Introducing: The Velvet Undergrads
April 21 – May 9, 2010
The Annual Juried Undergraduate Exhibition
Opening Reception – April 21st – 5:00-7:00pm
Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Introducing: The Velvet Undergrads, with work by current undergraduate students from departments across the University of Rochester campus. This annual juried undergraduate exhibition will open at Hartnett Gallery in Wilson Commons on Wednesday, April 21st, with a reception from 5:00 to 7:00pm. There will be refreshments as well as a DJ at the event, which is free and open to the public.
This exhibition represents the wide range of artistic practices and designs of students at the University of Rochester. From photography and digital work to painting and drawing, all different varieties of artistic media are chosen for the exhibition. Hartnett Gallery wants to encourage and promote students’ artistic and creative endeavors through this open call for art. The exhibition ends on Wednesday, May 9th.
This year’s guest juror is Tate Shaw, Executive Director of Visual Studies Workshop, a nonprofit center for the media arts with a graduate program in Rochester, NY. Shaw is co-publisher of Preacher’s Biscuit Books and his work is in most major U.S. and international artists’ books collections. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Artists’ Books and his writings on books and photography appear in several publications including JAB, The Blue Notebook, Afterimage, and Contact Sheet.
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Long Exposure
March 18 – April 11, 2010
Images of the urban landscape by Leigh Tarentino
Artist’s Talk – March 18th – 4:00pm
Opening Reception – March 18th – 5:00-7:00pm
Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Long Exposure, with drawing, photography, and collage of Rochester’s built landscape by the artist Leigh Tarentino. Long Exposure will open in the Hartnett Gallery on Thursday, March 18th, and will be on display through April 11th.
Tarentino’s work transforms the elements of an archetypal modern American landscape into a fantastic imaginary world. The work she has created for Long Exposure originates from her family history and memories of Rochester. As a child Tarentino frequently visited family in Rochester, where her grandfather was a lifelong employee of Eastman Kodak Company.
In preparation for this exhibition, Tarentino returned to Rochester and took nearly 500 photographs in and around the city, choosing locations based on her early memories, including homes where her family members had lived, Kodak Park, the shoreline of Lake Ontario, and Seabreeze Amusement Park. These photographs form the basis of the drawing and digital print collage in this exhibition.
Long Exposure is composed of two pieces, each a composite of many parts. One piece is a series of drawings based on the diminutive lakeside cottages along the shoreline of Lake Ontario. “Charmed by these modest lakeside cottages, some no larger than a garden shed,” Tarentino writes that, to her, “they symbolize a middle class prosperity that is sadly starting to seem like an anomaly of the mid-twentieth century.”
The second piece in Long Exposure is a panorama made from combining many digital photographs of the Kodak complex on Lake Avenue in Rochester. Tarentino thinks of this piece as “a whimsical representation of how large the complex is—it spans several large city blocks.” The title of the piece, “The Apparatus Division,” comes from the dedication inscribed on a photo album her grandfather received at his Kodak retirement party in 1978.
Leigh Tarentino will be at the University of Rochester on Thursday, March 18th at 4:00pm to give a talk about her work. An opening reception for Long Exposure will follow from 5:00 to 7:00pm. All events are free and open to the public.
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Leigh Tarentino makes paintings, works on paper and digital prints constructed from photographs of the built landscape. Tarentino received a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Stas Namin Centre, Moscow, Russia; Bank Gallery, Los Angeles; the University Art Museum, State University of New York at Albany; and The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, among others. Her work has been included in Scope New York, London, Miami and Hamptons. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant in 2008, and Brown University Humanities Research Grants in 2008-9 and 2009-10. She is represented by Black and White Gallery in New York and has had solo shows at the gallery in 2004 and 2006. Her work was exhibited in a three-person show at Black and White Gallery from February 20 – March 28, 2009. Tarentino is Assistant Professor of Art at Brown University, where she teaches painting, drawing, printmaking, foundations, and digital imaging.
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Something is Always Far Away
January 28 – February 28, 2010
Artist’s Talk – January 28th – 4:00pm – Stackel Room
Opening Reception – January 28th – 5:00-7:00pm – Hartnett Gallery
Video and Sculpture Installation by Annie Strader
- From “Something is Always Far Away”; dictionary and projection
Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition, Something is Always Far Away, a sculpture and video installation by the artist Annie Strader. Something is Always Far Away will open in the Hartnett Gallery on Thursday, January 28th and will be on display through February 28th.
In the exhibition Something is Always Far Away, Annie Strader utilizes found and altered objects in combination with multiple digital video projections of the horizon to explore the complex relationships between the ways that everyday objects and images impact our psychological perceptions of distance and longing. The installation contains objects that belong to interior spaces, which are altered materially and contextually to interrupt their conventional meanings.
Strader employs clay, soil, and table salt to transform these everyday objects, creating works that question traditional expectations of materials while revealing the complicated relationships between the social and psychological dimensions of material conditions and physical circumstances. The installation maps both physical and psychological journeys navigating the spaces between fact/fiction, interior/exterior, and past/present.
Through an interdisciplinary reliance on sculpture, installation, video and performance, Strader links her personal experiences of longing for various things such as love, truth and understanding with historical, mythical and contemporary archetypes of feminine longings found in literature, film and life.
Annie Strader will be at the University of Rochester on Friday, January 28th at 4:00pm to give a talk about her work in the Stackel Room across from Hartnett Gallery. An opening reception for Something is Always Far Away will take place in the gallery following the artist’s talk from 5:00 to 7:00pm. All events are free and open to the public.
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Annie Strader received an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a B.F.A. from Ohio University. Her work has been featured at institutions such as the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado State University Art Museum, and SPACES Art Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Sam Houston State University, and has served as the Interim Director of the Shift Space Gallery at Wichita State University.
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Zorcutt: The Way of the Future
October 29th – November 22
Artist’s Talk – October 29 – 4:30pm
Opening Reception – October 29 – 5:00 to 7:00pm
Flying Machines by Zachary Orcutt
Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Zorcutt: The Way of the Future, a sculptural project by the artist Zachary Orcutt. Zorcutt: The Way of the Future will open in the Hartnett Gallery on Thursday, October 29th and will be on display through November 22nd.
Orcutt explores the idea of flight as an “ephemeral escape from the ceaseless custody of Earth.” He communicates his work through an alter ego named Zorcutt, the “Don Quixote of Aviation,” bridging the gap between reason and fantasy by creating flying machines out of society’s waste. Orcutt employs abandoned exercise machines, car parts, and found objects to create large-scale sculptural flying machines that speak to the artist’s uncomfortable relationships with art, industry, politics, and commerce.
For Orcutt’s work, the dream of flight has proven to be a valuable metaphor for growth, transformation, and transcendence. He urges viewers to alter their perspective to consider how “an encounter with the unexpected can dramatically alter understanding.”
Zachary Orcutt will be at the University of Rochester on Thursday, October 29th at 4:30 to give a talk about his work in Hartnett Gallery. An opening reception for Zorcutt: The Way of the Future will follow from 5:00 to 7:00pm, with a live appearance by Zorcutt. All events are free and open to the public.
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Zachary Orcutt received an MFA in Sculpture from Bowling Green State University and a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University. In addition, he completed an apprenticeship at the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture in Mercerville, NJ. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Kettering Art Center, the Parkersburg Art Center, Duke University, and the Sculpture Center Cleveland. He currently resides in Parkersburg, WV, where he is a professor at West Virginia University at Parkersburg.
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Telecommunity Portrait
September 17th – October 15th
Meliora Weekend Reception – October 9 – 4:00-6:00 pm
Artist’s Talk and Open House – October 15 – 5:00-7:00 pm
Interactive video and drawing by Edie Tsong
- Image courtesy of PICA
Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Telecommunity Portrait, an interactive video and drawing project by the artist Edie Tsong. Telecommunity Portrait will open in the Hartnett Gallery on Thursday, September 17th and will be on display through October 15th.
The artist explores intimacy in human relationships at a time when our personal communication is so often mediated by technology. From her home in New Mexico, Tsong will be host live videoconferences on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 11:00am to 2:00pm, and Saturdays from noon to 2:00pm, during which she will engage Hartnett Gallery participants in a drawing exchange.
Tsong and gallery participants create drawings of each other via live videoconference in what she calls a “symbolic intimate act,” resulting in an accumulation of drawings on the gallery wall. “As the drawings accumulate on the wall,” Tsong explains, “it becomes more and more obvious how the drawings reflect the personalities of the participants, and how my face is simply a reflection of the participants—of the community.”
A reception for Telecommunity Portrait will take place during Meliora Weekend, on Friday, October 9th, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm in the gallery. Edie Tsong will be at the University of Rochester on October 15th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm to give a talk in the Hartnett Gallery about the project and the work on display. All events are free and open to the public.
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Edie Tsong is interested in the practice of portraiture as a way to explore the relationship between self and other. Her projects have used videoconference, facsimile, plasticene, performance, and drawing. Tsong has exhibited internationally and lectured nationally. She currently lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.
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