September 5–October 6, 2017

Curator: Michael Peglau
Reception: October 6, 5–7 p.m.
Artist Talk: October 6, 2–3 p.m.

Omar Rodriguez-Graham C’02 is based in Mexico City and is known around the world. He explores painting’s inherent language-hoping to find the meeting point between the recognizable and the abstract.

This program has been made possible by support from the Traphagen Distinguished Alumni Speaker Series Endowment. Endowed by Mr. Ross Traphagen, Trustee Emeritus, the series brings prominent alumni to campus to engage in discussion with students and other members of the Drew community.

Distant Exposure

Curator: Kimberly Rhodes

March 21- April 25, 2017
Reception: April 7, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Free Admission

The Korn Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Distant Exposure by Patty Cateura.  To counteract the passive intake of images that bombard us daily, Cateura’s paintings entice the viewer to slow down and pause.  Her art originates from time spent in remote landscapes, hiking, camping- being in nature. Back in the studio, this inspiring exposure yields flattened and juxtaposed abstract shapes of mountains, vistas, canyons, rivers and sea. Color is precisely chosen and hand-made from dispersion pigment.  Perspective is vast and skewed within the infinite expanse of monochromatic space. Occasional floating and fragmented geometric shapes allude to the man-made. Yet nature prevails in hills, trees, desert and pure color fields. Through the openness and sometimes emptiness of her compositions, Cateura evokes nature’s vibrancy, power, scale, and stillness as an arresting visual pause from the overdose of our media driven digital lives.

Patty Cateura attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received an MFA from The Maryland Institute of the Arts and a BA from Oberlin College. Her work has been shown throughout the US including recent solo shows at Robert Henry Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; Carol Shen Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; The Cooler Gallery, VT; and Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA. She has been awarded residencies at: The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; Yaddo; The MacDowell Colony; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and The Millay Colony. She has received painting grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation

Sam I Am

Exhibition: January 24 – February 29, 2017
Reception: February 3, 5:30 – 7:30 PM

ARTIST TALK: February 3, 4;30  ART 106

Free Admission

The Korn Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Sam I Am by Rory Mulligan.

Rory Mulligan is a photographer who explores the history of an urban landscape that was the setting of human violence.  He comments on the erasure of the site that attempts to re-write its history. Mulligan compares this guise to ancient male human violence, which he suggests conceals masculine vulnerability.

In addition to the solo exhibition at the Korn Gallery, Mulligan had solo exhibitions at Motus Fort, Tokyo, Japan and Center Gallery at Fordham University, New York, NY.  His work was included in group shows at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN; Lisa Cooley, New York, NY; Skirball Museum, Cincinnati, OH; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA, as well as other galleries and institutions. His awards include the Process Space Residence, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY; the Photography Fellowship Commendation Award, Silver Eye Center for Photography, and the Ward Cheney Memorial Award, Yale University, New Haven, CT. His work is collected by The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Rory Mulligan received a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from Yale University. He currently teaches at Drew University in Madison, NJ.

The Gallery is located in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University and is open Tuesday through Friday 12:30-4:00 PM, selected weekends and by appointment.

SOUNDINGS
Singing Masks/Automata/ Multimedia

Curator: Michael Peglau

Exhibition: October 20 – November 18, 2016
Reception: November 11, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

https://vimeo.com/192992043

Artist Statement

Sounding. Listening. Connecting. Dreaming.

I am an unabashed animist. I believe that everything is infused with what, for want of better word, might be called spirit. There is intelligence at the heart of all matter. Human intelligence is just one peculiar manifestation of this larger ground of being. Other manifestations are radically different, incomprehensible to conventional human sensibilities. Yet all things give voice to the underlying cohering essence, the spirit swirling through cells, molecules, atoms, quarks and superstrings. If we listen carefully we can resonate along with these primary vibrations and receive information, knowledge, altered understanding.

 This has been the thrust of the teaching by the Singing Masks that I have been making and employing in ceremonial/performances over the past thirty-five years. Their voices and iconographic presences have been continual reminders of connection with that animistic sense of spirit-essence in rivers, rocks, sky, trees, as well as among all things animate. They have become guides in all my work into shifting perspectives, into experiencing everything as holy (William Blake), into mythic and oneiric reality. This same sensibility has also come to inform my approach to making automata, sculptural instruments and a variety of multimedia creations.

The ceremonial/performance pieces inspired by the Singing Masks are not entertainments in a traditional sense. They are not music, theater or dance meant to tell a story or lead one along a preconceived path. They are more often invitations to dive into ineffable richness and chaos even, to discover and explore

 Whenever possible I like to make use of found objects as well as inexpensive materials, including electronics. I have also sometimes incorporated state-of-the-art computer technology to loop and pitch-shift the voices of the masks in real-time. This can be heard in recordings of some performances. I do not hide the technology. Nor do I make much effort to gloss over the inevitable awkward gestures needed to control the devices in my near-blind masked condition. I have an interest in the convergence of the primal and the present, the sacred and the mundane. In the Dream Time presence of the masks, automata, sculptural instruments and multimedia, even the most trivial occurrence may be recognized as having its own kind of perfection and beauty.

Dreaming. Connecting. Listening. Sounding.

Norman Lowrey
October, 2016

here

Curator: Margaret Kuntz

Exhibition: August 30-October 6
Reception: September 9, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Artist Statement

Left turns at night.

I only work from life, which is a half-truth.

I make left turns more than right turns, mostly at night. At those stoplights that don’t have a green turn signal I wait for a break in the oncoming traffic, and go.

The painting is me in space.

Continuity is contingent on interruptions, or is it the other way around?

‘What if’s and ‘why not’s.

Looking begins with naming.

Painting is simultaneity experienced viscerally.

Does knowing something is abstract make it more real?

Does something verifiable open up the possibility for abstract thought?

The image is everywhere; I wonder what stays.

Contours and silhouettes,

Echoes and parallel possibilities,

Spaces interrupted and painterly interventions.

processes of life and decay

June 3 – June 24, 2016
Opening Reception : June 3, 4-6 p.m.
Artist Talk: June 3, 4:30p.m.

I seek to understand why humans are so troubled by the inevitable processes of life and decay that we feel a need to create an artificial distance between ourselves and the aspects of the human experience that make us uncomfortable.

I am speaking to the distancing from our food sources, from our bodies, from our instincts, from the environment and from death. We’ve developed machines and unnatural procedures in hopes of bypassing the difficult or distressing conditions of life. We try to perpetuate the good: keep our food fresh, preserve our bodies, and fight sickness & corrosion. As in the story of Siddhartha’s enlightenment, we are being blinded from the negative sights and ultimately prevented from seeing life for what it really is: as a process of constant change.

With my work I am tracing the symptoms of the epidemic that I observe to be stemming from mankind’s disengagement with their natural processes, and through the creation of investigative artworks that focus on the abnormalities arising out of repetitive manipulation, I offer up my notes to the world in the hopes that someone more political than I will be curious enough to respond with a solution.

Stephanie Elden
May 2016

Sleep has Eyes
Exhibition:  March 17 – April 30, 2016
Reception: April 1, 5:30 -7:30 p.m.
Artist Talk: March 31, 5:00 p.m.

The Korn Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Sleep has Eyes by Robert Yarber on view March 17 through April 30, 2016. The Gallery is located in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University and is open Tuesday through Friday 12:30-4 p.m., selected weekends and by appointment.

This exhibition consists of paintings and drawings Yarber has done from 2005 to the present. Organized by Drew Professor of Art, Michael Peglau, the exhibition features work whose focus lies not in the pursuit of simple family resemblances of style nor of a series of imagistically related works. Instead Yarber has elected work for this show which all arose of what he has termed, ‘the intensity of his response to the moment.’

Since the early 1970’s, Yarber has created a unique oeuvre which is remarkable in the compositional complexities of its inhabited and natural spaces and in its deployment of figures, ranging from supine to falling to levitating.  Yarber’s work is no less fascinating in terms of his great resources as a colorist. Beyond his total command of both artificial and natural light effects, he often pushes his color into an extreme zone, where coupled with his imagery, it unmoors his work from being exclusively engaged in a shared social world. Instead, his color in it’s aggressive, incandescent interaction with his imagery opens into an interior world where, while we all venture there, unlike Yarber few of us return fully cognizant of its uncanny vividness.

Yarber has had a remarkable career with numerous exhibits in New York, including the Whitney Biennial, many exhibitions internationally, including the Venice Biennial, and many exhibitions in major galleries in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He currently is a distinguished Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University.

Spacer
January 18 – February 20
Reception: February 5, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Ben Pranger’s current sculpture combines organic and architectural elements in hybrid constructions of papier-mâché, plaster, wood and paint. Moving between organization and chaos, the work often begins with a fragment of a previous work. Blobby masses are built around skeletal structures or scaffolding supports bulbous growths. These contrasting forms operate in tension: pixilated grids emerge from fluid forms like cities colonizing an indeterminate terrain. The sculpture is a kind of failed architecture, where structures, overwhelmed by disaster, collapse under the weight of matter, only to rise again from the ruins to rebuild the city anew. While the sculpture is decidedly low-tech, investigating material-based abstraction, it also imagines future worlds and habitations, suggesting sci-fi, dystopian scenarios.

Ben Pranger earned a BFA from Oberlin College and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has shown his work throughout the U.S., including recent group shows at Drawing Rooms (NJ), Artist-Run/ Satellite Show (Miami), Trestle Gallery (NY) and Grizzly Grizzly (PA). He has participated in artist residencies at Kohler Art/Industry, Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has received sculpture grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the New Jersey Council for Art.