Juvenescence

Sam Fein Sean FitzPatrick Erin Fostel Morgan Frailey Lynn Palewicz Cathleen Sachse Sharon Shapiro

Juvenescence

THE SILBER ART GALLERY Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum | Goucher College

“ After all, we were young.

We were 14 and 15, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live—to die—to burst into flame—to be transformed into angels or explosions.”

— Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter

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n the new art exhibit Juvenescence, seven artists—Sam Fein, Sean FitzPatrick, Erin Fostel, Morgan Frailey,

Lynn Palewicz, Cathleen Sachse, and Sharon Shapiro—explore various aspects of childhood. Through video, painting, drawing, site-specific installation, and photography, these artists offer moments of nostalgia, where the viewer is transported back to childhood. Culled from both memory and imagination, the diverse works in this exhibit create narratives that tell stories of teenage curiosity, loneliness, and struggle. That period in our lives that greatly shaped our identity as we learned to navigate both personal and social terrains. A time wrought with emotion in a world that often felt overwhelming, and our vulnerability unbearable.

— Laura Amussen, Curator

Sam Fein

Sam Fein is an interdisciplinary artist who creates large-scale paintings that address complex psychosocial narratives.

Rather than replicating the literalism of the physical world, each piece gives expression to a uniquely individualized reality. Combining elements of magical realism, absurdist humor, ethnography, and communal storytelling, his pieces earnestly accept the imagination of childhood.

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Mishap, 2013 oil on canvas 75� x 96�

Sean FitzPatrick

Hood Race, 1994, 2013 oil and paint markers on canvas 48” x 48”

Sean FitzPatrick’s collection of paintings is modeled on a set of rediscovered childhood drawings. In the original pieces, he had drawn on black-and-white photos in a book about the American West.

Converting the original drawings into paintings is an act of re-contextualization.

FitzPatrick is now able to apply tools that were not at his disposal as a child and, in so doing, elevate what was not originally intended as art. This conversion undermines the “truth” inherent in all photographs. In these new works, he felt a sense of collaboration with his younger self, having transformed his forgotten drawings into mature, emotionally charged pieces that exhibit the control of a trained artist while remaining true to the raw childhood emotion that inspired them.

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Erin Fostel

As a child, Erin Fostel spent hours in her room drawing, writing, and daydreaming.

She created different worlds on paper and melted into them. It was a time when her dreams and her reality were divided by such a thin line that sometimes she lost touch with the present. Fostel wishes she had retained that pure, naĂŻve imagination, but it has been lost due to lack of use, from falling into the daily drudge of adulthood. Her drawings are about the spirit of imagination, a power so strong it can change the world.

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Climb this Mountain, 2009 charcoal on paper 37� x 30�

Morgan Frailey

Face Cake, 2012 video stills dimensions variable

Teenagers navigate the space between childhood and adulthood, where each day is met with crushing urgency and importance. It’s the flattening of time that comes from feeling both too old and too young, of wanting everything and having nothing. Interdisciplinary artist Morgan Frailey is interested in investigating this potent time through performance, sculpture, and installation.

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Lynn Palewicz

Lynn Palewicz’s photographs and drawings take the viewer deeper into a place that feels deeply known. Just as visions of Joan of Arc must have been in the 16th century, the world depicted in the images seems distant, yet disturbingly familiar. They are not scenes from socalled real life, yet we utterly believe in them as if they were stills from an unsuspected collective memory. Is it something about the serene and eternal loneliness of childhood, perhaps? Maybe something that is both of and about beauty and paint? Palewicz’s 21st-century tableaux vivants seem like living portraits of emotions we know but cannot name.

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Untitled (on chair), 2008 archival pigment print 28” x 40”

Cathleen Sachse

The Rabbits Came, 2014 site-specific installation dimensions variable

Cathleen Sachse is a Baltimore-based multidisciplinary artist. Her sculptural works deal with obsession, childhood, memory, and war. She employs materials and imagery that are traditionally associated with childhood, most frequently stuffed animals, namely bunnies. These toys act as a gateway into worlds of her own making. In childhood we are both a creator and a destroyer. Viewed through the lens of a child, tragedy instead becomes magic. In her installation works, Sachse deals with these contradictions and the point where cuteness becomes overwhelming and, at times, menacing.

History and memories are told through a blanket of protective fuzziness.

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Sharon Shapiro

Sharon Shapiro’s paintings suggest hidden stories, playful or private moments that question the social constructs of beauty, gender, and role play. She knits fragments of personal experience drawn from a range of photographic sources.

Shapiro’s subjects are composites, sharing traits that are both male and female, animal and human, childlike and adult.

For more than two decades, Shapiro’s work has chronicled the complexities of growing up in the United States. Her paintings capture the tender sensuality that emerges at an early age and the electric interplay of power and desire that surface in the everyday. Her territory is archaeology and reflection; she is driven to dig inward through memory, instinct, and experience to extract her observations from the details of daily life.

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Nine Lives, 2008 acrylic on canvas 36” x 46”

Juvenescence Sam Fein Sean FitzPatrick Erin Fostel Morgan Frailey

Lynn Palewicz Cathleen Sachse Sharon Shapiro

October 28 – December 7, 2014 (Goucher is closed November 25-30) ARTISTS’ RECEPTION

Thursday, November 20, 6-9 p.m.

(Artists’ talk at 7:30 p.m.)

THE SILBER ART GALLERY Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum | Goucher College

DIRECTIONS

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

GALLERY HOURS 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tuesday – Sunday 410-337-6477

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

goucher.edu/silber

15124-3225 11/14

The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.