GESTURES: AN EXHIBITION OF SMALL SITE-SPECIFIC WORKS
March 25, 2011 - July 24, 2011
On March 25, 2011, the fifteenth installment of the Mattress Factory’s Gestures: An Exhibition of Small Site-Specific Works series will open with a reception from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM at our annex gallery located at 1414 Monterey Street. Guest-curated by Katherine Talcott, Gestures 15 includes new work from Sue Abramson, Chris Craychee, Jerstin Crosby, Will Giannotti, Deborah Hosking, HOT SPOTS: What Comes After Oil? (artist collaborators Ann T. Rosenthal, Wendy Osher, Elizabeth Monoian, and Karin Bergdolt), Stephanie Mayer-Staley, Ingrid Nagin, and Garry Pyles.
Friday, March 25, 2011
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
$10 (MF Members & CMU/PITT Students FREE w/ I.D.)
Facebook event.
"Gestures 15 is about process and collaboration: how the curator chooses artists and the process of the artist to create and respond to visual cues or concepts. My process as curator is to identify the inner workings and conceptual subtleties of aesthetic practices, see the potential, and offer experimental opportunities to Pittsburgh’s creative community."
– Katherine Talcott, Curator of Gestures 15
GESTURES 15 ARTISTS
Sue Abramson
Sue Abramson is currently an Associate Professor of photography at Pittsburgh Filmmakers where she has been teaching for twenty years. Abramson has shown her work nationally and regionally including exhibitions at the Houston Center for Photography, the Visual Studies Workshop and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Her photographs have been published in Extended Frames, Pittsburgh Revealed: Photographs Since 1850 and in the Pinhole Journal. Her work is in numerous collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Allentown Art Museum and the Polaroid Collection.
Chris Craychee
Chris Craychee has lived in Pittsburgh his entire life, and has been involved in artmaking for longer than he can remember. His first commisioned work came at the age of 9 for a rendering of pro wrestler Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. He graduated from Woodland Hills High School and Carnegie Mellon University, earning a BFA in Art. Since finishing school Chris has worked in a wide variety of media, and has exhibited in a number of local and regional venues. He was a member of the Brew House Association in the South Side from 2000 to 2007, and has made a living as an art handler, working over the years for a number of local galleries and museums. Currently, Chris is the Head of Preparation at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Jerstin Crosby
Jerstin Crosby creates interdisciplinary works that combine seemingly unrelated contexts into forms that are both humorous and subversively dark.
He has exhibited internationally, and has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers, and Time Out London.
Will Giannotti
Will Giannotti is based in Pittsburgh PA and has conducted "art" projects in various contexts since 2003. Some venues where his work has been exhibited are the Huntington Museum of Art (WV), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and the Three Rivers Arts Festival. He has also distributed art materials through the mail and screened work on a JumboTron in a major sports stadium.
Deborah Hosking
Deborah Hosking has lived, worked and exhibited in New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Los Angeles and, since 2005, Pittsburgh. Initially a painter and mixed media artist, she now works primarily in digital photography and video. She has awards to her credit in each medium, and a number of her photographs are currently included in an exhibition in the American Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic.
Deborah served as production designer for the short films The Specials and Lightweight, which she also co-wrote. She holds a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon and an MFA in Film & Digital Media from Chatham University.
Artist Collaborators: HOT SPOTS: WHAT COMES AFTER OIL
Ann T. Rosenthal, Pittsburgh
Wendy Osher, Pittsburgh
Elizabeth Monoian, Dubai
Karin Bergdolt, Nurnberg, Germany
Ann T. Rosenthal brings to communities 30 years experience as an artist, educator, and writer. Her art installations address the local manifestation of global concerns, including climate change, food safety, and nuclear waste. Over the last few years, her work has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Exit Art and the Hudson River Museum in New York, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia, and Kunsthaus Kaufbeuren in Germany. From 2006-2009, she directed the Community Trail Art Initiative, partnering with trail organizations and post-industrial communities to reconnect citizens, educational institutions, and youth to their forgotten waterways as sites of common experience, history and possibility. Her essays and work on eco/community art have been published in several journals and anthologies, most recently in Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism, edited by Karen Frostig and Kathy A. Halamka (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, 2007) and Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame by Beverly Naidus (New Village Press, CA 2009). Ms. Rosenthal teaches environmental art and design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Plymouth State University, NH. She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999.
Wendy Osher's work is inspired by incongruities in contemporary life and human perception that shape questions about community, natural world, and time. Currently, environmental issues such as invasive species, modern food production, packaging, and gardens drive much of the work. Recycled accumulations increasingly dominate her materials. Recently identified by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as one of 2010’s best artists, Wendy just returned from a 2010 residency in Plueschow, Germany. She also participated as an invited guest in an international workshop, Irregular Art Practices in Public Spaces in Munich, Germany. Carnegie Museum of Art (2010) commissioned work for an exhibition. She is a 2009 Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 2004 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellow in Media Arts, recipient of a 2008 commission by American Jewish Museum and a 2008 Tough Art residency at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. She was selected as a 2007-8 recipient of Brew House Distillery program, an invited artist for the 2005 Pittsburgh Biennial and 2005 Mattress Factory Gestures exhibitions, and a 2004 participant in a community arts residency in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2003, she received an Award of Merit from the Three Rivers Arts Festival Annual Exhibition. Her work, including sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting has been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally.
Elizabeth Monoian is currently based in the United Arab Emirates and is Assistant Professor at Zayed University working with young Emirati women to build a rich contemporary art and design movement that is unique to the region. She is the Principal and Co-Founder of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). LAGI is a worldwide public arts initiative that offers the opportunity for collaborative teams of artists, architects, landscape architects and designers, working with engineers and scientists, to create new ways of thinking about what renewable energy generation looks like. The LAGI project calls on design teams to conceive of large-scale public artworks for specific sites that, in addition to their conceptual beauty, also have the ability to harness clean renewable energy from nature, convert the energy to electrical power, and distribute the power to the utility grid of the city. The project has received featured articles in numerous local and international press outlets, including The New York Times and Dwell Magazine. Her work has screened and exhibited internationally in venues including: The First Biennial of Oran, Algeria; Video’ Appart, International Video Art Biennial, Paris & Dubai; the XXIII Moscow International Film Festival, Moscow, Russia; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Open Screen Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Festival of Actual Kino, Novosibirsk, Russia; The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and the International Media Art Festival at the Armenian Center of Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia. Elizabeth received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.
Karin Bergdolt finished her studies with a master diploma at the Academy of Arts in Munich in the class of Nikolaus Gerhart. Since presenting her three-week performance and installation, "I CHOOSE THE PLACE OF WORK MYSELF" at the former frontier building Germany-Austria 1998, her work has addressed the use and organization of (public) space. In 2002, she established the initiative P.L.A.N. – a concept that is intended to work for the intellectual and sensorial reorganization of places and space, and which functions in an interdisciplinary and participatory way. Karin resided in Pittsburgh with her family for six months supported by an artists' grant through the Bavarian government. Prior to her visit and while she was in Pittsburgh, she formulated “Hot Spots: What Comes After Oil?” with Ann Rosenthal and Elizabeth Monoian. Her Hot Spots highly successful installation in a former gas station in Nurnberg last summer featured a month of public programs, including lectures and workshops for all ages. She recently received a one-year-stipend for the promotion of equal opportunity of women's rights in university and career. Over the last five years, Ms. Bergdolt has had five solo shows throughout Germany, and numerous group shows, including in Pittsburgh at Fe Gallery, ArtUp, and the Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Stephanie Mayer-Staley
Stephanie Mayer-Staley (Head of Design, Freelance Scenic Designer, Point Park University) was born and raised in Böhmfeld, a small village in the heart of Bavaria, Germany. Mrs. Mayer-Staley’s passion for the visual arts is influenced by her German heritage as well as her American experience. Her unique talents have found their expression primarily in Set Designs and Installation Art, while also venturing into Lighting Design, Land Art, Painting, Photography and Stone Masonry. Living “between two worlds” Mrs. Mayer-Staley’s art reflects her desire for cross-cultural understanding. The merging of her versatile background is expressed in the blurred line between scenic design and installation art, creating unique statements that impact the audience as well as the performer. Her work has been produced, displayed and honored in the USA as well as in Germany. In America her local visual art (installation, sculpture and mixed media) has been displayed at the Pittsburgh Biennial, Artists Upstairs, the Three Rivers Arts Festival as well as the Art Olympics at the Mattress Factory. Stephanie holds an M.F.A in Technical Theater/Design from California State University under the Mentorship of Danila Korogodsky.
Ingrid Nagin
Ingrid Nagin worked as an industrial and graphic designer in New York and Philadelphia before returning to Pittsburgh, her childhood home. She is communications designer for Weisshouse, a contemporary home furnishing store. Over the years, Ingrid has made art privately. In 2007, she was invited to experiment with her first site-specific installation. The exhibition "salvage/Salvation: Arise was in an abandoned church in Braddock, PA. This will be the second time she has exhibited her work publicly.
Garry Pyles
Garry Pyles is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, sculpture, and installation. He works primarily with simple industrial materials such as wire, plastic, fiberglass, and wax. He received his degree in Interior Design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1983. He is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. The artist lives with his partner, artist, Atticus Adams in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Lawrenceville.
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The Pittsburgh Art BlogThe Pittsburgh Art Blog features selected pittsburgh artists and upcoming exhibits with photos from the artists and galleries. since the major press outlets do not go beyond a directory listing of exhibits, blogs are needed to promote pittsburgh artists and their work. the blog also calls attention to the inferiority complex of pittsburgh art and how it's perpetuated by the major players in town. Started on August 20,2007. pittsburgh area galleries and art venues are listed at the sister site www.PghGalleries.com.
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