Courtesy of BigTown Gallery
Rick Skogsberg’s “Can’t Lose Shoes” is a collection of shoes that he has painted since April, 2015.
Saturday, Oct. 31 at 5 p.m. — ROCHESTER — BigTown Gallery in Rochester celebrates its newest exhibit, “Hot Houses, Warm Curves,” drawing, photography and painting. The exhibit is on display now through Dec. 12, with an opening reception Saturday, Oct. 31 from 5 to 7 p.m. Featured artists are Anda Dubinskis, Peter Moriarty, and Rick Skogsberg.
Anda Dubinskis’ figurative paintings have won numerous awards including two painting fellowships from the National Endowment on the Arts; two painting fellowships as well as an SOS grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and a Leeway Grant for Achievement in Painting. She was a resident artist at the MacDowell Artist Colony in New Hampshire, was awarded a residency at La Napoule, France and spent a month painting and drawing at the Ballinglen Arts Program in Ballycastle, Ireland. Her work has been exhibited extensively both locally and nationally and is represented by the Fleisher-Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia.
She received her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She has taught at various institutions in the Philadelphia area including Swarthmore College, the University of Pennsylvania, Moore College of Art, Arcadia University and Tyler School of Art. She joined the faculty at Drexel University in 2007 and is currently an assistant teaching professor and drawing coordinator in the visual arts department of the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
Photographs by Peter Moriarty are in numerous public collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the George Eastman House and the Yale University Art Gallery among others. His prints have been in both solo and group touring exhibits at such venues as the Smithsonian Institution and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. He has served as a professor of art within the Vermont State Colleges and a senior teacher at the Trinity School in NYC. He published “Lotte Jacobi Photographs” (2003) with David Godine in Boston. He now maintains a studio in Clinton, Mass.
Although Rick Skogsberg worked painting in full color for a decade and a half beginning in the early 80s and then spent another decade and a half entirely in only writing poems, he considers himself both more drawn to, and ultimately more successful as an artist exploring abstraction through drawings with black ink on white paper, where balance and illusion suggest space, which projections are seized and held by the line. This is how he began in 1969, and after the painting and the poetry what he returned to with full seriousness in 2008, and except for taking two years (2010-2012) to work strictly digitally, at first in color, then in black and white using scans of his drawings as source material, working with various symmetries and re-mappings of surface, all of his work since, whether on paper plates or on various rectangular formats on paper, has been in black and paint.
In April of 2015 he began to paint shoes, both in black and white and full color, which has seemed to him as if both form and format, at once medium and method, assemble everything he has accumulated in both experience and interest from nearly 50 years of making art.
BigTown Gallery is located at 99 North Main Street in Rochester. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 12 to 5 p.m.; and Sunday through Tuesday, by appointment. For more info, call 802-767-9670 or visit www.bigtowngallery.com.
