BARBARA CAMPBELL
8/31/01- 9/28/01- Sr. Rosaire Gallery

Evocative of memory and poetic in sensibility, Pennsylvania-based painter Barbara Campbell creates idiosyncratic landscapes and orders through the bold use of color and form. Her paintings act as a filter for her own fragmented process of remembering her everyday landscape (be it urban or rural). As a result, she exposes the precarious nature of our own memories regarding the spaces and places that we occupy, and the residual and lasting effects upon our everyday awareness.

Since receiving her MFA from the prestigious University of California, Berkeley (May 2000), emerging artist Barbara Campbell has actively exhibited her landscape abstractions on a national and international level.

She was most recently included in the exhibition "Young American Painters" at the Miami University Art Gallery (Ohio). Some of her other exhibitions include: "A transparent moon, a pink rag of cloud," Worth-Ryder Gallery (Berkeley, CA); "Blind Date 3," Manchester-Metropolitan University (Manchester, England); "Blind Date," University of California Art Gallery (Davis, CA); "Snapshot," Beaver College Art Gallery (Pennsylvania): and "School of Visual Arts Faculty Exhibition," Zoller Gallery at Pennsylvania State University.

Barbara Campbell received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, Penn State University in 1998, and currently she is an Assistant Professor in the Foundations area at PSU. Additionally, Ms. Campbell studied at Yale University's Summer School of Art and Music in 1997 and attended Skohegan School Painting and Sculpture during the summer of 2000.

Artist's Statement--Barbara Campbell

"The human imagination is spatial and it is constantly constructing an architectonic whole from landscapes remembered or imagined; it progresses from what is closest to what is farther away, winding layers or strands around a single axis which begins where the feet touch the ground."

-Czeslaw Milosz, Where I am

Milosz's observations pinpoints precisely what I feel wordlessly--that the physical space encircling us invariably works its way into our interiors, affecting us psychically. Even more, the material land around us somehow melds with our innately immaterial perceptions, coloring reality or tweaking it somehow.

I am particularly interested in instances of embellished reality, for my paintings, begun "where the feet touch the ground," ride on streams of fanciful interpretation. In them, the landscape rolls over, revealing an underbelly stranger and more remarkable than known. I paint what I see around me, giving in often to delight. Delight arrests me mostly when I am in motion; the fact has visual implications. I walk home from school, run along the bay, maneuver throughout the street, errand-bound.

In movement, my surroundings condense, emboldening color. Bits and fragments billow into importance. I fix, for instance, on a decorated tree. On a walk home, I notice someone has demurely and carefully tied a red bow around a tree limb hanging over the pathway. In my mind, the red bow renders the tree a being, funny and a bit bashful.

The act itself speaks to me of a very human impulse to do what is often not necessary, a poignant elaboration of the everyday. These incidence, usually grounded in the land, make their way into the paintings via brilliant color, formal elaborations, areas of heavy painting and areas of light, untouched canvas. An odd order results. A Technicolor land emerges.

-B.Campbell

MARCELLA HACKBARDT
8/31/01- 9/28/01-Little Theatre Gallery

Photographer Marcella Hackbardt deals with the multiple roles/meanings associated with motherhood; specifically she addresses the clash between the culturally generated, idealized notion of "mother," and the experienced, subjective version of that role. Ms. Hackbardt analyzes this duality through the use of the triptych by literally placing conflicting images of the duties, expectations, and rituals of mothers next to one another in series. The photographic triptychs raise important issues regarding our cultural assumptions and expectations, and consequently creates a dialogue for fresh perspectives regarding the role of "motherhood."

Ohio-based Hackbardt has an extensive exhibition record and regularly shows her work nationally. Her most recent exhibitions include: "Flesh and Blood," a solo show at 516 Magnifico Artspace in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and "2000 National Exhibition," a group show juried by Sandy Skoglund at the Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI. Marcella Hackbardt received her BA from University of Alaska, Anchorage in 1993 and her MFA from University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2000. She remains actively engaged in teaching through both community-based projects and as a Visiting Assistant Professor (Photography) at Kenyon College in Ohio.

Artist's Statement-Marcella Hackbardt

The past several years my work has addressed the role and the meaning of motherhood, questioning and celebrating motherhood as a series of bodily processes and psychosocial minefield. During the last year I have focused specifically on the issue of the family, the interference of children into a relationship, and the personal vulnerability of gendered identity as a part of the nature of this experience. Expectations, investments, and competencies are played out in an arena of duties, desires, and rituals.

The experience of motherhood is not a sameness shared by all mothers, regardless of class, race, historical setting, and marital status. Still, as a cultural construct, motherhood remains sentimentalized and normalized. I explore in visual form the discrepancies between my experience of mothering, and the assertions and presumption of a culture which positions this role as instinctual, natural, a sort of affirmation or fulfillment of femininity. The family, the terrain of inclusion and belonging, is riddled with processes of exclusion and struggles with autonomy.

Mainstream images of mothering evoke a mismatch between what we ought to be feeling and how we feel, between the simultaneous feelings of intimacy and invasion, fulfillment and emptiness, pleasure and resentment. These images suggest a female imaginary not at the mercy of a reflex of female identity, but in pursuit of a subjectivity continually negotiating motherhood and the terms of its discourse.

-M. Hackbardt

CASSANDRA HOOPER
8/31/01- 9/28/01- Hammes Gallery

Cassandra Hooper creates uncanny environments through photographic and printmaking processes that evoke elliptical narratives rather than specific times and/or places, people and/or things. Often working in a series, or through the creation of books, Hooper gives the viewer a glimpse into an enigmatic world of the indeterminate past and tells a story of deteriorating nostalgia--for what the viewer is not certain.

Hooper's working process is as layered as her "stories," working in a variety of media that ranges from analog photography, computer-generated imaging, IRIS printing, lithography, etching, drawing, painting, and collage.

Since receiving her MFA from the SUNY Purchase in 1991, Cassandra Hooper has remained actively engaged in art making and in teaching. She debuted her latest series "Tug" at the Atelier 31 in Kirkland, WA (2000), as well as the series "Grand Stand" at the Catherine Street Gallery in Staten Island, NY.

Her work is regularly included in numerous group exhibitions, that include: "Homeostatic" at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL (2000); "73rd Annual International Printmaking Competition" at the Print Center in Philadelphia, PA (1999); and "Small Works 6" at the PSD-X Gallery, Parsons School of Design, NYC, NY (1999).

Cassandra Hooper's work has been included in renowned art collections such as the Harvard College Library, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), Walker Art Museum (Minneapolis), and Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC).

Currently, Ms. Hooper is an Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Purchase College, SUNY

Artist's Statement-Cassandra Hooper

The images I create depict environments in states of chaos and serenity, order and decay. These invented places resonate as hauntingly real spaces and throughout their dichotomous format and content pose questions to the viewer about their relationship to society. The interiors conjure feelings of both isolation and involvement. Onlookers are invited into my spaces to be enchanted by the effects of age and neglect or to fear its hidden dangers and secrets.

The viewer can, as I do, revel in the possibility for beauty in chaos, of life in deterioration. At all times, the places that I create- these buildings and interiors-are often symbolic of us and our relationship with the old, the new and each other.Figures and animals appear often vulnerable, defiant or nonplussed. Main Street Parade and Grand Stand are complete bodies of work, each two-four year in the making, have images that ask increasingly pointed questions, doing less to obscure iconography and subject matter.

All of the works begin with my photographic imagery that I layer with other photographs, creating strange worlds, interiors that have never been experienced, but seem oddly familiar. These images are then realized in the form of large scale, mixed media works or artists' books utilizing a variety of print techniques from digital imaging and IRIS prints to lithographs, etchings, Van Dykes, and collotypes.

Currently, I am working on images for Tug, a series of intimate images that 'close in' on these places I create, at times giving away secrets the place might hold and at other times making the viewer aware of the complexity, fragility, and temporal qualities of the place. Tug means to pull at with force, vigor, or effort. It can mean a strenuous contest between opposing contradictions and complexities of life. Using visual metaphor and analogies, Tug will explore the struggle between identity and personal, introspection and extroversion, isolation and involvement, and private and public space. It examines the potential and possibilities of these juxtapositions--looking for balance, protection, safety or glory in the gaps between them.

Using found, photographed and computer generated images along with drawn, painted, stained, printed and collaged elements, the images in this series continue and build upon the search for beauty in chaos, order in decay, and life in deterioration that is seen in my previous work.

- C. Hooper