A year's effort will be on Exhibit
The email came over the spring break. I was thrilled. Eileen Tognini, the modern art curator, had selected two pieces of my new work to be exhibited at the Main Line Art Center Exhibition Galleries from May 9 to June 6. Eillen Tognini is one of the most forward thinking curators in the Philadelphia area (CFEVA Board of Artistic Advisors; Drexel University.). It has been over a year of hard work for me. An idea that came to mind at a visit to NextFab many months ago, finally came to fruition. My brain is in constant search mode. Ideas come to mind at rapid speed, and that is what happened that Philadelphia summer. The laser printer and the electronics' lab I saw at NextFab seemed really interesting to go unnoticed. A rush of ideas and possibilities came to mind. But making those ideas reality was not easy by any stretch of the imagination.
Using traditional drawing techniques, I take my pencil drawings and transform them by laser printing them on transparent polycarbonate sheets, lighting them with LEDs, making the images glow. The images acquire a different dimension. I draw images that are familiar to me and my daily life? That was the start. You see some of them here. At the same time, I have always been fascinated by layers, real and abstract, and how layers change everything and add complexity to any work of art and situation. A light projected on an image creates a shadow. The shadow grows and changes depending on our position and the position of the light. Our perception of things changes the same way. I print different layers on the sheets and these different layers create a perception of depth. The LED lights make the image float in space. In addition, when a light is projected on the image, this outside light creates shadows of the image on the wall. The perception changes as the light or the viewer moves. Our perception of things changes as we look at situations from different angles.
You may wonder what happened with the bulls, my mixed media works.... They are still part of my exploration and my regular work. Holding a brush in front of a traditional canvas is still a wonderful struggle for me. But more about that in the next post.
On view at The Main Line Ar Center (www.Mainlineart.org) May 9- June 6.
