CHALLENGING MATERIALS: A PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday, February 20, 7 pm – 9 pm
This event is free and open to all

Join us for a vibrant panel discussion where four artists will discuss their use of unusual materials in creating art. Each artist on the panel draws their inspiration from unexpected sources to create their work. Materials addressed such as fireworks, magnets, blood and velcro can be challenging for the artist as well as the viewer. Mary Birmingham, Curator at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, will moderate the panel. Participants include Jordan Eagles, New Jersey artist featured in Jordan Eagles: RED GIANT, Rosemarie Fiore, New York artist, Alice Hope, New York artist, and Cordy Ryman, New York artist featured in Cordy Ryman: Shuffle / Scrap / Echo.

RSVP is requested for this free event. Please call 908.273.9121.



MODERATOR

Mary Birmingham
Mary Birmingham is Curator at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, where she directs an ambitious program of contemporary art exhibitions. She began her career at the Whitney Museum, and for nine years was a member of the curatorial department of the Montclair Art Museum. From 2007 -2010, she was Director of Exhibitions at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ. Birmingham received an MA in Art History from Hunter College, with a concentration in American Modernism. She has organized numerous exhibitions, and has written and lectured on a variety of topics in American and contemporary art. She is the author of Dynamic Impulse: The Drawings of Stuart Davis (2007) and co-author of Montclair Art Museum: Selected Works (2002).



PANELISTS

Jordan Eagles
Jordan Eagles has been working with animal blood for over a dozen years. Through an invented process, he suspends, encases, and permanently preserves the blood, salvaged from slaughterhouses, in Plexiglas and UV resin. Eagles’ unique, multidimensional works explore themes of regeneration and the intangible connections between body, spirit and nature.

Jordan Eagles' works are in the permanent collections of The Everson Museum of Art, The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Mobile Museum of Art, The Fuller Craft Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Peabody Essex Museum, The Everhart Museum, and many others. His work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine, SF Chronicle, Art Ltd., ArtInfo.com and many other online and print publications.

Eagles has two solo exhibitions scheduled in Jan 2013 at the Visual Arts Center Of New Jersey and The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis and is featured in the exhibition Blood is the Life at the Everhart Museum in Feb 2013.


Rosemarie Fiore
Rosemarie Fiore is an artist based in Bronx, NY. She typically produces artwork out of the actions of mechanisms. She converts popular technology such as lawn mowers, cars, waffle irons, floor polishers, pinball machines, fireworks and amusement park rides into painting machines.

Fiore received her BA from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has attended residencies at Art Omi International Residency Program, Yaddo, Skowhegan, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Bronx Museum (AIM Program) among others. She has received awards through The New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York State Council for the Arts, The Sally and Milton Avery Foundation, The Bronx Council on the Arts, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, The Lower East Side Print Shop, NY and The Dieu Donne Paper Mill, NY. Her solo and group exhibitions include: The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and Hong Kong: Winkleman Gallery, NY; Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, NY; The Anderson Gallery VCUarts, Richmond, VA; Grand Arts, Kansas City; The Bronx Museum, NY; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; The Queens Museum of Art, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; The Roswell Museum, NM and The Franklin Institute of Science, Philadelphia. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, New York Magazine, Art in America, The Village Voice, NY Arts Magazine, FLAUNT Magazine, Art Papers Magazine, The Washington Post and Art on Paper.


Alice Hope
Alice Hope manipulates materials such as perforated aluminum, iron filings, ball chain, bbs, steel shot, ferrite and neodymium magnets that are associated with industrial functions. Through the dense application and repetition of these forms she maximizes their visual effects. Because these materials are normally outside of an artistic context, the scale, placement, and pattern must be deliberately controlled. The power of numbers is crucial as Hope calculates the work hours, number of magnets, degrees in scale, weight, and distance involved with each piece. Ultimately, her labor-intensive execution leads to opulent work that seems Baroque in extreme contrast to the materials that produced it.

Alice Hope received her MFA in painting at Yale University, and maintains a studio at the Elizabeth Foundation in Manhattan. For the past two summers, she has made installations at the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island. She constructed a large-scale installation at the former Camp Hero Air Force Station in Montauk, as part of the Parrish Road Show exhibition series. This year she is inaugurating the artist-in-residency program at WNYC's Green Space. She will be having a solo-exhibition at Salomon Contemporary in New York this spring.


Cordy Ryman
New York based artist Cordy Ryman manipulates materials such as wood, metal, velcro, Gorilla Glue, staples and scraps from his studio floor, reconstructing them into assemblages that hybridize painting and sculpture. He received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, including recent solo shows at DCKT Contemporary, New York; Stalke Up North, Gilleleje, Denmark; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, Eli Ridgway Gallery, San Francisco, Traver Gallery, Seattle and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York as well as group shows at Esbjerg Museum of Modern Art, Esbjerg, Denmark and P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center, Long Island City, NY. Ryman has been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Beautiful/Decay and elsewhere.