Hallucination invitation:

There is currently an excellent show open at Kent Place Gallery.
 
I am gallery director there -- the gallery is on the campus of Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, where I also teach art.

There will be a closing reception for the artist on Friday, March 11 (see below for details). Summit is not too far away (geographically-- i.e., it is in northern New Jersey), and Bruce is an amazing artist.  I hope will see you all there at the reception!

sweet stain, oil, acrylic, pencil & ink on canvas, paper, wood & cashmere 

Bruce Stiglich

click image to enlarge

“Accumulation/Hallucination”


Bruce Stiglich’s “Accumulation/Hallucination”
Kent Place Gallery Monday, February 14 – Friday, March 11
closing reception 6—8 pm on Friday March 11.


Works in the show combine painting, drawing and the gathering of found objects to create complex, beautiful and densely painted collections of surfaces and images.


“Sweet Stain” (above), uses a wide range of means, including oil paint, acrylic, graphite, ink, wood, and, crucially, cashmere. A tiny scrap of stained cashmere formed the starting point of this complex work. Stiglich painted a portrait of the scrap of fabric, enlarged and copied his own painting, represented it again in another way, again and again, and each new view became a part of the whole. The cluster of representations contains mirrorings and repetitions, but also surprises that open up space for the imagination. It is a kaleidoscopic outgrowth of remembering and reflecting. Yet the subject (if that shred of stained fabric is really the subject) remains enigmatic.


Such a ceaseless return to a mute and mysterious object, and the possibly obsessive circling around it with art, brings to mind Citizen Kane’s rosebud, Proust’s madeleine, that little scrap of blue velvet so prized by Frank in David Lynch’s film. The point for me is that Stiglich creates an exciting, almost hallucinatory visual world, and the work resists collapsing into an easy interpretation.

New York Times art critic Ken Johnson has said, “Style in Bruce Stiglich's work is psychological, as the seemingly obsessive repetition of tiny marks that build up into dense vibrating textures suggest the feverishly compulsive activity of an inspired monomaniac. You may be reminded of Jackson Pollock's drip works or folk artists who are driven to decorate their homes with countless polka dots or flattened beer cans.”


Bruce says, “My work is a compiling of personal history. I work in series. These series become installations. They span an extended period of time. It begins with a discovery of found images, objects and doodles that to me seem incomplete. The process of completing the images is self referential in nature.”


Bruce Stiglich’s art work has been seen in numerous exhibitions in recent years in New York City and the New York area, in Pennsylvania, and in Miami, Florida. He currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, and has also taught at Pont-Aven School of Art in France, and at the State University of New York. He has been a curator of several art exhibitions at MyPAC, in Miami, FL.


Kent Place Gallery
42 Norwood Ave.
Summit, NJ 07902

http://www.kentplace.org

 

--Ken Weathersby