to this is the history of using the feathers, wings, and bodies of exotic birds to decorate hats of women in the Western world during the late 19th century and men’s head-dresses in previous eras. Like birds, we as women of color have been exotified, plucked and worn. In our respective cultures, feathers are revered as symbols of trust, honor, wisdom and freedom. To don feathers is to adorn ourselves in spiritual meanings and expressions, symbolizing mystical powers and a way to communicate with the divine.

Our voices are strong, beautiful songs, that call out to live, lift and fly, not to be caged, silent, or objects of curiosity pinned to a board for study. We hatch. We nest. We rise from the ashes. We sing our songs. Breathe in life. We lift our wings and fly! WE ARE LEADING BIRDS

"Niigaanii Beneshi. Leading Bird.
There is a right relationship, a right distance between them-too close and they crash, too far away and they can't feel the micro adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of the other creatures' bodies. There is a deep trust in this..." - From Edgar Villanueva's "Decolonizing Wealth book (pgs 101-102)

Members of the #notwhite collective will explore and experiment with their work and how it is presented. We will not rush to meet the end goal of an opening reception, but rather, like birds building a nest, build our work throughout the month of August, one stick, one leaf at a time. This open studio process will be open to the public to share in our process.

Feathering: a Queer Burlesque
Friday, August 27th 8 - 10 pm

Closing reception for Murmuration:
Saturday, August 28th 6 - 8 pm
Free and open to all

About the Artists:
Excavating histories
Exposing realities
Exorcising oppression

The #notwhite collective is a group of 13 women artists whose mission is to use non-individualistic, multi-disciplinary art to make our stories visible as we relate, connect, and belong to the global majority.

We are bi/multi-racial/cultural, immigrant or descendants of immigrants investigating the many ways we are seen or not seen, how we self-identify and how we seek liberation through sharing space and stories; research and art-making; discussing the history of imperialism and its effect on us, on the whole non-white world. We actively reject colonialism through out non-hierarchical process.

The #notwhite collective expresses the hybridized and multifaceted aspects of self-defined liberation; we accept cultural fluidity as a means of seeing and being seen, each member declaring their existence, individually and collectively, through our voices, bodies and art.

#notwhite collective members are:
Veronica Corpuz
Zena Ruiz
Maritza Mosquera, in collaboration with NICK G Liadis
Alison Zapata
Sara Tang
Fran (Ledonia) Flaherty
Carolina Loyola-Garcia
Amber Epps
Liana Maneese
Geña
Maggie Negrete
Sarika Goulatia
Madame Dolores
https://www.notwhitecollective.com/

A solo exhibition of the ceramic work of Shanna Fliegel.

Resolute Accumulations is an inquiry of how the natural environment and built world shape and influence how humans navigate change and trauma. Whether the personal struggle is debilitating fear or a greater concern for the imposition of humans on planet Earth, there is a synchronous connection between the individual, interior psyche-scape and the landscape gestalt of humanity.

Gaston Bachelard wrote in the Poetics of Space, ““I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” This calls into question how one decides to define house (the forest, an apartment, a yurt) and in turn informs how one responds to change: safe or healed or supported, or perhaps terrified, paranoid, apocalyptic.

Oftentimes, built spaces conjure up nostalgic memories, while the grandeur of a wild mountain trail may transcend the mind into a sublime state. When one’s skin is wrapped in the forest’s embrace, there is a quiet comfort of refuge. The ocean’s horizontal sight-lines grounds us, reminding us of a shared gaze with our ancestors. During these moments one can sense a deep-seeded insight; that there is an understanding - that we are one. Solitude as togetherness I suppose.

Through the printed image, drawn narrative, and vibrant color palette, this body of work calls for your curiosity; to pay attention. Where do you seek refuge? How will our stories be interconnected? Clay embodies the recorded mark so well, allows for the temporality of dreams to last, and as the fired object to recall the very substance of the Earth.

Opening reception: Friday, July 9th, 6-9pm
Event is free and open to all
Exhibition on display through July 31st
Available for viewing by appointment: unsmoke@gmail.com

About the Artist:
Shanna Fliegel grew up in New Jersey and attended James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA where she earned her BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Ceramics. ​

Shortly after graduating in 2001 she accepted a year-long residency at the Cub Creek Foundation in Appomattox, VA. Here she connected with potters and sculptors from Shigaraki, Japan and Seoul, Korea. These relationships strengthened her background in wood-firing, native clays, and surface. ​She has since worked as a resident assistant at Greenwich House Pottery in the West Village, NYC; received her MFA in Studio Art/Ceramics at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, IL in 2008; worked as a resident artist, community outreach fellow, and instructor at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, NY; was awarded a summer residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT; and soon thereafter accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Art/Ceramics at Montana State University in Billings, Montana from 2010-2014. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Arrowmont School of Art and Craft and Brumfield Gallery have featured her vessels concerning the anthropocene, a topic of research that has informed the creation of a panel at NCECA 2019. Later she transitioned to teaching high school and worked at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, before relocating to teach ceramics and sculpture at Governor's Academy in Byfield, MA with her two boys and dog, Jersey. She participated in a month-long residency at Guldagergaard International Ceramics Research Center in Denmark in 2019 and is looking forward to teaching workshops at Morean Arts Center, Gaya Ceramics in Bali and attending AIR Vallauris in France in summer of 2022.
https://www.shannafliegel.com/

The former President of the United States, Donald Trump, better known for his reality television show and the art of the deal than his political experience or acumen, drove the national conversation via Twitter and questioned the veracity of traditional news sources during his presidency. To bear witness to this time in our nation’s history, on January 22, 2017 (Trump’s inauguration) Penny Mateer launched a series, In Today’s News. Acting as “photojournalist,” she responded to the contents of each daily edition (Monday-Saturday) of The New York Times by merging multiple images into a 5” x 7” hand-cut collage. The title of each is a headline or highlighted text from that day. For economical large-scale printing and immediacy, Penny printed the work on common objects to make difficult topics more accessible and to encourage the viewer to consider the impact of the “ready made” President.

A wonderful time lapse video of the installation is available: Click here

The Times they are a changin’
Exhibiting June 12-27, 2021
Opening reception: Saturday, June 12th 5-8pm
Open hours: Thurs. & Fri. 10am-2pm, Sat. & Sun. 2-6pm
or by appointment at penmateer@gmail.com

About the Artist:
Penny Mateer, artist/activist, works with textiles and recycled materials. Mateer’s art is rooted in quilting and embroidery traditionally thought of as “women’s work.” Drawing from this rich history of creating functional objects intended to provide warmth and comfort, she uses fabric as her primary material because it is both recognizable and relatable. Her work centers on social and economic issues with the goal to spark thought and discussion.

Mateer has received numerous awards including Best of Show Fiberart International 2016 and was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA. Her work is in the Pittsburgh Public School System collection. She was co-director of Knit the Bridge, a community-made public art project installed on the Andy Warhol Bridge in Pittsburgh. Currently she organizes Pole-2-Polls, a community-made public art project to promote voting. Mateer lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
www.pennymateer.com

Spring Equinox is a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Chelsea Long. Primarily working in oils, she explores impermanence, growth, and renewal. Elements from nature are used as a visual metaphor for these phases of change throughout the figurative and still life scenes.

The still lives often take on the humanistic, gestural expressiveness of figures. Unaware of the viewer’s gaze, the figures themselves are shown in a variety of introspective states. Interior settings begin to feel surreal with fabrics and colors evocative of streams and skies. When placed in composed landscapes, figures can take on the appearance of nymphs in mythological narratives.

Aspects of melancholy, romance, and fragility speak through the poses of the figure, props, floral arrangements, symbols, and color schemes. Allowing for an openness to interpretation, these painted scenes can create a sense of unease, but foreshadow growth. The work describes elements that are a part of everyone's inner world and mean what your response is to them. Whether it be a figurative or still life scene, the tender, mysterious, and emotive content displays human vulnerability.

Virtual Exhibition Tour: Click here

About the Artist:
Chelsea Long is an emerging artist creating figurative and still life oil paintings.

With her imagination always running, Long’s surroundings and experiences act as a gardens of inspiration and reference material for her paintings. She lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the discovery of wild strawberries in the grass has resulted in her building a strawberry crown prop for a reference photo shoot. Walks on the trails have become inspiration for landscape compositions. She hand builds all of the floral props featured in her paintings and creates sets with fabrics and other props in her studio. Models are brought in for reference photo shoots and these images are combined with reference material taken from her surroundings. She’s drawn to delicate subjects such as flowers, fawns, and people. Often including a combination of pastel and vibrant colors with dramatic poses and lighting, her paintings have been described as “a box of candy for a psychologist”.

Drawing inspiration from Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite painters, Long experiments with incorporating subject matter and techniques from these periods. She uses techniques including Flemish and Venetian glazing methods, such as grisaille. Grisaille, meaning grey, is a technique in which a painting begins with a monochromatic, traditionally greyscale, palette. Transparent layers of colored glazes are then applied to modify the subsequent, opaque layers. The multiple colored layers are mixed optically as the light hits them to create luminosity and depth. Using contemporary colors, she experiments with this method by substituting the traditional grey with a variety of colored underpaintings. Long finds the technical narratives in these classical layering processes to be alluring because they involve and symbolize a sense of care, patience, and thoughtfulness. Using the language of these traditional methods, she speaks of contemporary subjects.

chelsealong.com
@c._long

TD Projects is curating this group exhibition featuring the Fall 2020 Season of Artists-in-Residence with the Bloomfield Garden Club.

In August 2020, TD Projects (Tina Dillman, independent artist and curator) launched the Bloomfield Garden Club (BGC), a monthly salon highlighting local artists-in-residence working in dance, music, comedy, literary, visual, and/or performance art. The line-up for the Fall 2020 Season are August Artists-in-Residence: Naomi Chambers (visual), Betty Douglas w/ Rex Trimm (music) and John Musser w/ Scott Andrew (performance); September Artists-in-Residence: Tara Fay Coleman (visual), Clara Kent (music), and Shana Simmons (dance); October Artists-in-Residence: Betty Douglas w/ Rex Trimm (music), Jesse Factor w/ Scott Andrew (performance), and Christiane Leach (visual).

The goal of the BGC is to provide an experimental platform for local artists from various backgrounds to create new work in the dawn of this awakening hour, and to provide sources of revenue for those that are the most vulnerable. We will be showcasing local artists that identify as female, queer, anti-colonizer, person of color, or have always felt like they were the outliers. Tina Dillman’s vision: “The communities I create are inclusive of any background, race, class, gender profile, as there is only one way forward and that is to ensure that we all rise together. There is no world that I want to be in that exists without artists, as we are the backbone of every society-we document, we create, we breathe, we speak truth to power, and we dream up new ideas that have the ability to transform old civilizations into new beginnings.”

Public engagements for the BGC are happening on Tuesday & Thursday evenings, and Sunday afternoons, September 22, 24, & 27. Each salon will begin with a moment of silence/prayer, then the artists in residence will either perform or present their new work for up to 20 minutes each, and the event will conclude with a dialogue (question/answer) between the artists and guests. Snacks and beverages will be available, while guests can BYOB to this private event.

Due to Covid precautions there will be a limited number of tickets available for each event at $25/each, and tickets must be purchased in advance. As with limited seating, we are planning on having the events sell out, with no spots available the day of. Each artist-in-residence will receive a stipend through the revenue generated by ticket sales, membership, and sponsorship. For more information on how to purchase a ticket, please visit: http://tinadillman.com/the-bloomfield-garden-club/.

About the Curator:
TD Projects, founder & director, Tina Dillman, arrived to Pittsburgh in late 2018 for a fully funded arts writing residency through Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and Bunker Projects. In June 2019, she was appointed the Director of Exhibitions & Programming at the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media, but was a part of the massive lay off around Thanksgiving of 2019. Dillman has since been focusing on her artistic and curatorial endeavors that will allow for her to remain living in Pittsburgh, as she feels like this place is home. Tina received her master’s of fine art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014, and relocated back east later that summer to assist her parents with a family emergency.

About the Artists-in-Residence:
Scott Andrew is a multimedia artist working in queer oriented video, installation, and performance. Scott holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University where he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Art and a Fellow of The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. Scott also teaches in the Studio Arts program at the University of Pittsburgh, and in the CMU Precollege program. His curatorial history includes TQ Live! a yearly LGBTQIA variety performance at the Andy Warhol Museum which is organized with Suzie Silver and Joseph Hall, Fail Safe, a local variety series organized with Angela Washko and Jesse Stiles, and The Drift, a platform for artistic research exploring the three rivers as a context for artistic production. Scott is a co-founder of The Institute for New Feeling and has exhibited at MoMA’s PopRally (NYC), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), the Hammer Museum (LA), and the J. Paul Getty Museum (LA), among many others. Currently Scott has been creating and producing media driven discrete collaborative projects for stage with both dance artist Jesse Factor, and drag performer Veronica Bleaus (John Musser).

Naomi Chambers is a painter and assemblage sculptor born in Pittsburgh in 1987. Growing up in the 90’s she enjoyed so many free arts programs in the city, which unaware to her had such an effect on her creative growth and critical thinking in all aspects of her life. Her senior year of high school she decided to take an art class. Towards the end of the school year her teacher told Naomi that she had great ideas, which was eighty percent of what it took to be a great artist. The other twenty was skill, and that was easy to obtain. She realized art would be apart of her life going forward. She graduated with a double degree from the University of Pittsburgh majoring in Studio Arts and Marketing in 2009. In 2012, she took the leap to be a full time artist, and had her first solo show in January 2013. In 2017, she and her husband worked with a collective of artists to open FlowerHouse, a community art studio and creative space in Wilkinsburg where they offered workshops and classes for the predominantly black community. In 2017, she was also awarded the Investing In Professional Artist grant from the Heinz Endowment and Pittsburgh Foundation. In 2018, She had her first solo exhibition, Communal Futures at an arts institution, August Wilson Center: African American Cultural Center. “I want my work to fill people up with love, hope, and wonder like my favorite artists do for me. It’s about the creation of possibilities… new worlds we create for ourselves not solely the one we were born to.”

Tara Fay Coleman is an independent curator, producer, and conceptual performance artist from Buffalo, NY. She serves as a board member and Associate Curator at Bunker Projects, and is a member of the Carnegie Art Associates, and the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Her curatorial process is rooted in creating space for underrepresented Black and Brown artists. She has curated exhibitions for the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Phosphor Project Space, and most recently Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Her forthcoming projects include an exhibition as part of the Brewhouse Association Prospectus program, and serving as a guest curator for the gallery at Seton Hill University’s Harlan Gallery.

Christiane Dolores (aka Madame Dolores) is a multi-platform cross-disciplinary artist, who employs sound, vision, text, and performance as storytelling tools to create radical, sometimes controversial, cultural engagements. At the heart of her work is a humanistic empathy that questions our inability to coexist and reimagines new mythologies. She received the Pittsburgh Business Times Women First award in 2017. She was commissioned by the The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to create a song and lead Pittsburgh’s inaugural Complaints Choir, during the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2014. She is the winner of a 2010 August Wilson Center Fellowship; received a grant in 2011, from Advancing the Black Arts to market her second solo release, Amor Fati; a 2007 honoree at the New Hazlett Theatre “Celebrating Women in the Arts; a 2003 winner of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowship for World/Jazz/Blues musical composition; and a 2002 Pittsburgh Magazine “40 under 40” award winner. She received funding from Sprout for two MiniM Music Festivals for the Blues and Jazz genres and for “Listen to This”, featuring poetess, Ursula Rucker; a commission from Pittsburgh Foundation to write her first play, Saffronia; funding from Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative to produce Saffronia: the Mulatto Slave, which came in 2nd place at the Trinidad Theater Festival, in 2016.

Elizabeth "Betty" Asche Douglas, is a visual artist, musician, and educator, who earned a BFA degree in painting & design from Carnegie Mellon and an MA degree in Fine Arts from the University of Pittsburgh, and she completed additional graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught in high school and college, retiring as Professor and Head of Humanities & Fine Arts from Geneva College in 1996, and she is also the artist/owner of Douglas Art Gallery, Rochester, PA. Betty performs as a vocalist and pianist in “Artistry in Song” and is vocalist/leader with Betty Douglas & Co. band. She was inducted into the Beaver Valley Musicians’ Hall of Fame in 2003, and in 2016 she received a citation from Pittsburgh City Council as one of Pittsburgh’s “vintage” jazz artists, and is counted among Pittsburgh’s “Jazz Divas.” Locally, she has performed at the Andy Warhol Museum, Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center, Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media, and at Sweetwater Center for the Arts.

Jesse Factor works primarily in performance, channeling the divas in exile--from time and body--hauntingly reflecting the impressions they’ve left behind. Factor’s growing repertoire of solo work combines a speculative view of queer histories and the archive with contemporary composition practices. Factor’s works have been presented across the United States and Canada in the context of dance, theater, and nightclub performances. Recent creative highlights include: Freshworks performance artist in residence in collaboration with multimedia artist Scott Andrew at the Kelly Strayhorn Alloy Studios, the premiere of dance theatre work RELIC at the Minnesota Fringe Festival 2019, and the ongoing Marthagany: The Spectre-Acle series at RADfest 2017, Outsider Fest 2018, House of Yes 2018, Fierce Queer Burlesque 2019, TQ Live! @Andy Warhol Museum 2019, and Milton Fringe 2019.

Clara Kent is an independent afro-indigenous singer-songwriter and emcee. The self-proclaimed “Multidimensional Artistic Individual” hails from Homewood, Pa, a Pittsburgh neighborhood known for its talented people. There she learned how to take in her surroundings and to release her varied experiences through music and art. Kent was highly influenced by her late mother who was a painter and vinyl collector. Clara recalls her mother painting and listening to jazz records during childhood. After her mother's passing, Clara gained a new outlook on her gifts and began developing for her professional career in 2011. Clara Kent's debut project “Aura” was released in 2018, a project she describes as her "time capsule", giving a peek into a period of the singer's first steps into the reclamation of her power and heeding her inner wisdom. “Aura” led Kent to many stages across the country, including; SXSW 2018, BB Kings in Time Square, the Harlem Stage in Brooklyn, WYEP Summerfest 2019, a 2019 Sofar Sounds Tour, and much more. She also earned a cover feature in the City Paper in April 2018 and was named “Person of the Year: Music” by Pittsburgh’s City Paper 2019. Clara is gearing up to release a mix tape series called The Four Winds exclusively on Bandcamp in honor of the indigenous people's of the world. Half of the proceeds will go to several local and national organizations that assist black & indigenous women and children: Indigenous People's Movement, Return to the Heart Foundation, Sister's PGH, MMIW, and AAMI. The release is set to drop next spring (2021).

John Musser (stage name, Veronica Bleaus) is a performance artist and scholar. In 2019, John curated an exhibit at the Spurlock Museum in Urbana, IL on drag costuming, titled In Her Closet – How to Make a Drag Queen. His alter ego, Veronica Bleaus, has been performing in drag and collaborating with visual artists since 2005. In 2009, Veronica developed a public performance series, Drive By Drag, with visual and performance artist Dani Lamorte, and in 2015 was featured in Sasha Velour’s Vym magazine (now Velour magazine). Since 2009 Veronica has worked with visual artist Scott Andrew to make queer fantasy worlds in video performance. Most recently, they staged The Diva Saga: The Legend of the Worst Drag Queen at Washington College in Chestertown, MD.

Shana Simmons has a BA in Dance from Point Park University (2003), and a MA in Choreography from LABAN in London, England. Simmons has performed her own works in New York City, Belgium, London, Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh. Simmons has choreographed four collaborative works with The Eclectic Laboratory Chamber Orchestra, and has created five major performances through Shana Simmons Dance since 2012. Simmons was a nominee for the Carol R Brown Award (2016), has received Pittsburgh’s Best Dance listings (2015, 2018), and is an adjunct faculty at Point Park University. Shana Simmons Dance was founded in 2009 and has been bringing high quality dance performances to the Pittsburgh region since 2012, creating works based on a variety of current trends in dance and social issues we feel passionately about.

Rex Trimm, a native to the west coast. Rex Trimm survives as a glass artist and musician in the Pittsburgh area. He is a former member of the Cherry Popppin Daddies and has glass work in the permanent collection at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC, among other permanent collections.

The exhibition will be available online for a virtual tour and by appointment. Appointments to view the exhibition in person by email to Tina Dillman at: tinadillmanprojects@gmail.com.

An exhibition of new video art works by Sarah Moore
On display through August, 2020

Artist’s Statement:
”From an early age, I have been fascinated with seeing. My eyesight became horrible when I was quite young, which put me in glasses and then later, contacts. At the same time, I saw things happen to my family that I should not have seen, and I saw darkness grow in the world that I couldn’t un-see. I became obsessed with this darkness and how I could transform it or revel in it. It was from this place that I learned to control my gaze and reconstruct the world around me.”

”These short films represent varied meditations on memory, longing, fear, and stillness. I use the act of looking to frame my videos, imagining this act to be a type of healing or hope. At the same time, looking can stir chaos, tumult, and despair. By creating my own fiction from memories and facts, I wish to allow looking to be an antidote.”

Exhibition video feeds: Click here

-Sarah Moore

About the Artist:
Sarah Moore is a photographer and video artist, born and raised among the horizons of South Dakota. Sarah's research on the construction of memory, the creation of narratives, and female authorship has resulted in installation works around the country. Through an intuitive and archive driven practice, she uses diaristic, fictitious, and appropriated footage to create psychological non-linear stories. Her work has been shown around the country and in Europe. Sarah received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Montana. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Film & Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
www.sarahkatherinemoore.com

An exhibition of new work by Jeff Repko.

[A]part explores the effect of technology on modern communities, focusing on the current climate derived from the Coronavirus and social distancing. The show exists as the first iteration of larger project in which the artist explores notions of community and identity, using abstract mechanism and components as surrogates for these ideas. In the digital version of the exhibition, the work will be presented to the viewers in two manners here on our website.

In one presentation the work is presented in a singular collective. In the other, individual components are spread-out six feet apart across the gallery floor. In this body of work there are two identical versions of each component. As Repko begins to disseminate the parts, he will continue to create them, expanding the collective while the community it represents grows in numbers. This allows the sculpture to exist as both one and many concurrently. Viewers will have the ability to explore and purchase the individual components in person during the extent of the exhibition.

To view [A]part exhibition please click here.

About the Artist:
Jeff Repko is an artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He completed his MFA in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His practice combines traditional sculpting methods with modern fabrication techniques to explore concepts of deindustrialization and the transition to contemporary digital technologies. Recently in 2019 he received a grant from the city of Madison, WI to install a public sculpture in one of the city’s parks. This was followed by a residency and solo exhibition at Penn College exploring the history and future of industry in Pennsylvania. His work has been shown nationally in gallery and public settings. Repko currently lives in Atlanta, GA while teaching sculpture at the University of North Georgia.
https://jeffrepko.com/

An exhibition of new works by Laura Philips.

A culmination of work created over a year, Holding Space is a mixed-media show that reflects one woman's journey to find a sense of spaciousness in a world of overwhelming sensation and activity. Iterative symbology pervades paintings, woolen vessels, and larger tapestries. Viewers will have the opportunity to question what they hold and how to let go.

About the Artist:
Laura Phillips is a mixed-media artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She uses art as a way to make space to hold rebellion, choice, and self-expression noting that creating art has taught her how to let go of judgments that don't serve her. Starting in 2019 she began to understand art as a therapy, helping her to move with more ease throughout the world. Philips held a solo show was at The Roboto Project in 2017. She has shown work in local venues throughout Pittsburgh since 2010.
https://lauraphillipsgallery.com/

See more of the exhibition here

Due to distancing constraints this exhibition will be available for live viewing by individuals, or small quarantine cohorts, and by appointment only.
Appointments can be made online at: Click for appointment or by emailing the artist at laurannphillips@gmail.com
You will be alone in the space for 45 minutes. Though it is a very large and open space, you must wear a mask.

Join is an exhibition of new paintings by John Burt Sanders. The work includes a series of paintings on raw canvas stained with dilute primary colors and overpainted with a composition rendered in thick oil paint that matches the underlying bare canvas. The result is an image that changes as you move around it in which aspects of the composition recede or advance depending on the viewer’s position. Many of these paintings combine elements of formal abstraction and a recurring motif of undulating stripes, like those you might find on a waving flag. Sanders also references a 1754 political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin which features a snake cut into several parts. The text of the cartoon, “JOIN, or DIE” informs the title of this exhibition and the imagery of the segmented snake appears in several works. The general sense of the cartoon points to the requirement of many parts to constitute a whole. Sanders’ work asks us to consider the particularity of the part as a way to resist it’s being consumed by the whole.

To view Join exhibition please click here.

John Burt Sanders is an artist from Arcade, New York. He completed his MFA in painting and drawing at Ohio University in 2011. Additionally, he earned a BFA in painting and art history at State University of New York at Fredonia in 2007. In 2019, his work appeared in the Northeast edition of New American Paintings. Sanders was awarded an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council in 2014 as well as a Travel Grant from Ohio University in 2010. In 2014 he participated in a 4 week artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. Sanders currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
https://www.indivisibler.com/

Statement from the artist:
In my recent paintings, impasto linework lies heavily across bare canvas, generating a stark contrast between formless paint and woven support. These curvilinear painted forms are derived from 2D mazes, like those found on the back of cereal boxes. This solution line is often merged with a quartering of the support in the shape of an x or +. Each composition starts to suggest other imagery like maps of unknown locations or partial bits of illegible text, all the while painted in colors that are near in value and hue to the canvas, making it a challenge to discern the entire image at once. In general, I use my work to move away from thinking of anything as a unified whole, and seek instead something that is connected but composed of parts, completely without center.
-John Burt Sanders, 2019

New artworks by Andrew W Allison
Opening Reception: Saturday, Oct. 5, 6-9pm

My Castle Is A Dorm: Air And The Tulpa Called Night Compass is a solo show by Andrew W Allison composed of sculptures and paintings (completed from 2016 to 2019) that examine how memory, magical thinking, personal narratives and myth-making form identity. The centerpiece of these works is an ink and acrylic painting on cotton sprawling approximately 40 by 8 feet, titled: Remote Viewing Of A Class Act Turtle, Wichita Bedroom (Year 1996/ Porter Street), Love And The Consistency Of Having Wanted To Float More Consistently.

About the artist:
Andrew W Allison is a mixed media sculptor born in Wichita, Kansas and raised in Pittsburgh. He began making things early on in order to engage with his experiences with night terrors. He creates intuitive paintings and sculptural installations using handmade, mixed media objects that explore identity, memory, and the preternatural. He graduated with an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2013 and has shown nationally. Locally his work has been shown in places and shows such as: The Pittsburgh Biennial, The Mine Factory, Bunker Projects, The Three Rivers Arts Festival and The Carnegie Museum of Art.
http://www.awallison.com/

Opening and show is free and open to all.
Exhibition is on display through February 20th by appointment at unsmoke@gmail.com

Paul Mullins presents Unfurrrow Your Brow, a selection of hand drawn facsimiles of media-extracted images, portions that can be alternately nostalgic and questioning.

Presented in The Gallery Next Door, 1131 Braddock Ave.
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 5th, 6-9pm

Exhibition statement:
It’s probable that most of us who did any drawing past the age of ten, can recall selecting found images (then, in printed media), taking pencils and pens in hand, and doing our level-best to duplicate them.

 We selected the images because we admired the subject, and we considered our efforts successful the more they approximated a likeness.

These early pursuits in drawing from media images are sort of pure, fun and gratifying because they are straightforward, even naïve. Later, if we decide to become a continued and informed scholar of art, we will turn a critical lens upon what we make with our hands and ask many, many questions. 

I am interested in how, once that critical apparatus is rather large, and when the artmaking experience is quite lengthy – that early place can be revisited -and how, irreconcilable as it all is, the latter can inform the former.

These pictures, fragmented like memory itself, reflect the cultural productions absorbed by someone born around the same time as me, in an area such as I was, in a certain kind of body. 

These drawings were made during trying times. While meant to ask questions about how we engage with the past, they were produced as of late. So perhaps they emit some of the distress of the dishonesty, upheaval and perfidy we have had to contend with.

The beautiful space these drawings interact with, the age and integrity of the structure on display, could speak of how fleeting, or how lengthy, certain moments are.  There is a very welcome truthfulness to this interior.

It is my hope that, like our younger selves mentioned before, we can find our way to hopeful production, with purpose, joy and empathy visibly ahead of us.

About the artist:
Paul Mullins is a visual artist, with a 20-plus year practice in drawing and painting. His work has been widely exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Miami. For Fifteen years he was full time faculty at San Francisco State University. Relocating to Pittsburgh three years ago was a return of sorts, as he grew up and was educated in Appalachia, a region that has always informed what he made, sometimes overtly, sometimes more quietly. Presently he works from the third floor of his north side home, and teaches a drawing class at Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.theabdominalstretch.com/

Opening and show is free and open to all.
Exhibition is on display through October by appointment at unsmoke@gmail.com

Nowhere and Here is a two person show featuring new works by Annie Heisey and Kevin Mack.

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7th 6-9pm with a closing reception Saturday, September 28th, 7-10pm.
Admission is free and open to all

Between nowhere and here exists a space of transformation, standing in transitory space between two states of being. Annie Heisey and Kevin Mack both inhabit transitory spaces in their work, Mack between controlled discipline and intuitive play and Heisey between form and abstraction. 

Mack’s work stands between the solidity of the wooden forms he constructs and the fluid nature of the paint he applies to those forms. In his paintings he combines crisp geometry with childish blobs, and his more sculptural pieces highlight the contrast between his meticulous building of structures and the spontaneous color with which he adorns them. 

Heisey’s paintings flit between polished moments of realism and raw areas of brushwork. Her figures inhabit half-realized spaces which begin to disintegrate around them, suggesting the constantly shifting ways in which she views the world around her. They create the illusion that we understand what we are seeing and experiencing, while at the same time revealing that our understanding is always incomplete.

About the artists:
Kevin Mack is a multidisciplinary artist currently working out of Pittsburgh, receiving his BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2013. His work walks the line between seemingly disparate dichotomies. "I am influenced by the power of color and space, making art objects that can be seen with vast depth or extreme flatness. I make work to understand the temperamental and tumultuous nature of life and living, and I grant the viewer broad powers of interpretation - they can interact, analyze, explore, nitpick, or simply enjoy the show. I aim to make those who feel deeply think more, and those who think deeply feel more, accepting and exploring our discomforts for greater personal growth."

Annie Heisey is an artist and educator living and working in her native city of Pittsburgh, PA.  She earned her MFA from Boston University in 2007. Heisey's work has been shown nationally including exhibitions at the Boston Center for the Arts, Site:Brooklyn Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA. She balances her studio practice with teaching at various institutions. 
www.annieheisey.com

Exhibition installed through the month of September. Open hours to be posted later.

Laced, a solo exhibition by Kate Roberts, contemplates the mortality of people and the spaces they exist within. Inspired by the environmental impact of the mining industry on western Pennsylvania and the surrounding landscape of Braddock, Roberts’ clay dust installations investigate our perception of this changing terrain.

Through a combination of disintegration and filtration, clay dust images recede and emerge from layer to layer. These moments of fragmentation found between act as metaphor for change, impermanence, and a device for reinterpretation. Distorted and ghostly, the installation results in a fleeting, fragile reminder of the consequences of nature, time, and circumstance.

About the Artist:
Kate Roberts is native of Greenville, SC. She received both her MFA and BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2015 and 2010 respectively. She has traveled extensively and completed Residencies and Internships at Art Centers around the world including Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, La Meridiana in Italy, Cite International des Arts in Paris, Project Art in Massachusetts and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts.

Her work has been exhibited in museums such as the Tampa Art Museum, Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, PA and Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY and included in major exhibitions such as Scripps Ceramic Annual and Ceramic Top 40. Most recently she completed a large in situ ceramics installation as part of the Parcours Ceramique Carougeois Biennial in Geneva, Switzerland. She has lectured at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI. She currently resides in Memphis, TN and is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Memphis.

She says of her work, "My practice is a meditation on time and its role in the decay of objects and memories. Inspiration is drawn from historical objects, the architecture around me, or a personal relationship. My processes are repetitive and labor intensive; I draw, construct, and weave using materials to depict fleeting, fragile moments and to examine the temporary physicality of an object, space, or idea. Accumulation and deterioration; solidity and transparency; entrapment and protection; order and chaos are material and organizational polarities that cause the work to teeter on the edge of viability in a perpetual state of in-between. This push and pull, back and forth, parallels our relationship with the natural world. Nature bares life, nature takes life away, humanity resists, but nature in the end has the final say. And without question the cycle begins again. In questioning the consequences, I create work to find the beauty and the unrest in this temporal state."

www.katerobertsceramics.com

Opening reception:
Saturday, August 3rd 6-9pm
Free and open to all
Additional viewings by appointment only at unsmoke@gmail.com

Nicholas Volpe’s solo exhibition, Be Careful, explores the contrast of how the audience perceives, interacts with, and reacts, to artwork and how the audience ascribes definitions of art. The work consists of both sculptural furniture-objects and sculptural objects for which value is perceived by the community as a whole. For this exhibition, value is defined as individual attitude and subjective worth assigned to the art. When we begin to interpret value, we use our senses to explore the quality of the object, the materials that compose the piece, the place it resides, the function of the object, the cultural and social implications, the trends and matters all the way down to who is in attendance.

Using his background in manufacturing Volpe uses components of visual language that includes tension, contrast, unity, rhythm, and balance to define objects within the space. The value of these objects and their attributes, according to their aesthetic, is derived from the viewers engagement, and is cast in sentiment and personal experience.

However, individual experiences and values may also compete and contrast, and some with consequences that endanger others. Who decides which of these defines art and how should it be experienced and applied? The choice is yours to decide whether or not to engage with the work and explore your own value sets.

About the Artist:
Nicholas Volpe graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a BFA in sculpture and a secondary concentration on woodworking and furniture design. He moved to Pittsburgh in 2014 and began a career in the visual arts, such as working as a technician, fabricator, blacksmith, and designer. For the last several years he has owned and operated Temper and Grit, a design studio based in the neighborhood of Homewood that conceptualizes and builds architectural pieces, sculptures, and furniture for the businesses and residents of Pittsburgh. His work leans on the history of Pittsburgh and the manufacturing that is inherent to a city of such industrial renown. Much of the artwork exhibits modern fabrication methods such as welding, brake forming, and plasma cutting. Additionally, it explores the depth, complexity, limitations, and craftsmanship of using materials such as steel and wood. By exploring the line between art and craft he finds value in the space between form and function.
www.temperandgrit.com

Opening Reception: Friday, July 12th, 6-9pm
Free and open to the public

Additional viewings by appointment

New Works by Su Su and Jessica Alpern Brown

Su Su and Jessica Alpern Brown met at an event in 2017 and bonded over a shared belief that artists’ supporting each other is both powerful and meaningful. This exhibition showcases two contemporary, Pittsburgh-based artists that share a mutual admiration and a space to strengthen one another’s practices.

About the Artists:
Su Su
Born in Beijing, China, Su Su began painting at the Central Academy of Arts & Design at the age of 12. In 2011, Su Su received a full scholarship to attend graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama, where she completed her MFA in 2015. In the fall of 2017, Su Su was honored to receive a nomination for Pittsburgh’s Emerging Artist of the Year Award. In the summer of 2018, Su Su was nominated for the Eben Demarest Trust Award and also had her solo exhibition "Between the Lines" presented at Bunker Projects. Her paintings were featured in publications such as ARTPULSE Magazine (2018) and JUXTAPOZ (2018). Currently Su Su makes paintings full-time and further develops her professional studio practice.
https://www.artbysusu.com/

Jessica Alpern Brown
Jessica Alpern Brown comes from a diverse background driven by curiosity. She started her career as a photographer in the United States Navy stationed in Japan, followed by a position as a forensic photographer for the state of Texas. Deciding it was time to move away from the bureaucratic structure, Brown joined the crew of a sailboat and worked as a navigator and handyman for the next few years. Returning home in the wake of a family illness she discovered the subtractive art of paper cutting and a desire to be connected to the larger artistic community. Through her work with the Brooklyn Museum, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and now as the Gallery Programs Manager for the Pittsburgh Center for Arts & Media, Brown supports artists and her art practice through the use of her eclectic skill set.
https://www.jessicaalpernbrown.com/

Opening Reception: June 14, 6 - 9 pm
Gallery open: June 15, 21, 22, 28, 29, 6 - 9 pm
Closing Reception: June 30, 12 - 4 pm

Morphology, the debut solo exhibition by artist Stephanie Martin, explores the study of forms, shapes, and arrangement of parts of organisms in order to determine their function, development, and how they have been shaped by evolution. Here, Martin exhibits biomorphic expressionistic forms using low fire stoneware and ink drawings. The forms represent new worlds that range from a cellular level to a macroscopic planetary scale. The fabricated ecosystems are a representation of her perceptions and experiences of life familiar to Earth and yet an entirely new place. As an abstract reflection of biological forms within alternating scales, Martin's work focuses on dualities present in life and utilizes comparisons of attraction and repulsion. The overall processes involved with clay and ink drawings are a significant part of her practice, as they function as a way to express and reflect on personal experiences. She wants others to experience an evoked sense of living from these crafted worlds. In effort to achieve a symbiotic biomorphic form, Martin creates ecosystems implementing a variety of techniques with carving and drawing different textures, building hollow forms, implementing a variety of line work, and layering colors. These combinations of process take on a new life and evolve throughout her artistic practice.

Morphology opens Saturday, May 4th 6-9pm
Reception is open and free to all
Gallery hours tbd

About the artist:
Stephanie Martin is a secondary art teacher and emerging artist working in the medium of ceramics. She creates biomorphic expressionistic forms using low fire stoneware.

Martin fabricates a new place to experience that does not have an organized time of past, present, and future. These ceramic worlds were developed to gain freedom from the harsh realities of our world. During this process, she is able to escape into the world she is creating. As an art teacher of young aspiring artists she influences and guides others through many different challenges and difficulties as they are on a progression through life. Individuals grow in ways that reflect their past environments. Her work is to experience and withdraw from our environment and simultaneously relates to what our environment says about us. Martin controls and manipulates the medium of clay to manifest symbiotic relationships present in life for others to understand.

Unsmoke Systems is hosting a 10th anniversary show of Will’s Gift and its awardees.

Every year since 2008 this cash award has gone to a stellar Western Pennsylvania artist who - at the time at least - was unheralded or unrepresented by a local or national gallery. Haylee Ebersole, Laurie Trok, Mia Tarducci, Fabrizio Gerbino and Alexi Morrissey have been among those chosen. Come see a wide array of work by some of the regions best artists.

Opening Reception - Saturday, April 6th, 6-9pm
Gallery will be open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings through the month of April, or by appointment made at dconrad02@gmail.com
Additional speaker and musical guest events to be announced later.

Will’s Gift is named in honor of Kiski professor William Turley one of the finest teachers ever to grace a Pittsburgh classroom. His humility before his craft, his generosity and his belief in the inherent quality of his students - many of whom came from unheralded backgrounds - speaks to the best in all of us.

American artists Dee Briggs and Jason Boone are exhibiting all new work in their first exhibition together here at Unsmoke. Both trained as architects, the pair will install small scale work in our Braddock Avenue gallery and several large scale pieces throughout Braddock.

Jason Nelson Boone was born in 1979 in King City, Missouri. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Kansas State University in 2003 and came to Pittsburgh to practice architecture with Bohiln Cywinski Jackson Architects. No longer practicing architecture, Boone currently lives in the Regent Square neighborhood of the City of Pittsburgh and owns Urban Tree, a company well know for making exquisitely crafted furniture from felled urban trees. As a sculptor, Boone has exhibited regionally.
www.jasonnboone.com

Dee Briggs was born in 1968 in Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. She received a Masters of Architecture degree from Yale University in 2002 with undergraduate studies in architecture at the City College of New York. Briggs currently lives and works in Wilkinsburg, exhibits nationally and has taught in the schools of art and architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.
www.deebriggsstudio.com

Opening Reception: Saturday November 17, 4-8pm
Artists in conversation: TBD
Closing Reception: Sunday March 24, 12 noon - 5pm

Pittsburgh Subculture is part of the artist's 10 year journey into the lives of young adults who have chosen to live outside of the mainstream of society in the City of Pittsburgh.

The members of this subcultural group often refers to themselves as ‘Punk’, ‘Crust Punk’ as well as ‘Travelers’ within the larger group.

The images presented are from a point of view that is sympathetic to the subject's perspective to gain insight as well as an understanding of the youth living in this distinctive culture. Within her work, Zsuzsi looked to capture the metaphors and themes in life that are universal to us all. Her hope is that the images will present a more compassionate view of youth coming into adulthood outside of the accepted cultural norms.

The work represented in Pittsburgh Subculture is selections from from three portfolios; Lost in Pittsburgh, New Urban Class and Dreams and Wishes.

About the Artist:
Zsuzsi Matolcsy's early work was as an artist photographing environmental portraits of people in front of their place of work, home or public space. She did this type of work for 20 years. Returning to graduate school she was challenged to take a more personal approach to her subjects.

She decided to search out people in the Crust Punk community. It was a group that she'd been interested in for a while. Being accepted within the community was difficult at first, for numerous reasons, but after 4 months of searching she found a group living in the Mt.Oliver that opened up to her and her ten year journey into the crust punk community began. She followed this group through several Pittsburgh neighborhoods.

In 2016 Zsuzsi published her first book; Lost in Pittsburgh: A Journey into Youth Subculture.
Lost In Pittsburgh

An installation of hand made lighting created with an assortment of found and reclaimed plastics and signage fragments.

Copeland says that "my work embraces the collective memory, whether real or imagined, about a place, a time, or a community. With, “What is left behind,” these disregarded fragments are re-imagined in a new way, while paying homage to the past. “What once constituted furniture, a sign, a structure, is now reduced to its bare elements: wood, metal, plastic, paper.” Employing skills gathered while working in the fine art and sign industry, I re-contextualize these items in an attempt to maintain the value of the history they contain. I gather inspiration from typefaces, advertisements, and color palettes from the 19th to mid-20th century. My work takes the form of large-scale installations, collage, painting, sculpture, and illuminated 3-D works; all produced using reclaimed materials. Through a process of layering boards, paper, plexiglass and typography, my works are made to create an atmosphere that evokes a sense of nostalgia for a past era, but in a distinctly new form. I am constantly awed by the possibilities of what might unfold with the materials I discover."

About the Artist:
Ron Copeland is a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh. He grew up in Canton, Ohio, where he worked at a variety of printing companies and sign shops. During this time he independently studied art history, design, and photography. He mentored with a large format photographer, who helped sharpen Copeland’s skills behind the lens as well as in the darkroom. His early work primarily focused on a photography project stretching nearly ten years, documenting the blighted postindustrial Rust Belt landscape. His explorations from Gary, Indiana to Braddock, Pennsylvania, and cities in between, exposed him to a shockingly vast amount of disregarded materials that would drastically impact his view on “waste.” Later, these types of materials would become the canvases of his printed, painted, and sculptural works. What began as a passion of reclaiming bits of history to incorporate into his work, has now developed into a large network of symbiotic relationships to salvage and re-purpose scrap and overstock from a number of stores, galleries, sign shops, and printing companies, as well as the Warhol Museum, the Akron and Cleveland art museums. Ron Copeland’s mantra of reuse has become a celebration of sustainability with the potential to continuously experiment and expand his craft as “new” materials come his way.
http://roncopeland.tumblr.com

Angela Biederman

Opening Reception: Friday, September 7th 6:30pm – 9:30pm
Admission is free and open to all

FOUR PIERS is an installation of large-scale sculptures that reference structures on Brunot Island at the west end of Pittsburgh on the Ohio River. Constructed in the gallery, these formations transport a singular experience in the landscape to one that is independent of its original context.

The exhibition will remain up through September 28th and can be viewed by appointment.

About the artist:
Angela Biederman works on a large scale creating mixed media installations and does sculptural work in clay. Her work isolates and imparts physical features and the emotional energy of sites and structures in the landscape, thereby magnifying their presence and the responses they can provoke.

Angela earned an MFA in Ceramics from Kent State University and a BFA in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has taught ceramics at the Community College of Allegheny County, Sweetwater Center for the Arts and Kent State. She has also worked in galleries outside of personal exhibitions, and has organized and curated numerous shows. She has exhibited nationally in Providence, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and at the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts; and regionally in Pittsburgh, Kent, Cleveland, Columbus, and at the Huntington Museum of Art. She is also currently exhibiting at the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Rankin, PA as one of the Alloy 2018 artists. She is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.

http://angelabiederman.com
angelalbiederman@gmail.com
@angelabiederman

Left Behind.

These words sink in and stay, in a way that we carry them in ourselves, in abandonment by love, by family, by self. To leave behind life, homes and roots and keep moving, to be left and stand still.

Artists Ana Armengod and Katie Krulock use their personal experiences to express the extent of these words. Through film, photography and illustrations, made with repetition, extreme detail and a lot of emotion.

About the artists:
Ana Armengod is a Mexican illustrator and film artist. Her work is tied with nature and its death, as well as the small details that get lost in the bigger picture. Focused on accentuating the overlooked and unimportant, she gives magnitude to human reactions, history, emotion, and the environment while questioning how these things push us to evolve.
www.flickr.com/photos/humanleather

Katie Krulock is a photographer based in Braddock, PA. She is intrigued by human's innate curiosity about the world in which we live juxtaposed with parts of earth left untouched and forgotten.
www.katiekrulock.com/

Opening reception: Saturday, August 4th 7-10pm
This event is free and open to all
Exhibition on display through August 26th by appointment only. Please email unsmoke@gmail.com to arrange a viewing.

During the month of July, the gallery will be the site of a partially restored home, an exhibition in transition, an open-studio for the painting of several large portraits, and a space to share and converse on the topics of home and memory.

Come share a memory & photograph of home with artist Misty Morrison, during the opening reception on July 7th, 6-9pm or during the open gallery hours of July 8th-11th & 21st-22nd, 9am-5pm.

In exchange, Misty will give you a drawn portrait of yourself.

More about this exhibit:
https://clereviewbooks.com/2018/04/30/the-river/

About the artist:
Misty Morrison is a visual artist. She earned her BFA in Painting in Old Lyme, Connecticut from Lyme Academy, College of Fine Arts (a Beaux Art style art academy). She focused on learning to paint the human figure. She earned her MFA in Printmaking in Athens, Ohio from Ohio University (an interdisciplinary studio program with a strong emphasis on community and expanded practices in the arts). Misty works from her studio in the home she shares in Shaker Heights, Ohio with her partner, the writer and philosophy professor, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, and their cat Atlas.

Misty has recently taught water-based media at Cleveland Institute of Art and lithography in workshop as a visiting artist at Ohio University for the celebration of the retirement of Mary Manusos. Her recent work includes printmaking in an official portfolio for The Southern Graphics Council International (Conference 2018); an edition of large-scale, hand-pulled stone lithographs for the permanent collection of Ohio University’s Printmaking Department (2017); two large-scale, oil-based portraits invited for Lyme Academy juried exhibits (2017, 2018); and a solo exhibition of eight large-scale portraits of domestic drama at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts called “Oblivion” (2017).
http://www.mistymorrison.com/

By Casey Droege Cultural Productions

Tickets at www.sixxate.com

Food by:
Black Radish

Featuring:
Paper Buck
Sean Carroll
Julie Mallis
Clayton Merrell
Real/Time Interventions
Dominique Scaife

The 2018 season of SIX x ATE is made possible by Harvest Financial Corporation

Logo by Christina Lee

This is an all ages event, but please be aware that there may be language that some consider inappropriate for younger audiences. While kids are welcome, we cannot provide childcare during events and ask that you or a caregiver accompany kids 13 and under at all times.

Work by Ray Klimek
Opening recption: Saturday, June 2nd 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Carbon shuttles between analog and digital images as it traces the transformations of carbon as an elemental substance. The images employ diverse mediums to suggest a variety of forms and materials from landscapes to stars to abstractions, from cinders to carbon paper. Moving from macro to microcosm, unsettling perceptions of depth and creating an ambiguous sense of scale, they explore the vagaries of photography as a form of “light drawing” in relation to changing chemical and digital processes.

About the artist:
Ray Klimek is a photographer and writer whose work addresses the value of underused and overlooked places and objects. Ray was born and raised in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. He received a BA in English from Wilkes University before moving to New Brunswick, New Jersey where he received an MA in Literature. He taught English Literature and Composition at Rutgers University for 20 years before enrolling in the International Center of Photography’s General Studies program. He later received an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts. In 2005 he received an ICP/Tierney Foundation Grant enabling him to become a visiting artist at the University of Wales Newport, where he worked on a project documenting the abandoned coal fields of the South Wales mining valleys. He has shown this work in venues in the United States and in Great Britain including the Sordoni Gallery at Wilkes University, the GPF Gallery in Newport, South Wales and the University of Glamorgan’s Zobole Gallery in South Wales. He has shown recent work at the Roy G Biv Gallery in Columbus Ohio, the ARC Gallery in Chicago. and the Kitchen Table Gallery in Philadelphia. In addition to his photographic work he has published articles in Exposure and Raritan Quarterly. He has taught in several photography programs and was an assistant professor at Ohio University from 2008 until 2015. Currently teaching at Middlesex College, he lives with his wife, the writer Meg Hall, in Highland Park, NJ.
http://rayklimek.com/home.html

Exhibition is up through the month of June, 2018
Gallery will be open Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays, 6-10pm
and by appointment @ 732-589-4786

SARIKA GOULATIA & MIA TARDUCCI

Opening Saturday May 12th 7-9pm
Exhibition will remain on display through May 27th, available for viewing by appointment.

Past PCA Emerging Artists of the Year honorees Goulatia and Tarducci explore an ever changing political, social and personal existence in UNFOLDING. Each artist approaches the concept through their own lens, reflecting the individuality of the artist’s practice. Goulatia's social and political activism pairs with Tarducci’s personal and professional “evolutions”. Collectively the work speaks in broad strokes from the philosophical to the practical, the globally conscious to the deeply internal, resulting in visual reflections on life unfolding.

Please join us as we take a glimpse into the UNFOLDING practices of artists Goulatia and Tarducci this mother’s day weekend.

About the artists:
Sarika Goulatia is a visual artist best known for her large-scale sensory sculptures and installations. Goulatia’s work is diverse in theme, material, process and approach; it is united conceptually and tactically in its reflection of an unambiguous idea.

Goulatia transforms ordinary objects into compelling works of art that reflect her own determination and fortitude through explorations of various mediums, techniques, and genres. Her works range from sculpted ceramics to cast bronzes and aluminum, from extensively drilled/nailed wood to assemblages using found objects. Each piece is infused with vitality, enthusiasm and an investigational approach.

She is driven by an irresistible impulse to make labor-intensive work. Despite the incredible labor involved in her process, the completed work indicates that all questions and contradictions, especially those within the maximum and the minimal, disappear into a quiet place that invites contemplation. Noted for a dense accumulation of multiple materials, her sometimes ephemeral, often poignant, environments create immersive experiences. Goulatia does not shy away from the challenging, the difficult, or even the disturbing in her installation-based practice, but she masks her intent through her onerous, labor-intensive techniques.

In addition, as a diaspora artist her work stems from the intersection of her dual national identity; the synergy of this distinctiveness allows her to break through cultural barriers. She was born and raised in India and currently is based in Pittsburgh. Her extensive practice—predominantly in sculpture and installation—touches on the frailty of human experience, often drawing on personal challenges and socio-cultural issues.

Goulatia has had solo exhibitions at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and was named the Emerging Artist of 2016. She has exhibited work in group and solo shows through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust for the International Society of Sculptors Conference (2016) and as part of the India in Focus Festival (2015). Important group exhibitions include shows at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (2016), The Mine Factory (2013 and 2015), the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s Annual at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2016), and Double Consciousness at the Mattress Factory Museum (2007).

Goulatia was the recipient of the prestigious 2017 Carol R. Brown Award Creative Achievement Award, provided through the Investing in Professional Artists grants program, a partnership of The Heinz Endowments and The Pittsburgh Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Sally Gehl, Samuel Rosenberg and Elizabeth Jones Award in Humanities and Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2006). She has been awarded residency/exhibition opportunities at Neu Kirche and the Alloy at Carrie Furnace.
Sarika-Goulatia.com

Mia Tarducci was raised in Newport, RI and currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She studied Art History at the University of Siena, Italy and minored in an art concentration at Georgetown University where she received her BSL in 1997. A decade later she began pursuing a career as an oil painter.

Since showing her work publicly in 2009, Tarducci has had solo exhibitions each year and has been in group exhibitions. Her work has been selected by jurors from the MoMA, Guggenheim, Brooklyn Museum, MoCA Cleveland, Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museums and Mattress Factory for exhibitions, which include both museum and gallery settings in Pittsburgh, Dallas, and New York City.

Recent notable achievements include being named the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Emerging Artist of the Year in 2014, and winning the Leon A. Arkus Award as part of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 2016 Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
miatarducci.com

Opening reception Saturday, March 31st, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

In the Presence of a Moment is an exhibition of new work by Maggie Mullin O'Hara that considers our shared experiences of pain and suffering, both of the body and of the mind. It contemplates through experiential, social, historical and demographical insights. The work explores the idea of interconnectedness between the physical body and experiences of psychological balance and imbalance. It proposes the capability to reverse pain into pleasure, privacy into publicity, and restraint into release, or more radically, to collapse any distinctions in between. It challenges the potentiality of this realization through the public disclosure of ones individual vulnerabilities, fears and anxieties, to be recognized and understood intimately, universally and as a whole. It begs that together we endure, feel, and cry… for you, for me, for her, for him, for them, for us.

About the Artist:
Maggie Mullin O'Hara is a multimedia artist from Pittsburgh, PA, currently based in the South, specifically, Columbia, SC. Her work exists as a hybrid form, borrowing from the traditions of the mediums of video, photography, performance and installation. It explores ideas of interconnectedness between the physical body and experiences of psychological balance and imbalance while proposing the possibility of fulfillment through the indeterminate. It challenges the trans-subjective nature of our roles in the experience of the work, as well as the potentiality for indetermination as change -- as having the capability to reverse pain into pleasure, or more radically, to collapse distinctions between the two. The work proposes the ultimatum of indeterminacy leading towards an artistic, affective production, and away from any possibility of being limited, distinct or settled. 

Maggie received her Master's of Fine Arts in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015 and her Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Photography from Point Park University in 2013. She currently serves as adjunct Professor of Digital Video and curator/manager of the FAB gallery within the Visual and Performing Arts Department at South Carolina State University.

This exhibition is up through April 28th, 2018 by appointment

Structures of Transition, an exhibition by Angela Biederman and Jonathan Schwarz, is an installation of large-scale ceramic and mixed media sculptures that reference the local landscape and architecture being altered over time. Drawing from features specific to Pittsburgh, the artists attempt to capture the narratives and histories that occur as these structures change due to environmental factors and the impacts of human use and non-use. By showing the artists’ interpretations of these structures in a contained, interior space, they are re-contextualized with their states of transition intact.  With Unsmoke’s Gallery Nextdoor serving as a raw exhibition space also in a state of transition, and its own layers of history exposed for the viewer to experience and investigate, the artists hope to convey a “ruins within ruins” quality between the structures inside the space and the space itself; as well as the resilient, albeit incomplete, stories belonging to the structures of and within.

Structures of Transition coincides with NCECA Pittsburgh 2018: Cross Currents: Clay and Culture.

About the artists:
Angela Biederman is a sculptural artist whose primary medium is clay. The natural world has always been the principle influence of her work, because her experiences within it reveal incomplete, uncanny, and enigmatic narratives that reflect personal and human endeavors. The presence of actual human impact on these incidents adds to her connection to them, and possible interpretation or understanding of them. In her sculptural work, Angela attempts to maintain both the aesthetic of these incidents as well as the experience they impart.

Angela has worked in clay for over fourteen years, and recently began working on a large scale and integrating mixed media to create installations.  She earned her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Ceramics from Kent State University in 2016, and her BFA in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010.  She has taught ceramics at Kent State as a graduate teaching assistant, as an Adjunct Instructor at the Community College of Allegheny County, and at Sweetwater Center for the Arts in Sewickley, PA. She was also the Curatorial Assistant in the School of Art Galleries at Kent State, and has curated and organized numerous exhibitions both during and outside of her academic studies. She has exhibited nationally at NCECA’s Providence, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee conferences; locally where she resides in Pittsburgh; regionally in Kent, Cleveland, and Columbus; and at the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  Her solo exhibition Body in the Landscape of the Mind was held at 707 Gallery in July 2017; and Interdependent, a collaborative exhibition with Jonathan Schwarz, was held at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in the spring of 2017.  She is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh.
http://angelabiederman.com
@angelabiederman

Jonathan Schwarz has always been interested in the way things are put together, or more importantly how they can be taken apart.  Working with his hands has been an essential part of his life; whether creating artwork or remodeling an early 19th century home.  A curious mind led him to study ceramics and sculpture. His recent works are an investigation into the act of making objects that interrelate and rely on one another to exist; drawing inspiration from both the natural and architectural world. Schwarz received his B.F.A. from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in Edinboro, PA, and an M.F.A from Kent State University in Kent, OH.  Schwarz has shown nationally from Texas to Oregon to Pennsylvania. He currently works as a studio artist and owns and operates a kiln repair business in Pittsburgh, PA.
@jon_schwarz

Opening Reception: Friday, March 16th, 6-9pm
Exhibition on display through April 28th by appointment only.

This exhibition confronts the compounding ideological shift of human influence and its impact on geologic time. The works of artists Lauren Skelley Bailey, James Barker, Patrick Coughlin, Alanna DeRocchi, Shanna Fliegel, Mel Griffin, Crystal Morey, Brooke Noble, Lisa Truax, and Merrie Wright, use clay and mixed media to ask the viewer to imagine their surroundings void of architecture, agriculture and technology. Radioactive elements, plastic pollution, deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions, the extinction of species, mining, raised sea levels, and even the abundance of the domesticated chicken, are among the few reasons for geologists to consider the possibility that we no longer live in the Holocene epoch, but rather the Anthropocene, an age where human activity has permanently changed the course of climate and dominated natural systems. Through installation and sculpture this exhibition aims to both shed a refreshingly optimistic light on the Anthropocene, while also revealing the apocalyptic undertones of this era.

How will humans prevail in this new time? This exhibit, in conjunction with NCECA Pittsburgh 2018, CrossCurrents: Clay and Culture, will no doubt be a conference that calls to action. Catalyzing awareness is more important than ever as our society moves forward into unknown political, social and environmental territory. Cultures have survived for centuries, collectively progressing in order to meet their needs, habits and traditions, but not without compromise. These “symptoms” of culture will be confronted by the committed artists through the portrayal of architecture, endangered animals, changing geology, and observations of nature’s adaptation to culture, or vice-versa.

Shanna Fliegel, the organizer of the show, first heard of the Anthropocene while binging on TED radio hour. As a clay artist motivated by themes surrounding human culture and its dissonance with nature she was inspired by author Emma Marris who “wants us to broaden our definition of nature to one that embraces urban and wild spaces in order to learn and protect and care for it.” Shanna envisioned a show that gave a variety of impressions and perspectives of this new geologic time.

Opening Reception: Friday, March 16th 6 - 9pm

This exhibition will also be open to the public Mon. 3/12 - Tues. 3/13 2-6pm, Wed. 3/14 10am-5pm, Thurs. 3/15 2-6pm, Fri. 3/16 2-9pm, and Sat. 3/17 10am-1pm.

A solo exhibition of new works by Gina Favano.

Opening reception on Saturday, November 11, 6-9pm. Free and open to all.

Outsider artist and musician Gina Favano combines elements of folk art, sculpture, and embroidery to create an evocative visual language that is characterized by anthropomorphism, magical realism, and wordplay. Themes of illness, the destruction of the environment, and spirituality found in nature, reoccur and intersect within her paintings. She uses traditional sign-painting techniques to create weather-resistant totems on wood reminiscent of the talismanic imagery of Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs.

In this recent body of work, she incorporates paintings and found objects to explore themes of mortality and the examined life. A koan-like grammar of symbols punctuate her paintings to convey a cryptic shorthand.

Favano says that "I'm interested in exploring my compulsions, giving them freedom of expression without analyzing where they're coming from until it's completed. I usually don't know what something is going to look like until after I've made it. I'll start with germs of ideas that I find compelling, and then explore how they relate to one another. For this show, I've been influenced by the oracle of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and the imagery that's attached to the notion of endtimes.  Also of critically endangered species and how they're oftentimes harvested for medicine making. And of being sick for a really long time, and where these seemingly dissonant scenarios overlap. I'm grappling with the idea of these beasts of burden, and of how the world at large feels like it's sick and needs to be cared for."

About the artist:
Favano plays bass and sings in experimental Pittsburgh music trio Come Holy Spirit.  Originally from Philadelphia, she divides her time between living in Pittsburgh and off-grid in a Minnesota boathouse with her husband and their two dogs.

http://www.ginafavano.com/
https://www.instagram.com/ginafavano/
https://comeholyspirit1.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ginafavano/

In Accuracy is a group exhibition of new works by April Friges, Ben Schonberger, Krista Wortendyke, and Samira Yamin.

The opening reception for this exhibition is Friday, October 20th, 6-9pm. This event is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be up for viewing over the month of October. 

-----------------------------------

Photography is forever connected to reality, while imagery remains trapped in a fragmented construct capable of agitating our perception of representation.

Reality and representation function very differently, yet both rely on camouflage to exist without question.  For as long as artists have been utilizing the photographic medium to reinforce reality, others have used it to yield legitimacy. In In Accuracy, the mechanics of accuracy are being challenged by the exhibiting artists searching for ways to obscure the contextual and emotional boundaries of photography.

About the Artists:
April Friges is a conceptual artist based in Pittsburgh, PA, whose photographic and sculptural work is created in a darkroom with photosensitive paper, light and chemistry.  Utilizing traditional photographic darkroom papers and three-dimensional sculpting materials, she creates works that examine the intersection between image and object, developing a complex and imaginary language with the mediums in exploration. 

April’s work has been shown in galleries and museums such as LAXART, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Printed Matter, MOCAD, and ForYourArt. She recently exhibited via Stephen Bulger Gallery in New York City at AIPAD’s 2017, The Photography Show and PGH Photo Fair. She is a recipient of the Creative Development Grant through The Heinz Endowments/The Pittsburgh Foundation, and also completed her residency at Mass MoCA in 2016.  Permanent public and private collections include The Museum of Contemporary Photography, BNY Mellon and the Duane Michals Estate.  April received her MFA in studio art from The University of California, Irvine, is the BFA Program Director and Assistant Professor of Photography at Point Park University.
www.aprilfriges.com

Ben Schonberger is a visual artist and lecturer of photography based on the north side of Pittsburgh, PA. Utilizing photography, appropriated imagery, collage, performance and sculpture his work examines the complexities of identity through long term social investigations and archive augmentation processes.

A 2017 Foam Talent, Ben has exhibited his projects nationally and internationally. His work is part of public and private collections including The Detroit Institute of Arts Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs and The Toledo Museum of Art. His self-published photobooks can be found in the MoMA Library, The Cleveland Museum of Art Library and The Arts Library at Yale University.

Ben received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2013 and currently teaches photography at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA.
www.benschonberger.com

Krista Wortendyke is a Chicago-based conceptual artist. Her ongoing work examines violence through the lens of photography. Her images are a result of a constant grappling with the mediation of war and brutality both locally and globally. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally with works in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her work has been featured on Chicago Tribune, Wired Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Globe. In 2016, her interactive website for Killing Season Chicago received a Communicator Award and was nominated for a Webby. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College in 2007 where she currently serves as an adjunct professor and teaching artist. Krista is also an adjunct professor at Loyola University.
www.kristawortendyke.com

Samira Yamin’s work explores the narrativization and representation of war through an interrogation of documentary war photography. Using repetitive, precisely articulated gestures, Yamin dissects, reorganizes, and often obliterates documentary images, resulting in a collision of representation and abstraction andthe confusion of objectivity and subjectivity.

Yamin received an MFA from UC Irvine and BAs in Art and Sociology from UCLA. She has had a solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Camera Club of New York, Metropolitan State University in Denver, and San Francisco State University. A recipient of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the California Community Foundation, Yamin has been an Artist in Residence at the Rauschenberg Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
www.samirayamin.com

Two Performances on Saturday, September 23

2:00pm and 6:00pm
Admission: Pay what moves you

Blurring the lines between visual art, music, and dance, Some Assembly Required will engage you in a process/performance of improvisation and co-creation. Two unique and adventurous events will combine the planned and the spontaneous to create a world premiere inspired by each new venue, audience, and work of art.

Beginning with a short dance with live cello and percussion music, this performance evolves through a lively, guided conversation with the performers about selected works of art. This discussion will generate the inspiration for improvisational movement and music that will be overlaid onto the existing dance structure. The performance expands and intensifies through the feelings and interpretations of the audience to culminate in a world-premiere performance that connects artists with audience and artwork.

Co-Artistic Director of Attack Theatre, Peter Kope elaborates on the distinct history and nature of these performances. “Some Assembly Required is more than the choreography and music. It is a philosophy of making and a creative practice that Michele and I developed over many years. Whether a classical sculpture, a contemporary painting, or an important piece of architecture; the artists respond authentically in movement and sound to the audiences’ interpretations.”

Co-Artistic Director Michele de la Reza adds, “In this process, each audience is different. Each artwork is different. Each performance is different. This is what makes Some Assembly Required so challenging and rewarding. Performing a work like this is risky and personal – and we’re not afraid to call it intimate – and that’s what makes it so thrilling for the audience and performers.”

Attack Theatre dancers Kaitlin Dann, Sonja Gable, Dane Toney, Anthony Williams, and Ashley Williams with Cello Fury’s Simon Cummings and percussionist, Ian Green will skillfully transform audience comments into an emotional journey of movement and music. Attack Theatre Co-Founders and Artistic Directors, Michele de la Reza and Peter Kope created the concept and choreography for Some Assembly Required, and Grammy nominated musician, Dave Eggar composed the original musical score.

http://www.attacktheatre.com/sar

The Industrial Sublime by Liz Ensz

Opening reception - September 9, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:

Liz Ensz examines the designed and found icons of the American character in search of our underlying values and our aspirations as individuals and as a society, presenting a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and commemoration. While disparate intentions inform these impulses- one to remember, and the other to quickly forget- each will materially describe our society to future generations.

 In his 1757 essay, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, written at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Edmund Burke defines his criteria for sublimity as astonishment, obscurity, vastness, infinity, terror, and power viewed at a safe and removed distance.

 The Industrial Sublime ruminates on the material and cultural legacy of the Industrialization, which gave way to modes of mass-production, standardization, surplus, and marked the beginning of an unprecedented consumption of natural resources and the invention of "trash." Astonishment, obscurity, vastness, infinity, terror, and power- These elements of the sublime are engaged in every aspect of globalized production, consumption, and disposal. The invisible network of fragmented matter in motion is the underlying structure of the Hyperobject economy, which each of us is inextricably entangled with.

About the Artist: 

Liz Ensz was born in Minnesota to a resourceful family of penny-savers, metal scrappers, and curators of cast-offs. She received her BFA in Fiber from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2005), and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013). With an interdisciplinary approach, her work presents a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and commemoration. At the heart of her practice lies a determined material engagement, scavenger impulse, and a sincere hope for the rethinking of the valuation of people, resources, the environment, and living things.

Ensz has exhibited her textiles and sculpture nationwide, including Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, IL; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; The Sub-Mission, Chicago, IL; and Goucher College, Baltimore, MD. She has been awarded residencies at The John Michael Kohler Arts at Industry Program in Foundry, Sheboygan, WI; Salem Art Works, Salem, NY: Playa, Summer Lake, OR; LATITUDE, Chicago, IL; and Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; and has been the recipient of City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Grant, The Creative Baltimore Fund Grant, The Clare Rosen and Samuel Edes Fellowship Semi-finalist Prize, The Gilroy Roberts Fellowship for Engraving, and The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Travel Fellowship.

For more information about Liz Ensz's work visit: http://cargocollective.com/lizensz

This exhibition will be on display through September 24. 

Cyclopean Stonewares and at the Coming of Night by Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes.

Opening reception - August 11, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:
Cyclopean Stonewares and at the Coming of Night exhibits works by Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes. As a collective, the 181 is interested in creating visual and performance architectures out of the sample merging and strangely hybridized “what ifs” of information.

About the Artists: 

Based in Newark, DE - Bend, OR - Eugene, OR - and Pittsburgh, PA the 181 is Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, and Jason Rhodes. For more than a decade the 181 has been site-sampling, digital sloshing, and material shape-shifting together.

Formative beginnings took place at an annually uncovered Venice Beach waste spout leading into the Pacific Ocean: there a performative intervention set the pace for ongoing observational practices and site stagings. Some selected exhibitions and collective gatherings include: For Lo Futurity, Novella Gallery, New York, NY - street, bridge, and trail side works while Artists in Residence at the National Center for Contemporary Art, Saint Petersburg, Russia - on stage for Or Why Bridges Are Like Whales, at Bowery Arts and Science, New York, NY - and international radio transmissions/singalongs for Swing Song Centripetal, Cose Cosmiche #3, Milan, Italy.

Utilizing projection-amplification feedback loops and various materials of natural and extra-natural (synthetic) amalgamations (including lasers, lichens, streaming-web, and volcanic rock), always there exists permeable presence in their work. The thing that motivates the 181 is difficult to singularly establish because, simply, there are so many unresolved points of departure they wish to explore. The most stable element of the 181 is collective trust - one that does not predict or pre-formulate the mirror-merger of their making(s).

On August 18th from 6-10pm, the 181 will be putting on a special one night performance, the nature of which is improvisational and jazz-like. Using varying instruments and materials, the group will create a light and sound continuum in which information is exchanged, repeated, reflected, and sloshed about the space. 

For more information about the 181 visit: brandonboan.work - abbydonovan.com

This exhibition will be on display through August 27. 

The Natural Being by Aimee Heinnickel, Tony Havrilla, and Brandon McDonald

Opening reception - July 8, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:
The Natural Being is a group exhibition featuring the works of Southwestern PA based, emerging artists: Aimee Heinnickel, Tony Havrilla and Brandon McDonald. Visceral mark-making joins precise realism for the extrapolation of the human experience and voyeuristic representation of the implications that our actions have on each other. Natural Being calls into question our reason for being and the systems we have put into place to cope with our existence and the effects they have on our identity. For further inquiries, please email tonyhavrilla@gmail.com. 

About the Artists: 

Tony Havrilla graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania where he received a B.A. in studio art with a focus in painting. In 2016 he was selected to participate in a “Master Class” instructed by Alex Kanevsky and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. His work has been shown regionally within the tristate area; having been juried into shows and publications by the likes of Andrew Salgado, Teresa Oaxaca, and Valerio D’ospina. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pa. Havrilla’s works illustrate the industrial and human constructed elements relation to wild animals in their natural habitats, attempting to understand the human condition and his own place within.

Brandon Mcdonald is an emerging artist from the Pittsburgh region. Using dry mediums, he works in the tradition of realism to discuss an array of contemporary subjects. Brandon is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Indiana, Pennsylvania. 

Mcdonald believes that in today's society there has been a shift in our beliefs about the degree and manner to which we should be connected with each other by technological means. The pressure of having a presence on social media, checking in on work, or simply maintaining constant communication through texting and phone calls shows our dependence upon technological devices. His work is an examination of individuals seen through the perspective of the devices they use daily. Mcdonald believes that human beings did not evolve to simultaneously process such vast amounts of visual information. The over-stimulation inherent in screen time affects the human being’s cognitive awareness and ability to retain information. This daily overload is deleterious to face-to-face communication, personal space, and physical and mental health.  To achieve the effect of the individual's reflection on the screen of their devices, white color pencil on black paper is used. Mcdonald’s work urges viewers to examine their own use of these devices and how their use is averting genuine engagement with other people and surrounding environments.

Aimee Heinnickel was raised in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, Heinnickel’s works are a visceral exploration of femininity. Graduating with a B.A. in Studio Art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she reveals personal female experience against media objectification and standardization of beauty strikethrough bold oil paint and collaged assemblages. Heinnickel’s work investigates the developing perception of the self, and definitions of womanhood in the 21st century. She explores her own ideas about femininity shaped through her developing identity. Examining imagery that relates to the impermeable nature of beauty, as well as, critiquing iconography that represents “timeless beauty.”

This installation will be on display through July 30

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Surface/Structure by Natalia Gomez and Kara Skylling

Opening reception - July 8, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:

The Natural Being

The Natural Being by Aimee Heinnickel, Tony Havrilla, and Brandon McDonald

Opening reception - July 8, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:
Surface/Structure exhibits works by Natalia Gomez and Kara Skylling. Both artists explore constructed and built objects. By exhibiting works within the context of raw, unrefined architecture, Gomez and Skylling aim to promote a reexamination of the existing structure, surface, and built history of the space. New works will be created in response to the exhibition space and primarily made on site. 

About the Artists: 

Kara Skylling is an artist currently living and working in Pittsburgh, Pa. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Influenced by interaction with place, movement through space, and engagement with environment, her work explores pattern and process found in urban landscapes and architecture through the creation of deconstructed compositions and images using line, form, and color with a focus on process, repetition, and materiality. 

www.karaskylling.com

Natalia Gomez is a Pittsburgh-based artist who received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Through sculpture, installation, and photography, Natalia exposes the conceptual facets of the commercial building processes such as the economy of construction and the aim for perfection. Utilizing construction materials and methods, she draws form the built environments she has both lived in and passed through as a means of uncovering the hidden craft of labor and politics of the domestic space.

www.cargocollective.com/ngomez

This installation will be on display through July 30

Nice Painting - Ryan Lammie

Opening reception - June 9, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:
Nice Painting, a solo exhibition by Pittsburgh native Ryan Lammie, is a departure from some of Lammie’s previous work. Work that usually restricts its palette to monochromatic finishes now takes on a more curious and abrupt showering of colorful layers. Lammie’s work has always relied on domestic objects as a kind of starting point or origin for each piece that then becomes encased in various textures and treatments. In Nice Painting, the monochromatic work does make a return, but only as documented through photographs. The object depicted in each photograph has also been re-incased by new layers of oil, plaster and various materials. These objects along with a selection of two-dimensional paintings will anchor the exhibit.

About the Artist: 

Ryan Lammie is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, and photography. Lammie uses material interventions to re-establish an object's continued narrative. These interventions alter the object's original function, stripping the object of it's previous utility and suggesting a new or extended narrative.

Lammie has been inspired by artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Wols (A.O. Wolfgang Schulze), Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Jean Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, Louise Nevelson, Rashid Johnson, Chris Ofili, Mark Bradford, Leonardo Drew, Yayoi Kusama, Mickalene Thomas, and Julie Mehretu.

Lammie attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY where he studied painting and graphic design. He was awarded the Elizabeth Stokel Battell Fellowship Award and attended the Yale Norfolk Residency, in 2011. Lammie's work has been featured in the North East Issue (1101) of New American Paintings, the 103rd AAP Annual Exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and the Pittsburgh Biennial.

Opening reception - May 12, 6-9pm
Free and open to all

Artist Exhibition Statement:
"At what point does my body reach its limit? Or did I cross that threshold months ago and not even realize it? In the past 7 months, my body has rejected my transplanted heart over 4 times forcing me to undergo a series of rigorous immunosuppressive treatments. My cells, after 24 years, still see my heart as a foreign object. With each new drug, I am simultaneously healed and destroyed internally. At what point does my body and its normal functioning become so distant that it becomes unrecognizable?

Originally a process that functioned as a therapeutic activity, I practice meditative papercutting that allows me to fall into a hypnotic mental state which distracts me from physical ailments. Constant hyperawareness of my own body’s functioning (or malfunctioning) drive me to incorporate overwhelmingly obsessive patterns and techniques into the work. Ritualistic physical movements within the work on a large scale were once welcomed as a challenge but have now transformed into an obstacle due to my weakened state. The more I put into the work, the more I take from my body.

I believe materials to be like little bodies - susceptible to decay and strength just as we are. Layering materials and processes, I allude to disease and destruction brought on by long term medical treatment and medication. Painting, cutting, burning, stretching, and tearing during my practice allows materials to work with or against one another."

- Gianna Paniagua

About the Artist:
Gianna Paniagua was born in New York City. At the age of 14 months she was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and became the recipient of a heart transplant. Gianna received her BA from the University of Pittsburgh. She started her MFA - sculpture studies at California College of the Arts in 2016. She currently works out of San Francisco, CA.

Her papercutting sculptures have been exhibited at many locations in Pittsburgh including Wood Street Gallery, The Westmoreland Museum of Art, and 707 Gallery. She has worked bi-coastally in Pittsburgh and San Francisco as she collaborated with organizations in the Bay Area such as SF MOMA, Square, and the Kala Institute for Printmaking. She received the Grand Prize award for the VSA Emerging Young Artist Program in association with The Kennedy Center which honored artists with disabilities. She exhibited in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and was part of a nationally touring exhibition for this work.

Because of the deep emotional connections the work has with her health experiences, Gianna continues to use art as a way to involve herself in the medical community. She has lectured and taught at the Cleveland Clinic, partnered with Genentech in San Francisco to create art revolving around transplantation, and hosts classes for her practice of Meditative Papercutting for students and chronic illness patients.

April 2017
Opening reception April 8, 6-9 pm: free and open to all

An exhibition of work by Ryder Henry of spaceships, architectural constructions and oil paintings.

When describing There is More to Explore Ryder Henry references Cities In Flight, a story written by James Blish in the 1950s. Blish imagines the old cities of Earth (or at least the old cities of the United States) being hurled out into the cosmos by antigravity machines which generate force fields that simultaneously protect the spaces they encapsulate while repelling everything beyond their bubbles. The contents of these antigravity bubbles are perfectly guarded from the ravages of time.     Drawing from the preservationist ethos of Cities in Flight, Ryder's latest architectural model landscape combines the old brick towers with the new blast offices and antenna buildings. The new buildings are interspersed within the grid of the old ones. They do future science things- generate, absorb and transfer energy above the rooftops and through the spaces between what was already there . Blast offices are atomic generators. Antenna buildings are especially tall, so they're good at receiving and transmitting.  And spaceships are spaceships and they are far away.  They have been far away for so long that they are indigenous to space. They are Indigenous Space Machines.

There is More to Explore will be on display through April 30 by appointment only.

A collaborative installation by “Dear Volunteers”, an artist collaborative founded by Tra Bouscaren and John Schlesinger. 

Closing reception February 24th, 7-10pm. Free and open to the public.

“Installation Art is not a medium for us, but rather an approach through whatever media necessary” states Bouscaren. Bouscaren and Schlesinger take the world as a projection of found object/images through which they must act and re-project. Concerned with asking, rather than answering, questions of relational teleology their work weaves together the mysteries of unknown histories as they emerge through projection-assemblages of found things.

Orphaned objects form the material base of their practice. They re-animate artifacts of toxicity, destruction, addiction and nostalgia as video-soaked spectacle. Incorporating demolition rebar, lab equipment, neon, trash cast in epoxy, monumental hand-carved styrofoam sculpture and other junk-object assemblage, they program interactive video-mapped environments which envelop this material substrate in a video bath built out of live surveillance feeds taken from within the gallery itself.

Their work has been called, “Doom-Pop”, a label they haven’t tried to deny.  Their methods and materials reference certain points in the spectrum of popular culture that they recognize as indicators of anthropocentric toxicity, destruction, addiction, and nostalgia. Their found object choices carry a kind of Beuysian import in terms of how they reference topics of concern on both literal and symbolic levels.

About the artists:
Tra Bouscaren is a post-disciplinary artist and Lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Trained in Philosophy and Art at Yale and Penn, he is finishing up his PhD in Media Study at Buffalo. His work has been featured at the Museum für Naturkunde of Berlin, Victor I Fils Gallery in Madrid, Centre Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Fort Mason Center for Art and Culture in San Francisco, Hallwalls in Buffalo, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, and New York's Lincoln Center. He has been represented by N2 Gallery in Barcelona since 2007.
www.tra-bouscaren.com

John Schlesinger is a photographer turned sculptor. Over the long course of his career, he has won a Rome Prize, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, the Village Voice, Aperture, Bomb Magazine, Art News, and the New York Times. Collected broadly, Schlesinger's output can be found at the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hamburg Kunsthalle, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MOMA. 
johnschlesinger.net/

This installation will be on display through February 24, 2017. Viewing by appointment only.

What makes a work of art monumental? Is it the size of the object? Is it the scope of the idea?

With the mid-twentieth century Abstract Expressionist American Art Movement large scale art works became the expected practice for studio artists with artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning defining what was possible for their generation. In the decades that followed the scale of a work has seemed always both to reflect back to the paradigm shift of Abstract Expressionism and to help define a work of arts importance. Artist such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Eva Hess, Nancy Holt, and Richard Serra all have made work monumental is scale and monumental in concept, and such work clearly responds to many of the ideas that were opened up by the artists of mid twentieth century America as well as American culture itself.

The show Monumental brings together the work of Alexandra Watrous, Joshua Hogan, Ron Copeland, Stephanie Armbruster and Shawn Watrous, five Pittsburgh based artist who are attempting to continue to explore the role that monumentality plays in contemporary studio art practice.

About the Artists:
Stephanie Armbruster
Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Stephanie Armbruster moved to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon University where she received her BFA. In addition to working as a studio artist, Stephanie has a background in graphic design and street art. These influences are evident in the elements of mark making, typography and collage prevalent in her work. In 2010, Armbruster began working in encaustic, the ancient practice of painting with hot wax. Inspired by the permeable boundaries between memory and fiction, Armbruster’s works depict pivotal moments of transition and abstract references to time and place. Stephanie’s work has been shown nationally including exhibitions with the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, James Gallery, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Print Making Society, and others.

Stephanie approaches her work as a series of edits to an ongoing monologue in which the boundaries between memory, fiction and dreams are permeable. An attempt to illustrate the purely subjective portions of memory – the private experiences that we feel and sometimes share, but which evaporate the moment we try to articulate them. Some paintings suggest tone, while others create structure, depict maps and plans, or introduce characters. Each artwork represents an individual element of a larger construct, made more or less apparent through varying degrees of abstraction. Presented together as a collection, her paintings recall pivotal moments of transition through the abstraction of symbols and layered references to time and place.
www.stephaniearmbruster.com/

Ron Copeland
Ron Copeland is a Pittsburgh based artist originally from Canton, OH. He considers himself a self-taught artist but his graphic design studies at Kent State are a clear influence on his work. He has become well known for radiant lamps made from recycled plexi-glass and assemblages constructed from discarded wood. His interests have focused on salvaging materials from abandoned spaces of the Rust Belt region. Taking fragments of what remains of houses or buildings he recreates the space of a life left behind. He has shown his work nationally and is represented by Borelli-Edwards Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA and Galerie F in Chicago, IL.

Ron’s work embraces the collective memory whether real or imagined about a place, a time, or a community.  What once constituted furniture, a sign, a structure, is now reduced to its bare elements: wood, metal, plastic, paper. Employing skills gathered while working in the fine art and sign industries, he recontextualizes these items in an attempt to maintain the value of the history they contain. He gathers inspiration from typefaces, advertisements, and color pallets from the 19th to mid-20th century. His work takes the form of large scale installations, collage, painting, sculpture and illuminated 3-D works, all produced using reclaimed materials. Through a process of layering boards, paper, plexiglass and typography, his works are made to create an atmosphere that evokes a sense of nostalgia for a past era but in a distinctly new form. He is constantly awed by the possibilities of what might unfold with the materials he discovers.
http://roncopeland.tumblr.com/

Joshua Hogan
Joshua Hogan was born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and received his BA from Carlow College (now Carlow University). While at Carlow, Hogan began a series of abstract paintings inspired by his participation in the program, Semester at Sea. His journey across the sea, to countries such as Egypt and Libya, laid the foundation for the fluid shapes he continues to create today. In 2001 Hogan launched BoxHeart Gallery and began exhibiting fellow emerging and mid-career artists whose artwork exemplifies the diversity and originality of contemporary art and fine craft. In 2007 his abstract paintings shifted from an earthy palette to a chromatic palette when color exploded onto his canvases. His paintings have shown nationally including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and Fallingwater as well as internationally in the Love Art Fair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Hogan’s paintings have also appeared in several film productions including Bloodlines (TV Series), The Perks of Being a Wall Flower (Feature Film), and Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl (Feature Film). Recently, The Tower at PNC Plaza acquired several of his paintings for the corporate headquarters art collection. Currently, Hogan is working on paintings that will be exhibited this December at Aqua Art Miami during Art Basel in Miami Beach.
www.joshuahogan.com

Alexandra Watrous
Alexandra Watrous was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania and received a BFA from Edinboro University in Ceramics. Her time spent living in New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay area influenced much of her early abstract ceramic work. A decade ago she began working in a broader sculptural practice making objects and installations with materials including wood, metal, yarn, plastics, and seeds, as well as objects gathered from nature.  She has shown her work regionally and nationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Mattress Factory and Space Gallery among others.

Alex’s work explores themes of identity, family, loss, the feminine, and the wonder of our human connectivity.  She finds a balance between traditional formal presentation and a contemporary approach to materials that speaks in dialog with the last 50 years of sculpture.

Shawn Watrous
Shawn Watrous was born in San Francisco in 1977 and was raised on the San Francisco peninsula surrounded by ocean, the bay, mountains, and urban sprawl. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and his MFA from Kent State University, Kent Ohio in 2013. He currently resides in Western Pennsylvania and has taught as an adjunct professor teaching painting and drawing classes at Kent State andan Art Appreciation at Penn State University New Kensington. Recently he began a position as the Associate Preparator at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Shawn is an active member of the Pittsburgh arts community, participating in numerous art shows at a number of galleries and exhibition spaces, including a recent solo show at Boxheart Gallery. He has participated in shows nationally including New York and Seattle.

In his studio practice Shawn investigates what it means to speak of identity and the self in our contemporary moment of an information saturated culture. The elements in his painting, the marks, shapes and images are about memory and identity as well as emotion, home, place of origin, time and distance. The work is made through a multi-media process and is based in the layering of three visual motifs: gestural expressionism, geometric abstraction and photo-based representation.
www.shawnwatrous.com/

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15th 6-9 pm
Free and open to all
Exhibition is on display through October 30th, by appointment only

"We may be wage-enslaved Americans forced to move, at the absurd national rate, to a new "home place" every four years. We may be old men climbing on the wrong damned bus. We may be elk at heart, forced to live like sheep, or salmon forced to live like carp. The blood still begs direction home. No matter how circumstance has dealt with us, or how disenfranchised or placeless we've become, we will never be dispossessed of the right to feel at home in these little blood-filled bodies, on this reeling planet, as often as we can, as deeply as we can, any goddamned God-blessed place we possibly can."
-David James Duncan

Artist Statement:
The self portraits started just after I finished my degree at The Royal Drawing School, but the truth was I had been looking for me for a long time before that. I was initially hooked by the physicality of drawing my own portrait over and over, a face that like a river never seemed to be the same twice. Slowly I started to wonder what a person was. Around the time that I was starting to dig deeper I had a molar that had gone bad pulled, and the hole that it left in my jaw allowed me to feel a part of my skull, my jaw, for the first time. It shook me to really be able to understand myself as both an inside and an outside, and I started drawing in the parts I knew were there but couldn't see, my bones and organs. This still didn't explain what really makes a person a person adequately and over time I've added in elements of memory, myth, and place.

This show is a culmination of my search for both what a person really is and when they can say they are home. Like David James Duncan, I had come to the conclusion that my own body was my only home, but since I've moved back to the Pacific Northwest I'm not sure that answer is perfectly true. I am a body, but I also am from somewhere, and no matter where I am, that place comes with me. I am a collection of bones, an outside visible skin, bad teeth, water, fables, Salal, river teeth, tall grass, memories, and lungs. And so are you, in your own way.

About the Artist:
Nhatt Nichols was born on top of a mountain in north-central Washington State. Raised by survivalist parents, she grew up with a the ability to watch and observe the world around her as a permanent outsider.

Nichols graduated from The Royal Drawing School in 2011 with an MFA equivalent degree in drawing. After graduating she left London, ending a decade of living abroad to travel in her home country. After living in Brooklyn and Martha's Vineyard, she settled in Port Townsend, Washington where she is a member of Corvidae Press and teaches at The Port Townsend School of the Arts.

www.nhattnichols.com

Exhibit will be on display through September 25th by appointment only

Witch Hands and Beer Cans is a collection of new work that draws from found objects, déjà vu, and experiential wives tales; concerned with events that take place in-between the expected and unexpected.

About the artist:

Sarah LaPonte is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Braddock, PA.

www.sarahlaponte.com

“The displacement of people refers to the forced movement of individuals from their locality, environment and occupational activities. It is a form of social change caused by a number of factors, the most common being armed conflict.”

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2015 alone, more than 65 million people were displaced from their homes by conflict and persecution — this is the largest number since records have been kept. Globally, this is 1 out of every 113 people living today. Perhaps difficult to imagine, it is important to know that 90% of the forcibly displaced are displaced in poor or middle-income countries, not in countries that most of us know to be home.

With over half of the country’s population displaced — 11 million people — Syria is home to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. It is estimated that 4.5 million Syrians have fled across borders to neighboring countries and that over 6.5 million are internally displaced. At the same time, neighboring Iraq has been overwhelmed by people fleeing Islamic State-held territory. A recent increase in violence, beginning in 2014, has resulted in the displacement of over 3 million people.

To be displaced means to be forced from your home. It means having to flee for fear of your life — often in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on your back. It means having to make a decision between your home and personal possessions, and the risk of being killed. It means picking up your life and that of your families and fleeing an impossible existence for an uncertain future.

But what does this actually look like and who are the millions facing life as a refugee or an IDP (internally displaced person)?

In April of 2016, Maranie traveled to Jordan and Iraq in an attempt to answer some of these questions.

In Jordan she worked with two medical NGOs — Global Outreach Doctors and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) — inside the Zaatari Refugee Camp and then on her own in the outlying Mafraq tent camps. From there, she joined Doctors Without Borders/MSF (Medecines sans Frontieres) in Northern Iraq — Kurdistan — where she traveled to three villages in critical need to document the work of MSF physicians as well as the conditions faced by civilians returning to the homes that they had fled in 2014 when the Islamic State took control of the area.

This collection of photographs and words is an attempt to put a human face with oft heard, staggering statistics and phrases such as “migrant crisis and “world’s largest humanitarian disaster.” It is an attempt to humanize and make real a population of people that for too long have and continue to be dehumanized.

About the artist:
Maranie Staab is a documentary photographer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work focuses on people and especially those in marginalized parts of society — whether domestically or abroad. She photographs to dispel misconceptions, to underline the common humanity that unites us all, and to further understanding of a world outside of our own. Her work has taken her throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and to the Middle East.
http://www.maranierae.com/

Opening reception will include an artist talk, live music, refreshments and conversation.

Excavating History is an artist collective that creates exhibitions, publications, installations, and educational projects that link historical narratives to contemporary life. This August, Excavating History artists will create projects throughout Braddock, PA. The locations for their works include the historic bank building now occupied by Heritage Community Initiatives, the first Carnegie library, vacant lots, evolving green spaces, and a former convent. These artworks will be open to the public beginning August 4th. In addition, a series of linked workshops will be conducted with area youth that will result in handbound books that reflect the youth’s explorations of Braddock history and architecture. In October, Present Tense will be exhibited in Chicago at the Chicago Art Department.

Topics the artists are working with include the idea of a 'common' wealth (what we share with one another, and how we each make the other stronger); the hidden histories of the women behind the men who built Braddock; how common weeds and native plants reflect the healing and growth of Braddock’s community members, the labor history of the area; the architectural/cultural legacies of Braddock churches and the idea of a library as a ‘temple.’ Our shared histories leave traces throughout our architecture, landscape and language, and shape our culture. Excavating History artists engage these narratives as an inspiration for artmaking and, importantly, as a platform for all of us to imagine new futures.

Special events include:
AUG 4: Preview of the artworks, reception and fundraiser for the Heritage Community Initiatives

AUG 5: Workshops for area youth at HOST/Good Shepherd School, in partnership Heritage Community Initiatives

AUG 5 Gallery opening at Unsmoke Systems

AUG 8 Workshops for area youth at HOST /Good Shepherd in partnership with Heritage Community Initiatives

OCT 14 Exhibition presentation at Chicago Art Department

Participating artists:
Christine Bespalec-Davis is the lead organizer of Present Tense. She is a Chicago based artist whose work integrates historical and personal meaning into sculptural and installation based works. Christine is the Programs Manager at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago and is a faculty member of the sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent works include projects at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and curatorial work as well as sculptural installation at Beauty and Brawn Gallery in Chicago. She was chosen for Curator’s Choice at the Pilsen East Artists Open House in 2008 and exhibited for 10 years at the Around the Coyote festival in Wicker Park. Christine’s current work is exploring her cultural ancestry within the contemporary American landscape.

Rebecca Keller teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is the founder of Excavating History. She has created these research driven projects in historic sites and landscapes throughout the US and Europe. Her awards include two Fulbrights, an American Association of Museums International Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Illinois Arts Council. Exhibits include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the International Waldkunst Biennial; Portland Art Museum and many others. A book about her projects: Excavating History; When Artists Take on Historic Sites was published by Stepsister press. Her writing has received the Betty Gabehart prize, a Pushcart Nomination, and was a finalist for the 2013 Chicago Literary Guild Prose Award.

Moki Tantoco is an educator and artist based in Chicago, IL. Shegraduated with a BFA in art education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Active in community based education programming throughout Chicago, she encourages exploring socially engaged art practices through interdisciplinary means in public art, performance, installation, and bookbinding.

Liene Bosquê has exhibited her work internationally at museums, nonprofit galleries and public spaces in Brazil, Portugal, Turkey and United States. Recently she was an artist resident at Workspace Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and participated in NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists in NYC, and exhibited at PS1.

Amber Ginsburg teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and creates projects that insert historical scenarios into present day situations. She works in collaboration with other artists, but also with people who are experts through their lived experience. Her research based practice employs her roles as an artist, social scientist, and curator. Exhibitions include Luther College Gallery, Indiana University Northwest, Lawrence Art Center, Lawrence KA. Roman Susan Gallery, Chicago, IL and many others.

Katie Hargrave is a professor at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. She received her MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa, MA from Brandeis University, and BFA from the University of Illinois. Her work has been shown at DIY spaces, university galleries, nonprofits, and festivals. She is a member of the collaborative groups “The Think Tank that has yet to be named” and “Like Riding a Bicycle.” Her work is responsive to environments, develops over time, and is cocreated with participants as well as collaborators.

Opening reception: Saturday, July 9, 6-9 pm

Works by Kara Skylling, Jeremy Tarr and Robert Weaver span drawing, painting and sculpture. Through carefully executed marks of a brush, ruled lines and built and assembled materials; Non-Material Effects of Material Processes exhibits works exploring notions of indefinite space, process and deconstructed elements and the exploratory nature of experience and its ultimate interpretation.

About the artists:

Kara Skylling is an artist currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Influenced by interaction with place, movement through space and engagement with environment; her work explores pattern and process found in urban landscapes and architecture through the creation of deconstructed compositions and images using line, form, and color with a focus on process, repetition and materiality.
www.karaskylling.com

Jeremy Tarr is a fifth generation Pittsburgh native who received his Bachelors of Fine Art in 2013 from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania concentrating in Printmaking and Sculpture. As of Fall 2016 he will begin his Masters of Fine Art at Syracuse University New York in Studio Arts.

In his work, materials take on specific contexts through the exploratory nature of experience, and as time begins to take hold, these contexts shift and develop. Nothing is ever solidified. The penumbra between the finite and the infinite is where his work lies. The viewer’s imagination is invited to stretch beyond the banality of our being-in-the-world. Materials and relics are confronted with their archetypes, taking on new experiences and pointing toward something monolithic. The clarity of their original roles remains, in addition to playing a part in something more. The transitional interplay between what is known and unknown, within and beyond, is where the possibility of interpretation begins, and from where my work is constructed.
http://cargocollective.com/jeremytarr
 
Robert Weaver was formally trained in photography, print making, and sculpture. In the years since, he has grown an attraction to painting as an ideal medium to explore various tropes. His current works look at the possibility of indefinite space - re-arranging the space over and over again - creating and breaking rules along the way to arrive in a gridlock of competing elements. Forms are distilled in reminisce of this physical world then reintroduced in the liberated space painting provides. The works become a fractured physical catalogue of experiences and thoughts.
http://weaver.brainisgod.com/

Exhibition is on display through July 30th by appointment only.

Opening reception: Saturday, June 4, 6-10pm

An exploration of the human condition in the new millennium, YOU/U is a group show of installations that incorporate sculpture, sound, and digital technologies to create interactive experiences in a gallery setting. Since the introduction of portable devices, we are able and required to interact with objects that satisfy broader human desires for connectivity and consumption. “Networks,” both literal and metaphorical, are readily available at any moment, and the connection to them renders technology our most consistent domain. Though self-expression becomes increasingly desired in post-industrial society, our identity seems to dissolve in the face of an unprecedented consumption of media and manufactured goods. YOU/U questions the ways that emerging technologies are incorporated in our environment, either by will or necessity, and the effects they have on our identity.

About the Artists:

Ben Quint-Glick is a mixed-media artist with a background in architecture and fine arts. He explores the built and manufactured environment by integrating found objects and industrial materials into his installations through a process based practice.
www.benquintglick.com

Gianna Paniagua is a papercutting sculptor who explores themes concerning the dualities of the human body: strength vs. fragility, growth vs. decay, and unique vs. patterned.  Her experiences living as a heart transplant recipient spark examinations into the ability of the body to rapidly decay and the effects of layered medical treatment.              
www.giannapaniagua.com
                              
Zack John Lee is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the ways we interact with the world and environment around us.  Lee uses sound and ordinary electronics to evoke an immersive participatory experience in the viewer. Lee has a history in music and visual art.
www.zackjohnlee.com

Exhibition runs June 4-26, 2016. Viewing by appointment only.

Opening reception: Friday, May 6, 6-9pm

You Are Warming Weather is a solo show of mixed media drawings and textiles by Katie Ford. These new works explore the mental spaces we inhabit and the tools used to cultivate them.

Ford’s current practice moves between media as she explores the play of utility and emotionalism. Her series of Preparedness Blankets, textile objects made from commercial moving quilts and handmade patchwork tops, synthesizes this desire for depth of functionality. Hovering between bedding down or packing up and moving on, the blankets push these uncertain options into comfort rather than conflict. They are equally functional, and perhaps equally illogical.

The accompanying works on paper incorporate ink drawing, repetitive mark making, washes of color, and collage. These layers accumulate to create vivid spaces, some grounded by structures or horizons, others floating and amorphous. This work expands on Ford’s longstanding interest in social environments, as she questions how we build relationships with and within the spaces we share.

About the artist:

Katie Ford is a visual artist currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied printmaking and drawing. She has exhibited her work nationally and has been awarded artist residencies with organizations including the Charlotte Street Foundation, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Cabin Time, and Have Company.

Exhibition runs May 6-29, 2016. Viewing by appointment only.

April 8- April 29, 2016
Exhibition Opening and Reception April 8, 6-9 p.m.

Thing Change is a solo exhibition of work by the artist Haylee Ebersole. It features an array of vaporous yet dense sculptural objects that float between the familiar forms of man-made objects and the unruly formations of organic matter. 

Ebersole’s current work utilizes unorthodox materials, such as crystallized gelatin, to create abstract sculptures.  Drawing inspiration from the many objects, motifs, and images that infiltrate our daily lives, her sculptures resemble a collection of archaeological finds which call to mind various organic matter, geological formations, and man-made objects.  She incorporates everything from mass-produced storage containers and trash to architecture and Pinterest trends to derive form, material, and texture.  As a whole, Ebersole’s work emerges as a field of cryptic yet familiar objects that envisage her own kind of anthropocenic landscape, one in which she contemplates the traces our human existence may leave behind.

Haylee Ebersole is an artist living in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania.  She received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Printmaking from Metropolitan State College of Denver and a Master of Fine art in Printmaking from Ohio University, Athens. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at spaces such as Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Center for Visual Art in Denver, and Menningar Tjarnarborg in Iceland. 

https://hayleeebersole.com/

Join us and Thin Man Sandwich Shop on Sunday, April 24 at 7pm for a screening of the 1934 classic pulp fiction detective movie, The Thin Man, with dinner from the Thin Man Sandwich Shop. Complimentary 30s era adult beverages and Thin Man seltzers for the prohibitionists in attendance.

Wear a smoking jacket or silk nightgown if you prefer the smooth comforts of the period.

Tickets available at Eventbrite.com.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/thin-man-movie-night-tickets-24240421754?aff=es2

Anamnesis: Perceptions of Memory, Family and Self
On display April 1st - 3rd
Opening Reception: April 1st, 2016 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Presenting the work of: Dominique Hildebrand, Ren Rathbone, Michelle Montana, Ryan Maine, Kels Pennell, and Emily Faller

In Anamnesis, memory, family, self, and self-image work together to develop an idea as to what it means to belong in a specific setting. This setting is loosely placed time; it is in flux, constantly evolving between individuals, ideas, and distinct spaces. The works examine how memories are recalled and how they degrade, while ideas of family are scrutinized with acute awareness, and interpretations of the self and self-image are identified and examined. This look at small moments of life and experience take into consideration what it means to be an individual within the context of contemporary society.

Dominique Hildebrand
Dominique Hildebrand is a photographer from Rhode Island. She is currently living in Pittsburgh, PA where she studied photojournalism and history at Point Park University. Dominique enjoys working with unique people who make our world interesting and are essential to their community. Dominique is the president of Point Park’s Photography Collective and vice-presidents of the NPPA student chapter, a photography editor for the student run newspaper, The Globe, and a photography lab assistant. Dominique's work has been published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.
http://www.dominiqueanne.com/

Ren Rathbone
Rathbone is a conceptual artist currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. Their work grapples with gender and sexuality, and how the two shape and are shaped by our lived experiences. Ren attempts to examine in what ways we are kept down, and the means in which we push forward and resist in response.
http://www.renrathbone.com/

Michelle Montana
Montana is a visual artist who incorporates multiple mediums into her work, including photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, and fashion design. She is currently obtaining her B.F.A. in Photography at Point Park University and will graduate in the Spring of 2016. Her work exceeds the camera, as she expresses her concepts through a variety of mediums. Her goal is to provoke an interactive experience in all of her work, primarily through installation, design, and experimentation.
http://www.michellemontana.com/

Ryan Maine
Ryan Maine is a Pittsburgh based visual artist, currently obtaining his BFA in photography at Point Park University. Ryan centers his work on the meanings of happiness, love, sadness, friendship and regret - while portraying how they are felt between oneself, friends, family and strangers. His work attempts to understand, and visually exhibit, what it is to experience life with a detachment from normally related mental processes along with themes, such as depression, anxiety and other mental disorders.
http://www.ryanmaine.com/

Kels Pennell
Kels Pennell is a 22 year-old Pittsburgh visual artist and photographer. Her current work focuses on memory, loss, and the effect of time on the human psyche. She is currently finishing a B.F.A. in Photography and a B.A. in Multimedia at Point Park University.
http://www.knikolephoto.com/about/

Emily Faller
Emily Faller is a photographer based out of Pittsburgh, Pa. She grew up in Aliquippa, Pa. and is currently pursuing a BFA in photography and a minor in entrepreneurship at Point Park University. On top of being a student, Emily also owns her own business, Emily Faller Photography. She started her business in 2013 and focuses on portraiture. Recently, her interest in fine art photography has flourished, and she is focusing on encompassing her feelings symbolically.
http://www.emilyfallerphotography.com/

Special Event: Sunday, November 15, 4:30-6 pm

We are proud to host the Pittsburgh screening of ELLIS, with TEDxPittsburgh, followed by a discussion panel on immigration and Pittsburgh.

ELLIS awakens our collective memory, taking you back to the early years of Ellis Island through the experience of one immigrant.

Set in the abandoned Ellis Island Hospital complex and using JR’s UNFRAMED art installations, ELLIS tells the forgotten story of the immigrants who built America. It is the story of the ghosts of our country's past, the individuals who fled poverty, discrimination, and dictatorships, for a chance at a new life and eerily foreshadows the plight of those who currently seek the same opportunities and safety in this country and other parts of the world.

The short narrative film stars Academy Award® Winner Robert De Niro, is written by Academy Award® Winner Eric Roth, and is directed by the artist JR.

The event is FREE, but registration is required: https://www.showclix.com/event/ellis-screening-discussion

For more information, please visit the film’s website: http://www.ellis-themovie.com/.

Opening event: Saturday, November 7, 6pm - 9pm
On display through December 1, 2015

Late Harvest is a two-person exhibition of recent work by Rudy Shepherd and Paul Chidester that celebrates alternative notions of abundance when conventional ones are called into question. Against the backdrop of historically extractive industrial processes, opportunities now exist for redefinitions of value that require drastically alternate ways of seeing. Shepherd and Chidester put forth their unique visions in the context of these ongoing conversations.

This exhibition presents a series of recent ceramic sculptures by Rudy Shepherd called the Healing Devices that follow the launch of his Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber project this summer at the 2015 Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. In these works, Shepherd employs small sculptures as containers for negative emotions and conduits to better, kinder worlds.  Having scatological, toy-like and phallic appearances, these small-scale works are meant to evoke prehistoric tools and archaeological artifacts commonly found on display at natural history museums.

Also on view are new paintings by Paul Chidester that follow his solo exhibition, Tectonica, at Future Tenant, Pittsburgh in September 2014. Taking subject matter culled from his psychogeographical urban walks, these new paintings re-envision such non-sites and attempt to place value on a variety of commonly overlooked landscape features. His idiosyncratic depiction of these familiar, prosaic subjects is ultimately about reframing the perception of such places through a form of enchantment.

Rudy Shepherd received a BFA from Wake Forest University and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Solo exhibition venues include Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; Location One, NYC; and Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC. Group show venues include The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICA in Boston, MA, The Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse, NY; Triple Candie, NYC; the Swiss Institute, NYC; MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; the Contemporary Museum, Balti­more, MD; the Bronx Museum of Art; and the Queens Museum of Art. He received a fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park and was an artist in residence at the MoMA PS1 International Studio Program, the Jacob Lawrence Institute for the Visual Arts, and most recently a Process Space Artist in Residence on Governors Island with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. He lives in NYC and State College, PA, where he is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University. He is currently represented by Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC.

Paul Chidester received his B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at the University of Colorado, Boulder and M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Penn State University. His work has been shown at the Chicago Cultural Center; the Painting Center, New York; VIAFARINI, Milan; the Royal Hibernian Academy of Art, Dublin; John Post Lee Gallery, New York; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago; The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; Future Tenant, Pittsburgh; and is represented by Zg Gallery, Chicago. Reviews of his works have appeared in ARTFORUM, The Chicago Tribune, and WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio. He has received a Heinrich Boll Foundation Award; a Ballinglen Foundation Award, Ireland; a Studio Art Centers International (SACI) Consortium Residency, Florence; and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award.

For more on the artists:
rudyshepherd.com
mixedgreens.com
paulchidester.com    

Recent work by Elizabeth Potenza

Opening: October 10, 6-9pm
On display through October 24, 2015

Waiting... For a Signal is a solo exhibition of several of Potenza's large-scale, three-dimensional, works. Work will include cast iron, CNC embroideries, hand-blown glass Cathode Ray Tubes  (CRTs) with archival home video footage, and traditional handcrafted wares.

On display during the opening reception only will be the work - In the Interest of Space and Time - a piece comprised of three hand-blown cathode ray tubes, through which the artist explores her family's disintegrating home videos. Powered by the guts of 1960's black and white TVs, the hand shaped glass screens bend and warp the footage, much as time skews our own recollections.

http://www.elizabethpotenza-studio.com
In The Interest of Containing Space and Time- Vimeo

Opening Event: September 12, 6-9 pm
Free and open to all

Exhibition on Display: September 12-30, 2015

Within/Without brings together a group of artists concerned with the built environment and how it represents and defines human culture.  Curiosity, wonder, ambivalence, and critical reflection link these image makers in their efforts to highlight the mundane as an essential aspect of who we are.

The artists in this exhibition each have their own set of relationships to the landscape and built environment, but share several important concerns.  Notably, all of these artists picture the built environment without picturing people; the creators and users of the built environment are absent.  In this way the artists in this exhibition are working subjectively within the landscape, but without a physical presence for themselves or others. 

And yet, despite the absence of images of people, these artists’ acts of making are acts of resistance, and acts of affirmation, in the sense that they contest received ideas about place and persist in producing culture rather than only consuming it. It is a kind of criticism from within, one informed by and in reaction to what has come before, and one that ardently supposes the meaningful nature of making and invention in the face of an unimaginative, un-reflexive and conformist culture.

Finally, each of the makers in this show present a kind of poetics of place, a vivid engagement with the pictorial and semiotic aspects of representation. Beyond documentation, these artists juxtapose the observed and the invented, transforming the built environment into worlds of abstracted, shifting spatial relationships that unfold slowly, revealing the constantly evolving relationships of people and place.

Artist Biographies

Amze Emmons 
Amze Emmons is a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary artist with a background in drawing and printmaking. His work at Unsmoke space will explore the haptic graphics of printed lo-fi street signage when deployed in three-dimensional space. This is an experiment in place-making that purposely confuses index and context to make the familiar strange. 

Emmons received a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University and a MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He has held solo exhibitions in, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, among other locations. His work has been included in group exhibitions in innovative commercial galleries, artist-run spaces, and non-profit institutions. Emmons has received numerous awards including a Fellowship in the Arts from the Independence Foundation; an Individual Creative Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Arts Council; and a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. His work has received critical attention in The Huffington Post, Itsnicethat.com, Coolhunting.com, New American Paintings, as well as many other publications. He is currently an Associate Professor at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. Emmons is a member of the feral institution, Printeresting.org.

Kevin Haas
The prints, installations, and artist’s books of Kevin Haas depict familiar but overlooked aspects of the built environment.  He focuses on the sprawling commercial developments found just off highways, the construction cranes and glass condos transforming city skylines, and the clutter and detritus found throughout the urban landscape.

Since 1995 his work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Canada. He has been included in exhibitions at Davidson Galleries in Seattle, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Jundt Museum in Spokane and Deluge Contemporary Art in Victoria, BC. He is a recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship, and was an artist in residence at the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium in 2010 and 2012.  He currently resides between Toronto and Washington State where he has taught courses in printmaking, book arts and design at Washington State University since 2000.

Sean P. Morrissey
Sean P. Morrissey’s current research focuses on the contemporary American landscape dealing with land use, identity, and consumerism. He emphasizes areas of banal architecture and ornamentation in the suburban landscape to enhance the feeling of sameness or a basic space. The repetition of indistinguishable architectural and decorative elements mimics the monotonous and overwhelming nature of the suburban terrain and the need for adaptation. This unimaginative replication of housing contradicts the desire to achieve a unique identity by providing a false sense of individuality through predetermined design choices. Morrissey utilizes traditional and non-traditional techniques to create his works on paper and large-scale paperworks

Morrissey was born and raised on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. He holds an M.F.A. in Studio Art from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a B.F.A. in Studio Art: Two-Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State University. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as the International Print Center New York, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, Dedalo Center for Contemporary Art (Italy), and the Biennale Internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières (Québec). His work is included in several permanent and private collections, such as the New York Public Library, The Sheldon Museum of Art, and The Weisman Art Museum. Sean lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas where he is Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Arkansas.

Nicholas H. Ruth
The work of Nicholas H. Ruth pictures aspects of the built environment that symbolize the overriding needs and wants of contemporary American life. Ruth depicts the ubiquitous in our visual landscape, in the form of communications technology such as satellite dishes and cell towers. These objects represent a relentless march toward access to people and information, substituting connectivity for connection.

Originally from Philadelphia, Ruth did his undergraduate work at Pomona College, and received his MFA in Painting from the Meadow’s School of Art at Southern Methodist University. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including shows such as the 9th Triennale Mondiale de l’Estampe Camalieres, 2nd Global Print 2015 Portugal, the Pacific States Biennial, and the Atlanta Print Biennial.  He has received recognition for his work from the Dallas Museum of Art, The New York State Council on the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Ruth lives and works in western New York State, where he is a Professor of Art at Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Lenore Thomas
Lenore Thomas is a mixed-media artist whose current prints and paintings explore abstract forms that layer upon each other to create imagery suggestive of landscape. She is simultaneously interested in the flatness generated by color and the sense of space and perspective created by the abstracted forms. Her artwork has been shown in group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Estonia, China, Argentina, Portugal and Malaysia. She has been a resident fellow at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, Anchor Graphics in Chicago, Illinois and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2014 she was awarded a Flight School Fellowship, a professional development program that works with Creative Capital and is sponsored by the Richard King Mellon Foundation. Thomas received her MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA in Religious Studies and a BA in Fine Arts from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is currently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her husband, Mark, and their dogs, Vader and Wiley. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh.

Opening Saturday, August 8, 6-10

If One Won’t Another One Will is Stephen Grebinski’s first major solo show in the Pittsburgh area. His work is comprised of an ever growing and changing ecosystem of salvaged, created, and appropriated images. Portraits of men are juxtaposed with Balkan and Appalachian landscapes, relics from abandoned homes, and appropriated photographs of antique interiors. These gestures aim to subvert the photograph’s ambivalence and to reveal complicated intimate histories within these often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life.

Stephen’s work exists between documentary and performance, driven by an impulse to reveal and test the fractured, hidden world beneath our intentions and experiences. He is drawn by situations existing between the narrative potential of the photographic image and its silence—the in-between, the unseen, that which resists being photographed.

The photograph is an index of something that exists within itself, within the subject, or between my subject and me. History loses meaning. Identities and relationships are in constant flux. Abandoned spaces become totems, playgrounds, or palaces; a suburban girl, a warrior. The Midwest becomes the site of a falling empire. But even with these designations, nothing is fixed.

These images are actively recycled in installations, artist books, and video to reaffirm and redefine their meanings. This protects these images, experiences that may have never happened, through this constant inquiry. The work seeks to create a stagnating but beautiful world, a way perhaps of both redeeming and of asserting the power of the lost.

About the Artist:

Stephen was born in Dayton, Ohio and made his way east for film school at The University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Filmmakers, as well as an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. Recent exhibitions include The Hill Street Country Club in Oceanside, CA, The Week Gallery, in Bogota, Colombia, University of Kansas Art + Design Gallery, and The Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. His book and zine works are featured at Printed Matter and BGSQD in New York, and Art Metropole in Toronto. Stephen currently lives and works in in Pittsburgh’s Uptown/Soho neighborhood.

www.stephengrebinski.com

In addition to the opening event, the exhibition is available for viewing by appointment through Aug. 30.

Every person has a story; every story should be told. Every book holds a world full of secrets and mystery.

Other Books Other Worlds features a diverse group of five Pittsburgh artists telling stories from imaginary books filled with the mystery and adventure of childhood. This exhibit displays a series of mixed media methods including oil painting, screen printing, wheat pasting, sculpture, assemblage and installation to visualize the secrets behind the eyes and minds of the inhabitants of imaginary worlds.

David Newbury is a creative developer working with the intersections between hardware, animation and data. He is exploring methods to use technology to provide novel experiences without obvious technological mediation.

David has spent the past 15 years working on interactive projects for major brands, including Samsung, Google and Oreo, as well as working with museums, universities and public broadcasting. His work has received national attention including Emmy awards and coverage in Wired, Vice and other publications. He runs a small design practice, Workergnome Studios, focusing on unusual development projects and he gives workshops on utilizing technology for artistic practices.

David Newbury is creating an interactive piece exploring the feeling of being lost in the woods for Other Books Other Worlds. Inspired by the classic tales of the Brothers Grimm, his piece uses software and location-aware technology to simulate an invisible rainstorm, visible only through the nostalgia of childhood and through analog televisions.

Brad and Stephanie Towell have been collaborating creatively for more than 20 years. Brad’s experience as both a screen printer and graphic designer in the apparel industry and Stephanie’s work as a collage and assemblage artist have organically developed into a full-time career as designers and screen printers. As artists they work together in a Pittsburgh studio of their own, Modesto Studios. When they are not designing and printing work for their clients, Brad and Stephanie pair their talents and passion to design their own apparel, houseware products, furniture, interior design projects and art.

Brad and Stephanie approach creativity both collectively and individually with a humble but fearless curiosity about life and the world around them. Their adventurous spirits and nostalgia drive their desire to present moments of childhood adventure via installation and mixed media works. Brad and Stephanie Towell use a mixture of screen printing, collage, wheat pasting and assemblage to express treasured moments found in childhood such as playtime, joy and discovery. In their work these Modesto artists assist their viewers in escaping from the stressors of day to day life, responsibility, and guilt present in adulthood.

This couple's contribution to Other Books Other Worlds includes an installation comprised of assemblage, wheat pasting, and screen printing featuring their Adventure Kids series. The Adventure Kids are a cast of characters created by Brad and Stephanie Towell who take on the world through imagination and exploration, without the burden of adult imposed rules and regulations. This body of work follows a group of children fearlessly embarking upon a world of their own making, oblivious to all things that rob adults of joy.

Lena Loshonkohl is a painter and illustrator working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Painting and Art History in December of 2013. Lena works primarily in oil painting, watercolor and ink. She implements color, texture and design in her paintings to create feeling. Her oil painting techniques consist of glazing, scumbling and impasto layered on top of a thin photo-realistic underpainting or drawing.

Lena uses her knowledge of painting from life to invent illustrations based upon a distorted imaginative world that contains larger than life animals running amok in city streets, children embarking on adventures, adults who are unable to return from slumber and secret meeting places for individuals searching for hope. Lena creates illustrations that exaggerate reality to connect with viewers who struggle with understanding their own perceptions of the world.

Her installation for Other Books Other Worlds features a series of large-scale oil paintings that tell a story about adults searching for sleeping dreams and children who come to their assistance by sending secret messages to dinosaur sized rabbits who inhabit the moon.

Co Bappe is an artist working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Co uses his understanding of machinery, graphic design, printmaking, and unconventional items to hand-build motorcycles influenced by turn of the century board track racers. In addition to motorcycles Co also constructs a variety of two and three-dimensional art. His ability to see everyday objects outside of their intended purpose allows him to utilize inventive problem-solving techniques in his kinetic sculptures and printmaking methods. For example, a plumbing fixture becomes an exhaust manifold for a motorcycle built from scratch, a city sidewalk with rails and stairs turns into an interactive playground, a plaster hand transforms into a stage for a miniature dreamscape.

Co Bappe makes art for two reasons: in order to inspire his viewers to create projects of their own, and to see the physical manifestation of his ideas. Co is primarily concerned with negative space, visual weight and placement of the smaller components of his work. He strives in all of his projects to create balance in problem-solving situations where harmony seems impossible.

Co is providing a mixed media installation made of miniature paper, found objects and plastic for Other Books Other Worlds. The intimate, small scale of each sculpture tells a tale of adventure and invites the viewer to engage by filling in the blanks with their own stories.

June 6th - June 28th

Opening reception:
Saturday, June 6th from 6-10 PM
(featuring an exclusive seminar from GUY)

The Project Person Project: Brought to You by the #ENDOFNOW features recent work by mixed-media artist Max C Lee, as well as an exclusive seminar offered by GUY from the #ENDOFNOW.

The subject of this work is contemporary propaganda and Internet content that Lee considers to be propaganda. In some ways the work imitates and subverts these forms, in other ways he is creating his own. To do this Lee has made a public figure persona named GUY who runs a vague organization called THE END OF NOW. GUY is an embodiment of these forms of propaganda, but also reminiscent of cultic marketing personalities and new religious movement spiritual leaders.

The work shown at Unsmoke takes the form of performative videos (featuring GUY) alongside conceptual readymades — gatherings of images, language, and materials that illustrate the sometimes absurd function of design and commoditization in our visual culture. These works focus specifically on the propaganda associated with the rust-belt region of the U.S., including the city of Braddock itself.

Max C Lee currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He earned his BFA from Point Park University in Pittsburgh and is currently pursuing his MFA at The School of Visual Arts. He has shown previously in Pittsburgh at The MINE Factory and continues to perform publicly in New York.

For more information:
www.max-c-lee.com
maxccclee@gmail.com

May 14, 2015 to May 30, 2015

Opening Event: Thursday May 14, 6-10 pm

A solo exhibition by Jay. A Grassel

The Opening Event will have music provided by Aaron Lefebvre.

Grassel’s shaped canvas series displays crisp, hard-edged compositions of flat and strident color, which play off each other and the parameter of the canvas, in a dialog of saturated color. Another set of works features combinations of multiple rectangular panels. Here, the interplay of surface and texture is more crucial and is revealed only by the sum of its parts. Grassel offers his unique view of objects and places and blurs the context within which we associate them.

Lines of precise color, which lend a surprising precision and rigor to the surface, intersect some canvases; others have more delicate calligraphic marks of a not-quite ‘accidental’ nature. All have an engaging physicality to their surface, which suggests a sculptor’s hand. His more subtle hints at a hidden language encourage the viewer to investigate their meaning and, at times, the language of abstract painting is itself the subject. The artist explains that the effect of a life already filled with rich experience and travel is maybe his biggest influence of all. Grassel is bringing work to this exhibit that he feels brings increased depth and maturity to his work that has not yet been exhibited.

Jay A. Grassel was born in Pittsburgh. Grassel has been involved many exhibitions at some of the area's important venues including “Art of the State” at Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and “InteriorActive" at Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh. Grassel's work is heavily influenced by his experience as a paratrooper in the United States Army while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom and as working as a stonemason for seven years.

http://jaygrassel.com/home.html

Aaron Lefebvre is an acoustic finger-style guitarist from Pittsburgh, PA. He grew up in the rural hills of Central and Southwester Pennsylvania in a household where folk, blues, rock, and jazz were a constant presence. His music combines traditional and folk guitar musings with modern fingerstyle techniques that follow a musical narrative, which inspires the imagination.

http://www.aaronlefebvre.com/

In addition to the opening event, the exhibition will be available for viewing by appointment only.

April 4, 2015 to April 28.

Opening Event: Saturday April 4, 5 pm-9pm

Unholy Smoke-City of Steel is a three person show that, through sculpture, painting, photography and film, pulls back the veil on the American Dream and examine the legacies of our cities, our industries and people. 

Steve Staso's Detroit origin explains his early musical and cultural influences of Iggy Pop and the MC5. Upon moving to NYC in 1979, Punk rock provided the energy for his early art experiments and he has remained true to the anti aesthetic of anarchy and rebellion. His musical taste in the current Noise genre serves as his litmus in keeping his work fresh and oppositional to the status quo. He wouldn't make art if he didn't have to, but everything he paints, draws, and films seems to be embraced by other artists and musical pranksters. For this show, Staso will create 4-foot model prison structures and then will light them on fire and film the conflagration. This stands as an appropriate conclusion as Staso does not wish to participate in the marketplace of art. What better way to pay homage to his European influence, Guy Debord and his society of the spectacle? Also on view are some of the artist's hundred's of sketchbooks, drawn and collaged with quotes and images from our own mercurial times with an up to the moment feel of the rawness of now. The books are a record of our current events, an endless loop of violence and justice perverted, and thus we grasp the magnitude of information that we ingest, with little awareness of the spectacle's effect on ourselves. 

Rebecca Zilenziger went to New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and photographed the collapsed city. The photos are of ruined homes under returned blue skies, and the bright colors on empty streets highlight a devastated place, albeit from a natural disaster, but compounded by government's lack of response. In another photo, a child wearing pink gloves, ready to reclaim her life, tell us that the living keep on. The photographer walked the streets with a keen eye, as the images need no editorial embellishment. 

Anne Delaney finds that Braddock imagery provides unusual motifs for her work as she mines the meaning of manufacturing steel in America for possible metaphors. Delaney paints the interiors of steel mills and their heavy machinery and furnaces, steel as scaffolding, as sky scrapers, and even as plinths on which to lay to rest a super hero's worn out red cape. In abstracted landscapes, lengths of steel create a formal structure, as do chunks of iron ore. Drawings on paper of lines racing across the page echo the miles of train track that have been laid across our country, like scars, or life lines, or any place traversed and experienced.

In addition to the opening event, the exhibition will be available for viewing by appointment only.

Rebecca Zilenziger graduated from the Parsons School of Design and spent time in New York City working for the photographer Richard Avedon. Her photography has been shown in many US cities, widely throughout Puerto Rico and other Caribbean locations, and in Switzerland. She currently resides in San Juan, Puerto Rico. http://www.rebeccazilenziger.com

Steve Staso founded Bone Film as a means for production and distribution of his art films, or in his words, “anti-art films,” which include films documenting the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, Washington, DC, and Oakland, CA, as well as a film series from London, UK, made during the trial of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Steve Staso has no qualifications, nor certificates, nor commendations from any reputable source. He is currently “deleted” from a society in which he refuses to participate. He lives in Brooklyn.

Anne Delaney is a painter and drawer. She received her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. She has continued to show her work in galleries throughout the city. She is also the founder of an arts and social justice grantmaking fund and is a member of the artist gallery co-operative, the Bowery Gallery. She currently lives in New York City.  http://www.annedelaney.com/

BRADDOCK  Coming Home

The Art of Ramon Riley

March 27 & 28

6:00pm - 8:00pm

Ramon Riley's paintings retrace his steps through his hometown of Braddock, PA.  The historic landscape of Braddock helped to develop Riley's sensibility as an artist, now evident in his engaging debut exhibit: BRADDOCK Coming Home. Specially selected student art from Woodland Hills and Pine-Richland high schools, utilizing the theme "Where I Am From", will also be on display. 

Acknowledgment of student work on March 27. 

Light refreshments will be available.  This exhibit is free and open to the public  

“The more I learn about history, the greater my appreciation increases for Braddock’s influence on me and my art.”  -- Ramon Riley

BRADDOCK Coming Home is funded by the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh Program, a partnership of The Pittsburgh Foundation and The Heinz Endowments.  Support for the "Where I Am From" student program is through the Pine-Richland Opportunities Fund (PROF).  

Please visit rrileyart.com  for more details.  

Fountain is an exhibition of work from the two studio practices of Patrick O’Rorke and Brian Barber.

The exhibition opens Saturday, October 11th from 6pm – 9pm and runs through October 26th. Admission is free and open to all. 

Fountain is a look at two similar studio practices with divergent outcomes. Patrick O'Rorke and Brian Barber met during their first year of grad school in Ohio. They quickly realized that, although their work appeared very different, their influences and individual approaches to working were similar. Focused on an effort to find and explore form through the process of making (and destroying), this show brings together work that is handmade, machine built, two-dimensional, digitized, concept-driven, and formal.

In addition to the opening event, the exhibition will be available for viewing by appointment only.

Patrick O'Rorke is from Portland, Maine. He studied as an undergraduate at Maine College of Art in Portland. He entered the MFA program in painting at Ohio State University in 2010. Most recently he curated the My Crippled Friend exhibition at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH. He now lives and works in Detroit.

Brian Barber is from Seattle, Washington. He studied glass as an undergraduate at Ohio State University, and after ten years in Seattle he returned to Ohio State for the MFA program in glass. He has shown at the Museum of Art and Design in New York City and the Brick Lane Gallery in London, England. He is currently studying architecture at the University of Michigan.

Ephemeral Self is a solo exhibition by mixed media artist Julia Betts that investigates the idea of transience and self through choices in material and process. Impermanent materials such as masking tape, scotch tape, ground digital images and string act as surrogate for the body. The materials go through stages of accretion, removal and regeneration through both physical intervention and natural degradation. During these transformations, the essence of the materials is revealed and visual fallacies are created. For example, the mixed media piece Detritus, shredded self-images of the body accumulate into layers of dust. Through grinding images of herself with a cheese grater, the essence of the images is explored and the "body" grows. In this piece, Betts is contemplating the daily loss and growth of the body.

The opening reception is on Saturday, September 13th from 6-8 pm. In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment from September 14th through September 27th.

Julia Betts is a mixed media artist interested in process and material. She follows her ideas across different disciplines--choosing the most effective medium to fit her idea. Julia has shown work in solo exhibitions at Second Sight Studio in Columbus, Ohio and O'hara Ballroom in Pittsburgh, PA. Her group exhibitions include "Identity Material" at the Roboto Project and "Outerwear" at Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh. This year, she completed an artist-in-residence program at Second Sight Studio and will soon have her next residency at Bunker Projects.

Featuring: Jay Brown, Melissa Catanese, Ross Mantle, Matthew Newton, Jake Reinhart, Justin Visnesky

August 2 - August 29, 2014

Opening Reception: Saturday August 2nd 7:00pm - 11:00pm

Collective Unconscious is a group show which brings together 6 photographers who are sifting through the environmental and cultural influences that shaped their individual adolescent identities and their current perceptions of self. Reconciling misconceptions and celebrating the influences they still hold dear. This show examines identity, subculture, environment and access to means of communication.

Jay Brown, AKA jfotoman, has been chronicling the independent rock scene for almost 30 years. An Ohio native, he began taking 35mm photos in the mid 80s of bands such as Black Flag, the Minutemen and Husker Du. The D.I.Y. ethic of those early shows stuck, and over the years he continued to train his lens towards the stages of dives & dingy bars. Along the way he has photographed bands that are now considered indie icons such as Dinosaur Jr., the Jesus Lizard, Nirvana, Guided by Voices, The White Stripes, & The Black Keys. Jay now works full time in Pittsburgh, PA as a photographer with his work appearing in numerous music documentaries, magazines and band biographies.

Melissa Catanese lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is the co-founder of Spaces Corners, an artist-run photobook shop and project space founded in 2011. Her artistʼs book, Dive Dark Dream Slow was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation First Photo Book Award. Cataneseʼs books can be found in library collections throughout the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art Library and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography Library. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Carnegie Museum of Art as part of the Hillman Photography Initiative. Her work will be part of The
Archive, an upcoming exhibition at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.

Ross Mantle lives and works between his native Pittsburgh, PA and New York City, dividing time between self-initiated projects and client work. His commissioning clients include Monocle, Bloomberg Businessweek, The FADER, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Metropolis, Inc. Magazine, Print, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Whole Foods Market, Google, MASS MoCA, The Revson Foundation and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden amongst others. Mantleʼs prints and booklets can be found in the collections of the Houston Center for Photography and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. In 2013, he received the Keystone Award from the Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA and was named a Young Gun in 2012 by the Art Directors Club in New York City.

Matthew Newton is a writer and journalist from Western Pennsylvania. He has written essays, many about class and culture, for Guernica, Oxford American, and The Rumpus, and his reporting has appeared in the Atlantic, Esquire, Forbes, and Spin. He is currently at work on No Place for Disgrace, a memoir set in the American suburbs in the final days of the twentieth century.

Jake Reinhart is a photographer interested in the way memory affects our interactions with our environment, and its role in the formation of identity. With his ongoing projects he explores the area between cultural memory and individual experience. With the belief that, the way in which we perceive the past is constantly shifting based on how we endure the present, he works on reconciling feelings of stagnation with civic pride, nostalgia with progress. HIs work has recently been show in San Francisco, Nashville and on-line through the Looking at Appalachia project.

Justin Visnesky is a photographer, designer, husband and father. His work focuses on the contemporary family and the relationships people form with place. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife, son and daughter. Justinʼs work has been featured in various print and online publications including Conscientious photo blog, Darwin Magazine, Feature Shoot, Flak Photo, Fecal Face dot com, Kindling Quarterly, La Pure Vida, Paper Safe, Romka Magazine and Tiny Vices. Justin received an honorable mention in the Summer 2007 Hey, Hot Shot competition. His photography has been exhibited throughout the US., most notably at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Jon Bindley will be performing an acoustic set during the opening event. Beer will be provided by the Braddock Brew Gentlemen and delicious BBQ will be available to purchase from Blowfish BBQ. In addition to the opening, the work will be available to view by appointment only through August 29th.

Join us on July 25th for a night of merriment! Over fifteen artist carnies bring the midway to Braddock with playable art pieces, stick joints and spell binding performances! Wonder in amazement, take aim and test your skill. Fun times for the whole family!

Pizza will be made.  Beverages will be available for a suggested donation.

Participating artists include:
Teresa Martuccio            
Matt Smith
Aris Georgiadis
Gail Simpson
Jacob White
Mary Tremonte                  
Jake Reinhart                  
Heather White
The App Expo
Matt Forest
Alisha Wormsley
Tresa Varner
Helt Collective
Dave English
and more

This is a ONE-NIGHT ONLY EVENT!

Boundless Voyage of Love tells a story of determination, struggle and an eventual transformation into something greater than us. This exhibition is a blending of traditional and craft artistic processes to represent raw human emotion as it develops our mind, body and spirit. Butler and Hayakawa together have examined their emotional states as they journey to find their direction and purpose in life. Hayakawa’s sculptures describe the raw and urgent emotions evoked from struggle, while Butler’s paintings and drawings stimulate healing and good fortune.

Boundless Voyage of Love opens Saturday, July 12th from 6pm – 9pm. Admission is free and open to the public.

In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment from July 5th through July 20th. Please email unsmoke@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

Alanna Butler is a painter and mixed media artist born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Raised by religious parents, she has now found spirituality through herbalism, astrology, tarot reading, Reiki healing and crystal therapy. She also runs a business called AEtheric Alchemy with her partner Odin, located in Sharon, PA. Utilizing metaphysics and spirituality, she creatively transforms the way we heal, learn and live, so that we may truly live for others.

aethericalchemy.com

Lindsey Hayakawa is a sculpture and installation artist born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. She received her BFA in ceramics from Pennsylvania State University in 2012 and is now creating work at the River Arts in Damariscotta, ME. Combining clay and yarn, her work describes a beautiful struggle and how that can lead to a profound transformation. Inspired by monolithic structures and sacred sites, her work stems from a core spirituality that is intrinsic to all humans.

www.lindseyhayakawa.com

transformBECOME

Featuring: Elan Wojciechowski, Stephanie Neary, Ron Hornbeck, Christina Labrise, Justin Hartman, Tyler Palladino, Jen Green, and Maura Doern Danko

transformBECOME includes the work of 9 artists. The exhibition is based on themes of change and transformation expressed by each individual artist through a variety of media including animation, painting, installation, and photography.

Opening Reception - Saturday, June 21, 6-9pm
Singer-songwriters from the Strum Society will perform at 6:30 PM. Additionally Jeff Condran from Braddock Avenue Books will be reading short stories from his most recent publication, A Fingerprint Repeated at 8 PM.
Free and open to all

Work on display by appointment, June 7 - June 29

About exhibiting Artists:

Stephanie Neary uses mixed media and her current series uses a combination of paintings and stuffed dolls.
http://stephneary.tumblr.com

Andy Scott is a mixed media artist who uses illustrations and installations that reflect themes of change.
http://aplace-forall.blogspot.com

Elan Wojciechowski is influenced by graphic design as well as fine art and interactive installation.
http://elangated.com

Christina Labrise is an Art Institute of Pittsburgh faculty member working primarily in photography.
http://labrise.carbonmade.com

Maura Doern Danko also employs a mixed media approach and will present 6 small paintings and dioramas for the June show.
http://mauradoerndanko.wordpress.com

Ron Hornbeck uses a mutlidisciplinary approach in his collaborative efforts with groups of artists.
http://vimeo.com/ronhornbeck

Jen Green, Tyler Palladino, Justin Hartman, and Ashley Richardson are a group of collaborative artists and students from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh who are providing two animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRRabgkSgzl

Featuring: Alex Blau, Paul Collins, Rocky Horton, Ron Lambert, Jonathan Rattner, Thomas Sturgill, and Willard Tucker

Curated by Virginia Griswold and Karen Seapker

May 10th - June 1st, Opening reception May 10, 6-9pm
Open by appointment

TERRESTRIAL includes the work of seven artists affiliated with the curatorial collective, COOP, based in Nashville, TN.  The exhibition is the second part of an exchange between these two art spaces and the artists that inhabit them.  In April, artists who work at Unsmoke ArtSystems exhibited their work at COOP Gallery in Nashville.  Opening May 10th, COOP artists present their work in Braddock.

The work included the show spans a diverse range of media including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video.  In their own way, each of the artists included in Terrestrial has been strongly influenced by the external world around them— whether responding to their personal home or work environment, the strange environment of a foreign land, the metaphorical transformation of space and place, or larger political issues. The outside world is filtered through the artists’ process, distilling a specific and idiosyncratic vision. The works included in this exhibition re-enter the viewer’s environment, re-contextualized, fragmented, or assembled in novel forms that propose their own physicality or restructuring before us.  

Artists Include:

Alex Blau is a painter currently living in Nashville, TN.  She has an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design.  Blau has shown her work internationally including solo shows at Firecat Projects in Chicago, Gallery Seomi in Seoul, Korea, Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, Kevin Bruk Gallery in Miami, Barbara Davis Gallery in Houston and the New Britain Museum of American Art.  She is the recipient of several awards including a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant.  Blau is currently teaching art at APSU and working in her studio.

www.alexblau.com
 

Paul Collins is a multidisciplinary artist and curator from Nashville, TN. Paul makes drawings, paintings and sculpture that combine humor, tactility and observation to examine the world around us. Paul has an MFA from Yale and has been a resident at Skowhegan, Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the Vermont Studio Center. Paul is an enthusiastic collaborator and has curated shows or organized artist projects for a wide range of artists including James Surls, William Pope.L, Dahlia Elsayed, Betty Woodman, Paul Jacobsen, Mala Iqbal, Kenny Scharf, David Humphrey, Charles Long, Michael Kreuger, Jason Rogenes, Kim Dickey, and Takashi Nakazato.

www.paulpaul.com

Rocky Horton was born in Arlington, Tennessee in 1973.  He attended college at Harding University, where he first discovered painting.  After graduating in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Art, he lived and work in Italy, first Milan then Naples, for approximately two years.  He received an M.F.A. in studio art from West Virginia University in December of 2003.  Since that time, he has served as a Professor of Art at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.

www.rockyhorton.com

Ron Lambert, working mainly in video and sculpture, investigates the intersection between psychology and the environment. He received his MFA from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, and his BFA from the University of Connecticut. Ron is currently an assistant professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. Ron's work has been published in Shaping Space, Third Edition, and Color, Third Edition, both by Paul Zelanski as well as the show catalogue People Doing Strange Things With Electricity.  Ron has shown in galleries nationally, including the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Michigan, the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts, the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut, the Frist Art Center in Nashville and several college and university galleries around the country.  His videos have been screened internationally including Hungary, Ireland, Brazil, Serbia, Romania and as part of the Sanluan Yishu project in Beijing China.  His work is in the Vascovitz collection, the Swedish Medical Center, and the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum.  Ron is a founding member COOP collective in Nashville TN.

www.ronlambertart.com

Jonathan Rattner is a lens-based artist who primarily produces experimental nonfiction film and videos.  Rattner has exhibited work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the World Social Forum in Brazil, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, as well as at other colleges, festivals, and galleries in the United States, Europe, Australia.  Rattner holds MFA's in Film and Video Production and in Intermedia Art from the University of Iowa and a BFA in Film and Television from Tisch School for the Arts, NYU.  Rattner is currently an active member of the lens based collective Wildland Urban Interface and holds the position of Assistant Director/Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

www.jonathanrattner.com/
 

Thomas Sturgill was born and raised in Pound, Virginia, a rural company town whose heyday had long passed.   In 2002 he received his undergraduate degree in sculpture from the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville,  Tennessee. Sturgill received and MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.  He has exhibited domestically and internationally.  He works both solo and collaboratively. Sturgill is a founding member of the artist collective, Pulled Resources. Thomas Sturgill currently lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee and is presently an Assistant Professor in Foundations at Middle Tennessee State University.

http://www.thomashsturgill.com
 

Willard Tucker is a sculptor and mixed media artist handling issues of economy, material use, and value and their effects in Appalachia and the rural South.  Growing up in rural Kentucky, he experienced, like other people from places on the margins of industrial development zones, the friction of the official economy in conflict with local customs of use and land management. Working in fragments, his work seeks ecology in incompleteness–the accident undergirding the built environment. His work attempts to reclaim a sense of temporality separate from the industrial time keeping–time as money–concept of efficiency and time-thrift.  After receiving Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Kentucky in 2006, Willard Tucker attended The Ohio State University as a University Fellow receiving his MFA in 2009. Since then he has lived and taught in Nashville, TN.  His works have been exhibited at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia, Land of Tomorrow in Louisville, and were reviewed in Art Papers and Sculpture Magazine.  He now lives and works on a small farm near Berea, Kentucky with his wife, Laura.

www.willardtucker.com
 

More about COOP
COOP is a curatorial collective made up of artists, curators, thinkers and professors who are committed to expanding Nashville’s dialogue with contemporary art by presenting challenging new or under-represented artists/artworks to our community. COOP is committed to exhibiting art of diverse media and content, with a goal to provide an alternative venue for artists free from the constraints of the retail market. COOP seeks to initiate a discourse between Nashville and art scenes across the country by inviting artists to show, develop projects and interact with the Nashville community.
Website: www.coopgallery.org
 

For questions contact:
Karen Seapker: karenseapker@gmail.com

Come celebrate with some awesome people of Chatham University and Braddock Avenue Books as we launch our independent presses and first chapbooks out into the literary world. An evening of reading, pizza, booze, spring, and chapbooks!

This event is kid friendly. FREE TO THE PUBLIC.

Chapbooks available for purchase at $10 each.
Readings and books by:
Timothy Butler
Megan Parmarter
Aubrey Hirsch
Sara Watson
And writers from:
Words Without Walls
Sisters of Survival
New Hanover County Jail
Wellness University at Project Lazarus

An art production brought to you by humans unabsorbed by the soul deadening paradigm of everyday life.
With musical guests Old Lords.

Exhibiting artists:
Andrew Huntley
Crystal Miller
Tyler David Rahl
Ashley Bouton
J. Kozlowski
Daviea Davis
Melissa Riggatire
Kayla Bennett
Todd Pinkham
Pierce Marratto
Ziggy Sawdust
Zack Emma
Logan Randolph
 

SUBTERRANEAN REALITY encourages you to turn off your devices, turn on your minds, and interface with the world and the questions that artists raise. It is about choosing your own heroes and paths, unfiltered by the overwhelming media inputs of our modern time. It is a statement about the real power in the human soul and striving to live for a truth beyond billboards and box stores. This exhibit reflects the desire to live a life of variation, grit, and the search for beauty in art, regardless of style but rather through the calming effects of clarity.

The event, the first of the season at UnSmoke Systems Artspace, will have free beverages and snacks on hand. After the opening event, SUBTERRANEAN REALITY will be available to view through April 27th by appointment only.

No Empire will release In Case of Emergency, an all-new zine by writer Matthew Newton with original illustrations by William Arthur and layout and design by Peter Rentz. Set in the height of the Great Recession, In Case of Emergency tells a true story of personal crises—both past and present—that take place between the disparate worlds of adolescence and adulthood. Printed on a Risograph GR3750 using 100% recycled paper and limited to an edition of 100, In Case of Emergency is the debut release from No Empire, a small press publisher based in Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Small Press Pittsburgh will host the release of In Case of Emergency in its first author event. An all-indie press pop up bookshop that has been popping up at various Pittsburgh art events since early July, Small Press Pittsburgh will be at UnSmoke Artspace selling books by local authors as well as unique books from around the country. Do Not Destroy, a vintage goods shop, will also be on site with a selection of books and ephemera available for purchase. View From A Hill, artist Devon Johnson’s psychological portrait of the landscape of Pittsburgh, will be on display in the exhibition space.

Doors open at 6 p.m., readings begin at 7 p.m. Your readers for the evening will be:

Matthew Newton

Matthew Newton is a writer, journalist, and editor from Western Pennsylvania. He has written essays, many about class and culture, for The Rumpus, Colorlines, and Thought Catalog and his reporting has been published by The Atlantic, Esquire, Forbes, Guernica, and Spin, among others. He is currently at work on No Place for Disgrace, a memoir about mental illness and teenage love set in the American suburbs in the waning days of the twentieth century. More info: www.matthewnewton.us

Karen Dietrich

Karen Dietrich is the author of The Girl Factory: A Memoir. Her writing has appeared in Nerve, Joyland, PANK, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. More info: www.thegirlfactory.net

Karen Lillis

Karen Lillis is a small press author, blogger, bookseller, and event coordinator. Her latest novel is Watch the Doors as They Close (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and her latest venture is Small Press Pittsburgh, a pop up indie press bookstore since July 2013. More info: karenslibraryblog.blogspot.com

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Karen Lillis (eyescorpion@gmail.com) or Matthew Newton (mr.newton@gmail.com).

IMAGE DOWNLOADS:

• Emergency Bottle by William Arthur (high resolution | low resolution)
• Disaster Sink by William Arthur (high resolution | low resolution)
• In Case of Emergency, zine stack (high resolution | low resolution)

View From A Hill is a psychological portrait of the landscape of Pittsburgh by artist Devon Johnson. This film and photographic installation is an attempt to capture something about Pittsburgh that is essentially unphotographable.

The film, shot on Super 8mm, explores the disconnect between one’s internal landscape and external images of the city captured on celluloid. The photographs, made from enlargements of drugstore prints taken while the artist lived in Pittsburgh a decade ago, address how physical photographic objects influence our formulation and understanding of a place.

At its core, this work is not about Pittsburgh, but rather how its topology can make one feel. The resulting installation is intensely personal, steeped in memories and myths surrounding other artists’ attempts to make work about the city.

Devon Johnson is an artist working primarily in lens-based media. He earned
his MFA at George Mason University, and has exhibited both nationally and
internationally. His films have been screened in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. In 2012 his work was included in the Vancouver International Film Festival. In 2013 he was awarded a stipend from the Goethe- Institut to go to Berlin, where he began an ongoing body of work. The work in this installation was initiated during an artist residency at UnSmoke Systems Artspace in May 2013.

Lasky and Ramos's works share a joint inquiry into dispersion, decay, fertility and habitat. With Things Inside presents sculpture and new media pieces with rigid geometric structures and fluid forms intersecting and inhabiting one and other. Multiple holding spaces store and intercept oozing motile dispersion, organs, corpses, and embryos. The works are the result of individual pursuits as well as a continuous dialogue that has led the artists to this two-person event.

Carolina Jacobs Ramos is an interdisciplinary Brazilian artist, currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Fascinated by impalpable biological and social processes, Carolina interprets and imagines living interactions. She currently works at UnSmoke Systems in Braddock, PA and towards a Masters in Social Work with a specialization in mental health. Carolina has exhibited at a variety of venues including Espaco Viga in Sao Paulo, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, the SETI Institute and the Miller Gallery. She received her BHA in Psychology and Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University.

David Lasky was raised in modern Orthodox Judaism and though he left the orthodoxy, and even most of the religion, he never lost a fascination for the religious object, the relic, the artifact, and the specimen. He attempts at the cohesion of disparate crafts to make strange and somehow, more "whole" objects. David admires and believes in craft, resourcefulness, and cunning. He studied Sculpture and Decision Sciences in a dual degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

 This work will be on view by appointment through the month of October 2013.

Testosterone - an international group show

Artwork to commonly address masculinity, violence, Eros, desire. Testosterone is written in the same way both in English and in Italian.

Alberto Condotta - Italian working in Edinburgh, Scotland
Giulia Belli - Italian working in Lisbon, Portugal
Giordano Marco - Italian working in Glasgow, Scotland
Matthew Paul Isaacson - St. Louis, MO
Heather Iris Galt-McLoughlin - Bristol, UK
Riccardo Giacomini - Italian
Giovanni Grauso - Italian

Exhibition photos: Mari Campistron

Opening August 10, 2013 7pm – 11pm 

UnSmoke Systems Art Space, Braddock, PA

Pittsburgh, PA - Making it Home, an exhibition of photography from the 2013 ADP Workshop, showcases projects from 8 documentary artists whose works come together around our varied understandings of home. The exhibit interprets the personally complex concept and the corresponding difficulties in locating a place we all simultaneously know and continuously find new meanings in. 

Home is the place of the memories we hold and the destinations we seek. It becomes distant, during borderless travels and immediately familiar upon return. At times we grow into the homes we choose. Often by chance we find ourselves comforted by a home we did not know prior. We return to these places only to leave them again. As life pulls forward, intersects and traverses other roads, we are lead to, from and around homes that only we can identify. That place and those thoughts always within reach and just beyond grasp.

Making it Home opens at UnSmoke Systems Art Space in Braddock, PA. on August 10, 2013, from 7pm to 11pm, and will be on view by appointment throughout the month. It features works by Matt Austin (Chicago, Illinois), Josh Birnbaum (Athens, Ohio), Talia Herman (Northern California), Julie Reneé Jones (Dayton, Ohio), Kelly Kristen Jones (Atlanta, Georgia), Ed Panar (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), John Francis Peters (Los Angeles, California) and Ben Rasmussen (Denver, Colorado).

On Thursday, August 8 and Friday, August 9, starting at 7pm, the ADP Workshop will open its doors to host public discussions with photographers from Making it Home at UnSmoke System Art Space. In this open forum, all questions, comments, and thoughts will be welcome. Some light refreshments will be on hand, please BYOB and come curious. More information and specific scheduling of photographers can be found at adpworkshop.org during the week of the events.

About ADP Workshop

The ADP Workshop fosters a network of photographers whose work focuses on contemporary U.S. society. Facilitating critical discussion around ongoing projects, we aim to help artists develop these works, fulfill project goals, and assist in reaching new audiences with their images. 

Once a year, we bring together a select group of artists from around the country for the ADP Workshop Review. Over a long weekend we host group discussions, public forums and an exhibition. The Review allows artists to step away from their working lives and share new or experimental projects in an open atmosphere that supports a free exchange of ideas. During this time, we like to see unfinished pieces, experiments in form, and burgeoning concepts, while we welcome artists to open their work and thoughts to a larger discussion.

At each Review, we seek to bring together both past participants and new artists in order to maintain an atmosphere of familiarity and intimacy, while expanding our network to showcase new work and ideas. Though our primary focus and background is in photography, we also welcome artists from other disciplines to participate. From painters to writers, filmmakers to bookmakers, we aim to expand the scope of included practices in order to develop understanding between mediums, promote collaboration and break free from our own comfort zones and experiences. 

This year’s Review will be held at UnSmoke Systems Art Space in Braddock, PA from August 8 to 10, culminating in the opening of Making it Home. Some of this year’s participating artists include Matt Austin, Emily Berl, Josh Birnbaum, Jessica Chou, Talia Herman, Julie Reneé Jones, Kelly Kristen Jones, Chris Maggio, Ed Panar, John Francis Peters, Ben Rasmussen, Justin Visnesky and Nathan Ward.

The ADP Workshop believes in the power of long-form documentary photography to spark conversations and record change in our society. As we become more connected and doors open instantly to lives, happenings and discussions in distant regions, we find less time and fewer spaces to slow down and communicate personally. ADP humbly seeks to bring together those artists who find face-to-face dialogue, important and vital to the understanding of their lives, their practice and the greater good of communities. 

Residual Conditions - Impressions from Anatomy, Industry and Ecology

Featuring the work of three local, emerging artists: Christopher Cassady, Gianna Paniagua, and Ben Quint-Glick. Opens Saturday, July 6th at Braddock’s UnSmoke Systems. All artists will be present, admission is free.

The exhibition showcases mixed media sculptures and installations focusing on the impressions and artifacts relating to anatomy, industry, and ecology. After collaborating on a number of projects and exhibits at the University of Pittsburgh, the three celebrated artists, Gianna Paniagua, 

Ben Quint-Glick, and Christopher Cassady, began to pursue the parallel themes found in their work. Each artist, whether in craft or concept, transforms ideas of humanity and artifact. 

Christopher Cassady is drawn to industrial material and aesthetics, but roots his work in traditional tribal rituals related to the totem. 

Gianna Paniagua, in her papercut sculptures, explores the fragile and delicate nature of the human body and its tendency for pattern. 

Ben Quint-Glick combines visual and auditory sensory material to create installations based on consumption, standardization, and the disregard for ecological principles.  

In addition to the opening Residual Conditions will be available by appointment only until the end of July.

Prelude

June 8 – July 20, 2013

Opening Reception – Friday June 14, 2013 – 6-8pm

Unsmoke Systems

Prelude is curated by Sean Derry and Chris McGinnis and features the work of fifteen regional artists selected for Alloy Pittsburgh 2013..  The Prelude exhibition showcases work created by each of the artists prior to their participation in Alloy Pittsburgh.  Works on display represent a broad range of media including video, sculpture, photography and painting.

Curators: Sean Derry & Chris McGinnis

Participating Artists:

Anika Hirt, Dan Wilcox, Carl Bajandas, Ryan Keene, Laurie Barnes, Anna Milkolay, Amber Neidomys, Emily Sciulli, Meghan Olson, Kara Skylling, Edith Abeyta, Kyla Groat, Logan Five, Will Schlough and Michelle Colbaugh.

Alloy Pittsburgh is a unique visual and performing arts initiative developed for the Carrie Furnace National Heritage Area and administered by the Kipp Gallery at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The program is conceived as a laboratory where 15 emerging artists from the Pittsburgh region will create site-based projects that investigate the creative reuse of a post-industrial site. The completed artworks will be simultaneously presented in a one of a kind art event to be held at the Carrie Furnaces National Heritage Area in the fall of 2013.

Pittsburgh’s Second Annual Art Fair for Photography

We are pleased to announce PGH Photo Fair, Pittsburgh’s first art fair promoting the discussion of photography within the contemporary and fine art market. PGH Photo Fair will host twelve internationally known dealers to exhibit museum-quality prints and photo-based art spanning the history of the medium, from nineteenth-century vintage prints to contemporary photography, as well as photographic books and photo-based magazines. The two-day event will be held at Unsmoke Systems Artspace in Braddock, PA. 

PGH Photo Fair founder Evan Mirapaul, a Pittsburgh-based photography collector, described this year’s event as growing in many key ways. “Building on the successes of our first year, we haven’t just doubled our numbers of exhibitors,” said Mirapaul. “The scope of galleries we will be hosting has expanded as well.” 

This expanded scope means greater internationalism and historical breadth. In addition to Stephen Bulger Gallery from Canada, PGH Photo Fair welcomes Next Level Projects from London and Only Photography from Berlin. 

Returning this year are Gitterman Gallery and L. Parker Stephenson, both specializing in classic and mid-century work. But the time line has expanded in both directions. New, and with a very strong representation of the best in contemporary photography, are Higher Pictures and Sasha Wolf Gallery. In nineteenth-century works the excellent program of Gary Edwards Gallery is expected from the DC area as well as Winter Works on Paper, a trailblazer in showing the best in vernacular photography. Rounding out the roster with books, limited edition prints and magazines are newcomers from Blind Spot, and returning exhibitors Aperture Foundation and Spaces Corners, all with compelling programs of contemporary work.

“Above all, my goal is to present Pittsburgh with the highest quality photographic work available for sale anywhere at any price,” says Mirapaul. “There will be rare books, limited editions, one of a kind prints, and a full range of photographic processes. Really there is something for anyone interested in the medium of photography.”

PGH Photo Fair will be held Saturday May 18 and Sunday May 19, 2013 at Unsmoke Systems Artspace at 1137 Braddock Avenue, Braddock, Pennsylvania. Entry to the fair will be free and open to the public from 12 to 6 p.m. Saturday, May 18, & 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, May 19. Check www.pghphotofair.com for information and updates.

Food will be generously provided by Kevin Sousa and Salt of the Earth. Among the many delicious offerings, the onsite brick oven will be turning out made-to order pizzas, and Union Pig and Chicken will be roasting whole pigs. 

For media inquires or visual materials, contact: Evan Mirapaul: info@pghphotofair.com or 646-436-4698. 

Opening reception Friday, May 10th!​

“To achieve the impossible; it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.” - Tom Robbins

Possible is a collection of works that aim to question the bounds of impossible material construction and physicality in art making. These selected pieces stretch the limits of the medium they were created with, using traditional materials in nontraditional ways and using nontraditional materials to create something truly magical. The creators of these works activate their media in unexpected and newfangled ways.

​Stand by the road and hold out your thumb. It sounds easy, but hitchhiking is a world of danger, exhaustion, freedom. To bum a ride is to give in to fate— and participate in a great American tradition.

"Faster Than Walking,” an interactive multimedia installation comprising new work by Lindsey Peck Scherloum and painting by Sarah Leavens, opens Saturday, April 6th from 6pm – 9pm at Braddock's UnSmoke Systems Artspace. The event also includes pie baked in Braddock’s community brick oven at the UnSmoke site. Admission is free.

This exhibit is a series of installations using photography, video, sculpture and painting to explore the freedom of travel and the emotional impact of the US highway system. The exhibit documents ten years of hitch-hiking in America with evocative experiential pieces that bring intimacy with strangers, as seen through profiles of people who pick up hitch-hikers; and a sense of the spaces we ignore while traveling in cars. At a time when environmental impact and carbon footprints are in public debate, car culture, and the environments created to support it, still dominates American lifestyle. Fusing narrative and images in multimedia environments the audience can enter, artists Lindsey Scherloum and Sarah Leavens collaborate on installations designed specifically for the gallery at UnSmoke Systems.

Lindsey Peck Scherloum works in sculpture, photography installation and performance that explores human relationships with objects and the impact of space on emotion and behavior. Her work blends visual and written narrative with interactivity on environmental and temporal levels, and likes to explore the spontaneous reactions created by public settings. She holds a BA in art and anthropology from NYU's Gallatin School of Interdisciplinary Study, and an MFA in creative writing from Chatham University. She has shown in Gallery A and Edward Thorpe Gallery in New York City, Garage Gallery in Rockville, MD, Transmission Gallery in Albany, CA and Most Wanted Fine Art in Pittsburgh. Past projects have also included the Traveling Puppet Fias Co. (2004) and The Mississippi River Project (2008). Her work has appeared recently in Weave Magazine, Mudthroat Records, The Fourth River and Hot Metal Bridge. For more information visit her website www.AMapOfUs.com

Sarah Leavens is a writer and visual artist interested in the overlap between images, words, and acts of creating. Content and context. Gray area. Flux. Leavens is the current “Out of the Forge” writer-in-residence in Braddock, PA. Her recent work has appeared in Stone Highway Review, The Diverse Arts Press and Blast Furnace and is forthcoming from Weave and So to Speak. She received her MFA in Nonfiction and Poetry from Chatham University in 2012 and her BFA in oil painting from Wittenberg University in 2006. She teaches visual art and writing in Pittsburgh. Read more at sarahleavens.com

In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment through April 28th. Please email unsmoke@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

SATURDAY, MARCH 30TH

8PM -11PM

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

BYOB (BRING YOUR OWN BEAMER) IS A SERIES OF ONE-NIGHT EXHIBITIONS HOSTING ARTISTS AND THEIR PROJECTORS. 

THE EVENT, TITLED TBA/BYOB, WILL BE A USER-GENERATED AD-HOC EXHIBITON, INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE GALLERY, PRESENTING AS MANY GIFS, MOVS, AND OTHER VARIOUS MOVEMENT BASED MEDIA AS POSSIBLE.

TO PARTICIPATE, SIMPLY COME PREPARED WITH A FULLY CHARGED LAPTOP AND EXHIBIT WHATEVER CONTENT YOU LIKE. ACQUIRING A PROJECTOR IS NOT NECESSARY BUT HELPFUL, AS THERE WILL BE A FINITE NUMBER AVAILABLE.

INTERESTED ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO THEIR OWN PROJECTORS, ARE ENCOURAGED TO CONTACT PATRICK QUINN AT aduulterie@gmail.com. PLEASE SHOW UP AT 7PM IF YOU WANT TO PARTICIPATE.

CONFIRMED LOCAL, NATIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS INCLUDE:

Kevin Clancy | Julie Mallis | Dan Wilcox | Isla Hansen | Craig Fahner | Steve Gurysh | Felipe Castelblanco | Luke Loeffler | Carl Bajandas | Elizabeth Buschman | Lucia Nhamo | Jingjing Chen | Matthew Torti | Amalia Ulman | Daniel Temkin | David Dao Ellena | Morgan Higby-Flowers | Jon Cates | Alfredo Salazar-Caro | Kevin Carey | Shawne Holloway | Anthony Dunn | Bryan Peterson | Nick Kegeyan | A Bill Miller | Patrick Quinn | Daniel Mazzocco | Jenna Kelly 

TBA/BYOB WILL ALSO FEATURE MUSIC BY:

Soundcloud.com/yxu (Braddock, PA)

SON OF DAVID (Pittsburgh, PA), and

dither d00m (Chicago, IL). 

ONCE AGAIN, EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO COME AND PARTICIPATE//

BYOB IS AN IDEA BY RAFAEL ROZENDAAL. THE FIRST EDITION OF BYOB WAS INITIATED BY ANNE DE VRIES & RAFAEL ROZENDAAL IN BERLIN. 

THIS EVENT IS CO-ORGANIZED BY PATRICK QUINN AND A. BILL MILLER.

A. BILL MILLER

ARTIST STATEMENT

We exist within a built environment that is constantly mediated by the grid. Grids organize space through coordinate mapping and patterns of development. Grids compress, redisplay, and reorder information. Grids are an enforcement system imposed upon both nature and culture. I respond to this ubiquity by creating gridworks. These forms examine the blurred boundary between the machine and the human - the tool of data collection and the interpretive mind.

BIO

A. Bill Miller, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, at Penn State Altoona earned his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His nationally and internationally exhibited works include his acclaimed Gridworks Project, which comprises abstract ASCII drawings, animated GIFs and videos, as well as live audio/visual performances.

SITE

http://www.master-list2000.com/abillmiller

PATRICK QUINN

Technology, and more specifically computer culture, is typically associated with organized interfaces, efficient, high-resolution screens and, particularly in the context of Western civilization, the problematic notion of “progress”. I attempt to challenge the utilitarian purpose of the interface, and problematize certain notions intrinsically tied to Internet culture. I investigate the digital, appropriative archive as not only a collection of media artifacts, but also as a subversive mechanism and agent for channeling social unrest. To me, this subversion, an attempt at re-structuring technological hierarchies and processes, encapsulates the essence of civil disobedience in the twenty-first century.

I am connected internationally through darknets, deaddrops, sneakernets, USB drives, tumblrs, noise shows, mixtapes, and to other like minded End Tyyymes-Aware artists and musicians//

Keywords:

Dither d00m

Pixel fetish

Digital goth

A collaborative installation by artists Keith Lemley and Taryn McMahon

Opening Reception

Saturday, November 17th 

6-9pm

FREE

Artists Keith Lemley and Taryn McMahon are merging two ongoing bodies of work, Lemley’s Dreams of an Ideal and McMahon’s Every Flower is Susceptible of Cultivation, to create a collaborative installation at UnSmoke. This exhibition intermixes the artists’ shared interests in the tension between natural and manmade constructions. Imagining the fate of a place that has been abandoned and reclaimed, McMahon and Lemley visualize a post-apocalyptic flower garden with neon light, screen-printed and cut Mylar and paper, and other found objects. The resultant installation, entitled Sweetness and Light, creates hybrid forms of simulated biological systems and idealized archetypes of industrial design.

In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment through December 16th. Call 415.518.9921 or email unsmoke@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

Keith Lemley grew up on a small ancestral farm in Pennsylvania, an experience that stimulated his early interest in the connection between the natural and man-made.  Following his undergraduate studies at The Pennsylvania State University, he received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Lemley has been awarded several residencies and grants, including Sculpture Space in Utica, NY, and an Iowa Arts Grant.  His artwork has been featured nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Soap Factory, Minneapolis, MN; Redux Contemporary Art Center, Charleston, SC; 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA; Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; and 210 N. Wells, Chicago, IL.

www.keithlemley.com

Taryn McMahon received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a recipient of the Leola Bergmann Graduate Fellowship and a Graduate Teaching Assistantship.  She has held artist residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO; Anchor Graphics in Chicago, IL; Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY; and the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, KS.  She is the recipient of a Southern Graphics International Graduate Fellowship Award, and a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Award through the Women’s Studio Workshop.  Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA; Islensk Grafik in Reykjavik, Iceland; Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY; Dubuque Museum of Art in Dubuque, IA; and Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, MO, among others.   McMahon’s prints can be found in collections around the world including the Art in Embassies Program, Reykjavik, Iceland; Southern Graphics Council International Print Collection; Anchor Graphics, Chicago, IL; University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA; Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY; and Women’s Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY.

www.tarynmcmahon.com

Sculpture exhibition by Wisconsin-based artists Aris Georgiades and Gail Simpson

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Opens Saturday, October 13th​

6pm- 9pm​

Free​

Aristotle Georgiades and Gail Simpson are sculptors who work individually and as part of the collaborative team Actual Size Artworks.

In Not Like I Remembered, Aris Georgiades will exhibit a large architectural sculpture inspired by the bridges & rivers of the Pittsburgh area, and what they meant to the local economy when he was growing up here. He will also exhibit work using salvaged woodwork and building materials. Gail Simpson will exhibit a group of sculptures using cast-off toys and lawn ornaments of the type that appear in peoples’ yards at holidays. Simpson’s work produces a kind of idiosyncratic and illogical form that looks both humorous and bizarre.

In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment through November 2nd. Call 415.518.9921 or email unsmoke@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

Of his sculptures featured in Not Like I Remembered, Georgiades says:

 “Much of my work involves objects made up of common materials. Some of the objects use material that has been salvaged from one life and given another. There are also works that use existing objects and re-purpose them into expressive sculptural forms. Most of these sculptures make reference to our continuous desire to move through life with purpose. I see these repurposed objects as a metaphor for our human need to adapt and change directions when confronted with obstacles or failures. Often the objects and materials I use are approaching obsolescence. I see a relationship between some of these objects and the situation in which many American workers, especially in the rust belt, have found themselves. We often find that we are no longer useful and there is a need to reinvent oneself in order to survive and move forward.”

Simpson explains her work by saying:

“I’m especially interested in combining objects from different decades – I’ve been able to obtain objects that people seem to have had in their garages for 20 or 30 years, and juxtaposed with more current versions of the same objects (snowmen, bouncy horses and jack-o-lanterns, for example) some very striking coincidences appear. The space outside our homes or apartments is both private and public – it is meant for use by the residents, but we often characterize it with objects that say something to the community about who we are, much as a bumper sticker or yard sign does. A nativity scene communicates one thing, pink flamingos another. Conflicting impulses towards individuality and conformity often appear together.”

Aris Georgiades is originally from the Pittsburgh area. He has an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from University of Michigan. In addition to public art projects, he makes smaller-scale sculptures using salvaged building materials and objects. These often relate to issues of adaptability and the changing nature of work, and ask questions about usefulness and ambition. http://www.arisgeorgiades.com/

Gail Simpson has an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She has exhibited temporary projects around the United States and Europe. Her recent projects reflect her interest in landscape materials and the built and natural environment and her involvement with local community issues. Actual Size Artworks has done public art projects in Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina, Illinois and other locations nationally. http://www.gailsimpsonsculpture.com/

Both artists reside in Stoughton, Wisconsin and teach at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

For more about Actual Size Artworks, see http://www.actualsizeartworks.com/

Photos of all work by Jim Escalante.

Saturday, October 6th, 2012​

7pm - 10pm​

Readings will begin at 8:30pm​

$7​ admission

​

The 4th annual Wood-Fired Words will feature readings by: Sean Thomas Dougherty, Braddock’s 2013 Into the Furnace Writer-in-Residence; Sarah Leavens, Braddock’s current Out of the Forge Writer-in-Residence; and Salvatore Pane, author of the forthcoming novel Last Call in the City of Bridges, published by Braddock Avenue Books.

The event will also include The East End Book Exchange pop-up used bookstore, paintings by local artist Anna E. Mikolay, and wood-fired pizza baked in Braddock’s community pizza oven (with special chef appearance by Kevin Sousa).  Drinks are BYOB, and an ongoing potluck will occur inside the gallery.

More details about participating writers, artists, organizations and programs are available below.

Into the Furnace is a writer-in-residence program in Braddock, PA. The selected writer is housed in a two-room suite in the former St. Michael’s parochial school convent, which is located beside UnSmoke Systems Artspace, across the street from the Edgar Thompson Works, and beside the community pizza oven. Into the Furnace offers an adventuresome creative person, whose work and work ethic can benefit from the energy Braddock has to offer, up to 9 months of creative work time at our urban residency. http://www.intothefurnace.wordpress.com

Out of the Forge is a new writing residency for post-MFA graduates held in conjunction with the Into the Furnace residency. It allows time and space for an emerging writer to focus on his/her craft as well as engage with the Braddock community. Housed in the convent building next to UnSmoke for 6 to 9 months, the writer-in-residence becomes part of the heart of Braddock’s burgeoning literary community.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of thirteen books across genres including the forthcoming All I Ask for Is Longing: Poems 1994- 2014 and Scything Grace. He is the recipient of two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry and a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans. Known for his electrifying performances, Dougherty has performed at hundreds of venues, universities and festivals across North America and Europe. He has worked as a lecturer, in factories, warehouses, as a security guard, in a bakery, a sawmill, and as a teacher of at-risk youth. He currently works at a pool hall and teaches creative writing part-time at Cleveland State University.

Sarah Leavens received her MFA in Poetry and Nonfiction from Chatham University, where she served as the Margaret Whitford Fellow. While at Chatham, she organized the monthly reading series Word Circus in collaboration with Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery and earned certificates in the Pedagogy of Creative Writing and Travel Writing. Originally from the middle of four cornfields in Indiana, she has lived at length in Ohio, where she coordinated an arts outreach program for at-risk youth and families in Springfield, and served as Vice President for the Yellow Springs Arts Council. Her recent work has appeared in Fourth River and Weave; she teaches writing and visual art in Pittsburgh.

Salvatore Pane was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, will be published by Braddock Avenue Books this fall. His chapbook, #KanyeWestSavedFromDrowning, is forthcoming from NAP. He is an Assistant Professor of English Creative Writing at the University of Indianapolis. His fiction has been nominated or shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 [Very] Short Fictions. He won the 2010 Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction judged by Stewart O’ Nan with an excerpt from his novel. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Short Fiction, Hobart, PANK, Annalemma, BOMB, The Rumpus, HTMLGIANT, The American Book Review, and many other venues. http://salvatore-pane.com/

Braddock Avenue Books is an independent literary press dedicated to publishing both new and established writers and graphic artists whose work engages honestly and meaningfully with contemporary circumstances. Braddock Avenue Books especially supports writers using literary fiction, the long-form essay, or graphic fiction and nonfiction for serious explorations of what it means to be alive today. Founded by local writers Jeffery Condran and Robert Peluso in 2011, Braddock Avenue Books is located in Braddock, PA.

http://www.braddockavenuebooks.com/

Sherrie Flick is author of a novel, Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books), and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume). Select anthologies include Flash Fiction Forward (Norton), New Sudden Fiction (Norton), and The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. She has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Ucross Foundation, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A recipient of a 2011 Work of Art Award for Artistic Vibrancy from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, she teaches at Chatham University and (for 10 years) served as Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series.  Sherrie was instrumental in the creation of the Into the Furnace writing residency program.  http://www.sherrieflick.com

The East End Book Exchange was founded in the summer of 2011 on two simple ideas: love of books and love of Pittsburgh.  It is a pop-up used bookstore dedicated to connecting booklovers and books in the heart of Pittsburgh’s East End.  Each weekend, The East End Book Exchange appears in a community space or local business in a different neighborhood.  http://www.eastendbookexchange.com

Anna E. Mikolay is a painter and installation artist who lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She received a BFA from Edinboro University and maintains a studio space at Unsmoke Systems Artspace, in Braddock, PA. Upcoming Pittsburgh exhibitions include New Paintings at Concept Art Gallery, a site-specific installation at Future Tenant Gallery, and a solo exhibition at Unsmoke Systems Artspace. Recently, she was an artist in residence at the New York Student Art League's Vytlacil Campus, Sparkill, NY and a fellow with the 2011 Flight School Fellowship, Pittsburgh Filmmakers in Partnership with Creative Capital. Recent projects include, The Space Between, a solo exhibition at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, an installation for the 8 Hour Project, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA and paintings in the show, Minimalism in The 21st Century at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. http://www.annamikolay.com

Solo exhibition featuring paintings by Anna E. Mikolay

Opens Saturday, September 15th, 2012

7pm - 9pm
Free

Mikolay’s paintings use color fields, subtle marks, grids and geometric shapes to explore the idea of nothingness and the spaces beneath the perpetual hum of day-to-day existence. Activating Space: New Works also explores the idea of the painting as an object, a space activator and an optic stimulator. 

“If the world and everything therein was a symphony, than my paintings would be the “rests” in the score. They examine how a sliver of silence can permeate and expand at a given moment in time and ripple through the eye of the beholder.” - Anna E. Mikolay

In addition to the opening, the work will be on view by appointment only through October 6th. Call 412-865-9051 or email aemnow@gmail.com to schedule an appointment.

Anna E. Mikolay is a painter and installation artist who lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She received a BFA from Edinboro University and maintains a studio space at Unsmoke Systems Artspace, in Braddock, PA. 

Upcoming Pittsburgh exhibitions include New Paintings at Concept Art Gallery, a site-specific installation at Future Tenant Gallery, and a solo exhibition at Unsmoke Systems Artspace. Recently, she was an artist in residence at the New York Student Art League's Vytlacil Campus, Sparkill, NY and a fellow with the 2011 Flight School Fellowship, Pittsburgh Filmmakers in Partnership with Creative Capital. Recent projects include, The Space Between, a solo exhibition at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, an installation for the 8 Hour Project, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA and paintings in the show, Minimalism in The 21st Century at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. www.annamikolay.com