Artist Statement

One of the most striking features at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan is the Calatrava-designed PATH station.  (PATH is a commuter train that runs between New York and New Jersey.  The original station was destroyed on 9/11.)   I took many photographs while this bird-like structure was under construction.  I was really struck by the contrast between the beautiful and the chaotic, by the concrete forms and their reflections on the glass walls of surrounding buildings.  The objective of the collage was to convey symmetry within the chaos of this construction site.

Note:  Now that the PATH station is completed and open to the public, it has been renamed The Oculus.

Biography

Sheila Eder was born in Muskogee,Oklahoma and raised in Detroit.  Her artistic ventures began with the violin, culminating with study with the then-concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony, Mischa Mischakoff.

After an East Coast orchestra tour, Ms. Eder decided against a career in music, and instead earned graduate degrees in psychology, public health and public administration.  She retired from a long-held university job in 2013.

Since retiring, Ms. Eder has pursued an interest in collage and mixed media, studying at Cooper Union and at the Art Center of the 92nd Street Y.   She has lived in Lower Manhattan since 1981.  Her work has been exhibited in New York and in several online galleries.

Artist Statement & Biography

Heather Joy Puskarich studied Sculpture and Dimensional Studies at Alfred University where she graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts. Her work shows nationally and internationally, including recent juried shows, Artprize at the FED Galleries/ Kendall College of Art and Design, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, the Kinsey Institute, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania, where she received awards in both photography and sculpture. Her images have been selected for Corning Museum’s New Glass Review 36 and she was named one of the 20 Women of Power in Maniac, Pittsburgh’s Fashion Magazine. Since graduating, Heather Joy has served as an adjunct professor of Contemporary Art, has been named the Cultural Director in the Woodlands TX and is active in the community while continuing her artistic practice. As an interdisciplinary artist, she blurs the lines between artistic traditions and encourages material and social exploration. Heather Joy currently lives and works in The Woodlands TX.

“As Georges Bataille so eloquently puts it, “To look at an object with desire is to appropriate it, to enjoy it. To desire is to pollute; to desire is to take.”

The evocation of desire influences my decision to utilize images of women, specifically in the form of self-portraiture. In my practice, I strive to use consumer waste, cutoffs, expired, and thrown-away materials. I work intuitively with materials, exploring ideas of desire and consumption by utilizing recycled and overlooked materials such as confectionaries, glass, metals, soaps, and cosmetics. I question ideas of commercialism and my practice, how I consume and am consumed by my environment. The tension and contradictory nature of my work is the catalyst for my self-exploration. By utilizing my own body in tandem with both ephemeral and lasting materials, I am responding to change, aging, my own ideas of desire, beauty, and the search for identity.

Artist Statement

This recent work is a reflection of masculinity being defined by today’s gynocentric society which has led me to many questions: my art being one of them and society’s views on male and female relationships. Within these relationships I will interweave the hostile environment that has hindered the life of both sexes into an aurora borealis abstraction. The aurora borealis is an atmospheric phenomenon consisting of bands of light caused by charged solar particles following the earth’s magnetic lines of force. These surfaces create condensed layers of dripping, scraping and textured dimensionality. As each layer is extracted I am exploring the sexes chaotic behaviors but engaging those behaviors into a beautiful organic refraction.

Biography

Christopher Shelton is a native of Las Vegas, Nevada and U.S. Army veteran; whose dynamic perspectives on social political views are interwoven into visual artistry. His newest body of work combines painting, and sculpture to create a beautiful organic refraction. Subsequently, he is planning on continuing to make new forms of three-dimensional abstraction into a new age art movement.

EXHIBITIONS

2013     Define Art, Alexander Hall Gallery, Savannah, Georgia

Senior B.F.A. Painting Exhibition, Alexander Hall Gallery, Savannah, Georgia

IN/EX Senior Seminar Exhibition, Ashmore Gallery, Savannah, Georgia

(Solo), Butter Head Greens Café, Savannah, Georgia

2014    Fervor, Whit’s End Gallery, Savannah, Georgia

2017    [Fusion] Black and White gallery, online Juried Art Exhibition

2^nd place honors, Prospectus “Creative Inspiration”, Bauhaus Prairie Art Gallery

COMMISSIONS

Sharon Gray, Miami, Florida, USA

COLLECTIONS

Hayden John Phelps, Savannah, Georgia, USA

Andrew Sayers, United Kingdom

Artist Statement

Dusk is a particularly beautiful time in a city, when the sun sets and the lights begin to shimmer. The old Atlas Life Building in Tulsa, OK, now converted to a hotel, has an iconic neon sign which fortunately was preserved in the conversion and continues to light up a busy downtown street. The beautiful glow throws irresistible colors over the building, sidewalk and surrounding areas.

Biography

Anke Dodson is a native of Germany and a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Her work includes cityscapes, landscapes and marine subjects. She enjoys working in the style of contemporary or painterly realism on a variety of surfaces such as watercolor canvas, aquabord, claybord, yupo, ricepaper and, of course, traditional watercolor papers.

She has studied painting in watercolor and pastels with nationally known artists and instructors such as Steven Quiller, Alan Flattman, Naomi Brotherton, Judy Betts, Christopher Schink and others and in recent years has added the art of printmaking, more specifically monotypes. Taking a workshop taught by renowned printmaker Julia Ayers made her want to learn more about this unique medium and its possibilities.

In June of 2011 she was invited by the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK to teach an introductory monotype workshop in conjunction with their “Rauschenberg at Gemini” exhibition. A solo exhibition of her work at the Gallery of the Performing Arts Center in Tulsa in October 2011 included a large number of monotypes, portraying the change of seasons on the prairie.

The Community National Bank of Kansas commissioned her to paint historical works for seven of their branch offices. The large watercolor portraits of these communities are now on exhibit in their respective cities.

One of her paintings was included in the 2017 Watercolor USA show.

Her work has been added to a number of corporate and private collections in the U.S., Germany and France, including a number of commissioned pieces.

She is represented by the Eva Reynolds Gallery of Fine Arts in Leawood, KS (Kansas City) and her work can also be found in the virtual galleries of the Oklahoma Visual Artists Coalition and the Tulsa Artists Guild (TAG).

Artist Statement & Biography

Influenced by both Op Art and chaos theory, Howard Harris breaks with the strictures of traditional photography to reimagine the expressive possibilities in a photo-based image. Harris states that his explorations in photographic art represent “an attempt to recreate the perceptual experience, with its dynamic nature and hidden complexities”.

Harris’s work engages the idea that every photographic moment allows for a multiplicity of experiences depending on the way we look at it. Even in his more representational work, the identity of the object is pushed toward abstraction and the full experience of the image – the sensuous allure of color and line and spatial energy – is felt.

Harris creates his “visions” as kaleidoscopes of visual movement, as if the image could shift before your eyes. Many of his photographs feature biomorphic blooms of colors shimmering across a rhythmic space. In some of his 3-dimensional pieces, Harris gives his images a sculptural effect, layering the work using clear acrylic surfaces superimposed on a subtle grid and then shaping the surface. The images gain dimension and the viewing experience shifts depending on the angle.

Harris has long been interested in space and form and, eventually, how both can be represented in a visual object. A native of Denver, Harris received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and completed a Masters in Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn mentored by the renowned design theorist and educator Rowena Reed Kostellow. Through his growing interest in such Op artists as Julian Stanczak and Josef Albers as well as Henry Moore’s figurative sculptures, Harris learned to appreciate the way visual perception can be broken up and reconfigured creating an immersive experience before your eyes. Harris’s expressive and visually arresting photo images build from these earlier insights.

Josef Albers once said that “Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature”. In his photographic explorations, Harris also takes reality and twists and toys with it in intriguing ways to shift the sensory awareness of the viewer. As his work proves, perception is forever changing.