Up next at the Tower Fine Arts Center Gallery is BIG/Bold, a national invitational exhibition in which the artists’ works are large, confrontational, and unapologetic. The show will run from February 1 through March 6, with an opening reception scheduled for February 1 from 4 to 6 p.m. The gallery is located at 180 Holley Street, Brockport, and the exhibit is free and open to the public. Gallery hours for this exhibition are Monday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 4 pm. SUNY Brockport’s up-to-date COVID-19 prevention guidelines can be found at the ticketing website (fineartstix.brockport.edu), the Fine Arts Series Facebook page, and at brockport.edu/coronavirus/spring_2022. Compliance with campus protocols is required in order to attend any performances or events.
Participants in the exhibition include Lisa Bryson (San Diego, California), Sergio Gomez (Chicago, IlinoisL), Christopher Troutman (Beaumont, Texas); and Bill Wolff (Salisbury, Maryland).
Troutman explains how he draws and paints “the human figure in contemporary urban settings, which I depict from unfamiliar vantage points, imbuing everyday subject matter with renewed dynamism. The vantage points are augmented in polyptychs as a means to subdivide images into multiple parts, to fracture space and time, as well as act as panels to tell stories, borrowing from art history and contemporary comics.” In keeping with the theme of the show, much of Troutman’s work measures more than three feet by four feet. His explanation for why he works in that outsized format is that it puts “the artwork and audience in the same immediate space. The works’ large size exaggerates the scale of figures and environments, inspiring an overwhelming mood, through which I hope the memories that initiated the artwork can achieve a similar resonance with viewers.”
Wolff’s sculptural works, which can measure more than 10 feet wide, “reflects a consistent conceptual origin and a focused concern for the material, gesture, form and balance. All of the materials I use have a previous history. The surface of the work and material reveals this history. My work in wood is carved, hollowed and assembled from sections of trees otherwise destined to be firewood, a variation of the traditional Japanese yosegi zukuri process. Essentially, it permits large-scale wood sculpture with non-cylindrical forms, reduced weight and a controlled surface, largely free from the concerns associated with regular, seasonal wood movement. Each work is initiated with a chainsaw, jointed with chisel and plane, hollowed out with an assortment of tools, carved with gouges, charred with a torch, scraped and sanded, leafed with metal, and then scraped and drawn on. Tool marks from every stage are visible atop the grain of the wood and are a reference to the material, the history of making, and image.”
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