Angelo Arnold
Christopher La Voie
Jackson Martin
Sebastian Martorana
Rachel Bone
Alyssa Dennis
Robert Sparrow Jones
James Rieck
Eddie Winter
Habitat
presented by the art + art history department
Goucher College
R o s e n b erg G a l l e ry
“ We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.� Winston Churchill
Habitat is an inquiry focused on the home. The exhibition not only investigates the interior and exterior spaces of home, but also, using house as a metaphor for humanness in all its multiple contexts, explores the recesses of the psyche. The home is where the intricate relationships between architecture, domesticity, objects, comfort, safety, memory, and gender become visible, and, in part, this exhibition demonstrates how otherwise ordinary household items can be elevated into artworks of significant emotional and artistic resonance. These physical items occupy and define space and become surrogates for our thoughts, fears, dreams, and desires; they provide a fertile environment in which to gain insight into the places we both physically and emotionally live.
Laura Amussen Curator
In Familiarture, Angelo Arnold presents concepts of change and subversion through the comfortable format of furniture. Arnold’s metamorphic forms deconstruct the functional object, establishing a foundation on which to recall memories, stories, and uncanny events. Though his reconstructed objects reference a vocabulary of furniture, removing the functional aspects subverts the viewer’s expectations and provokes new interpretations. Arnold uses the gallery as a platform on which to establish an imagined environment of familiar upholstered objects with an unfamiliar twist.
(right) Enough, 2007 wood, foam and fabric 3’ x 4’ x 3’ (left) Loved Seat, 2007 steel foam and fabric 3’ x 4’ x 3’
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Sculptor and multimedia artist Christopher LaVoie deals with themes of domesticity, stasis, and movement as he deconstructs and reconstructs familiar middle-class objects and furniture. LaVoie sees a correlation between re-imagining our material surroundings and re-imagining ourselves, a transformation often evident in everyday objects that have become activated, released from their boxes, their shelves, and their stasis. His work re-fabricates the prefabricated, giving it animated personality.
Grey Vibrations, 2008 mixed media dimensions variable
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Just in Case (Family of Three), is the second in a series of sculptures created by Jackson Martin for the sole purpose of satisfying his obsession with preparation. With their daughter’s recent arrival, a whole new set of worries and concerns have surfaced for Martin and his wife. Just in Case serves to highlight this newfound anxiety and stands as an ominous and foreboding table, exhibiting daily an apocalyptic future that might be just over the horizon.
Just in Case (Family of Three), 2008 steel, acrylic, two adult respirators, one youth respirator, and filters 34” x 30” x 20”
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Carved from marble, Sebastian Martorana’s latest sculpture, Homeland Security Blanket, depicts a small child wrapped in a blanket. It serves as a humanist rather than political memorial, focusing on the sacrifice of others for the security of oneself and one’s loved ones. Martorana believes that the importance of a sense of personal security cannot be underestimated, though it is often taken for granted, and that the home is perhaps where safety and security are most precious.
Homeland Security Blanket, 2008 marble 23” x 20” x 20”
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The women in Rachel Bone’s paintings are inspired by a range of people: from strangers in the street to public figures in the news to traditional folk heroines. Although the characters themselves are modest, conservative, and domestic, they are often sent on unlikely adventures or put up to bizarre tasks. The lack of individuality or independence of the 1950s-housewife stereotype makes her an entertaining candidate for such adventures. These paintings are an illustrative reminder that there is little more heartbreaking than a person so confined to a personal world of order and practicality that she doesn’t recognize the beauty of nonsense when it surrounds her.
The Debaters, 2008 gouache and ink on paper 17” x 21”
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Influenced by her involvement in a number of sustainable building projects, Alyssa Dennis explores architecture as it relates to human function. These images represent a level of disconnect by contrasting aspects of post-industrial architecture with natural building techniques. Alyssa currently works as a research assistant for a “green” architect and brings these experiences to her drawings, “building” them with natural materials such as ground pigment, graphite, and colored pencil.
Menhir, 2008 mixed media 20” x 16”
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Robert Sparrow Jones’s narrative vision is a combination of many sources, including landscape, upbringing, faith, family, and friends. Jones recognizes the deep relationship between natural form and human design; his propensity to include architecture within the landscape is a Thoreauvian attempt to coexist with nature. His places and structures hint at human complexity and contradiction, and a bold history is revealed in the layers. Jones’s loose, transparent layers constantly move and pulse. Like a wealth of wonderful fields, lakes, and rivers haunted by stories, they imply a chance for magic and wonder in an otherwise mundane scene.
Fiddlehead, 2008 oil on panel 21” x 25”
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James Rieck paints within the language of consumerbased advertisements and photographs. His work deals with the illusion of perfection generated by the utopian picture presented in fashion ads—artificial postures that, although seemingly benign, carry agendas. Rieck’s cool hand, acute cropping, and dramatic scale emphasize the simulated, generating psychological tension and demanding a re-evaluation of what is “real.”
Fitted Style, 2003 oil on canvas 96” x 72”
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Eddie Winter’s photographs encourage retrospective imagination. The images focus on ideas related to domesticity, challenges within memory, and the uncanny circumstances of the human condition. Winter’s goal is to hold the viewer in a state of suspended reading, simply suggesting the values of intimacy and exploring the threshold of description.
Untitled (The Living Box Series) 2007-2008 digital C-print 30” x 30”
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Habitat November 3 – December 7, 2008 Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13, 2008, 7-9 p.m.
Directions
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus. Gallery Hours
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays. Call 410.337.6333 for evening and weekend hours. The Rosenberg 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 NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences. C9190-10/08
www.goucher.edu/rosenberg