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Elements of Collage and Light Animate Colorful New Exhibition at Colby-Sawyer College

NEW LONDON, N.H., Oct. 6, 2006 – A new exhibition at Colby-Sawyer College will feature six artists whose paintings, photography and sculpture are infused with light and colorful found object collage.

“Collage and Light” opens Thursday, Oct. 12, with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery on campus, and continues through Nov. 9. The community is welcome to attend the event, and admission is free.

The exhibition will present solar photograms by Martha Madigan, painting and rete-chromes by artists Richard Allen and Janet Shapero, and sculptural, mixed-media works by Paul Bowen, Mark Soppeland and Tomas Vance. Organized by Fine and Performing Arts Professor and Chair Loretta Barnett and Gallery Director and Assistant Professor Rebekah Tolley, the exhibition was conceived as a vibrant and joyous way to welcome the college's new president, Thomas C. Galligan Jr., to campus.

“Our goal was to host a bright exhibition to welcome the president and to reflect some of the energy he brings to our campus,” says Tolley. “In doing so, it was important to us to include some local and regional artists as well as artists from outside of the area to inspire students and the community in areas that relate to our teaching in the Art Department.”

Paul Bowen, Untitled, 2001
Wood & Tar, 60”x 48”x 16”

One of the exhibition's well known artists, Wales native Paul Bowen, creates abstract collage sculptures with driftwood gathered from beaches near his Provincetown, Mass., studio. From an endless supply of rough, bleached wood, Bowen sculpts extravagant circular shapes, which he brushes with paint, tar or wax. His more recent work focuses on structure and space, and is influenced less by his Welsh background than by waterfront buildings, boats and the distinctive light of Cape Cod.

Bowen studied at the Chester Art School and the Newport College of Art in England and Wales and went to graduate school at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. He has received awards and fellowships from the Welsh Arts Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Martha Madigan, Graciela: Growth XII, © 2002-2003
Giclée print, 40”x 24” (Detail)

Martha Madigan, a photographic artist from Philadelphia, is best known for her exquisite solar photograms that refer to, record or transform aspects of nature and the human figure. Madigan has explored a variety of photographic light sensitive materials from the earliest cyanotype process to the latest technology in digital color photography. She will present life-size images from her “Human Nature” series, in which she seeks to represent every age of human life, from newborn to age 100.

To create a solar photogram, Madigan uses light sensitive paper to record a person's image in sunlight for five minutes. She later places a variety of leafy plants on the same paper and re-exposes it to sunlight. The final image reveals a silhouette of human figures though which the delicate vascular systems of plants seem to flow.

Madigan, a professor at the Temple University's Tyler School of Art, studied art education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work extensively across the country and has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Temple University, National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations.

Janet Shapero, Near And Distant Shores, 2003. Paint on Open Weave, 89”x 36”

Boston area artist Janet Shapero creates rete-chromes by applying layers of pigment through painting or printmaking onto an open-weave backing, through which filtered light emerges. She began interweaving sculpture, printmaking and installation as a graduate student in the 1980s and continues to refine and explore these techniques. She describes her current works as a “collage-like juxtaposition of colors and patterns.”

“My rete-chromes have been likened to illuminated texts, sacred scrolls, stained glass, windows, tapestries, landscapes and topographical views,” she explains. “For me, each work represents an investigation; an inner journey…As vehicle, path and destination merge, each serves as a means of synthesizing experience and creating wholeness; an aid in striving for connection, harmony and peace.”

Shapero currently teaches in the University of Barcelona's Doctorate Painting Program and is a professor and head of the Sculpture Department at Utah State University. She exhibits her work across the United States and in Italy and has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships for the arts.

Mark Soppeland, The Shrine to Suspension of Disbelief, 2006. Mixed media with light.

Painter, sculptor and designer Mark Soppeland works in a variety of media but describes his use of discarded materials in sculpture is a “logical response to a society that has never been as wealthy, or as wasteful.” He sees his sculpture as symbolic representatives of the world of dreams, the world of ideas and the world of culture, which use light to transform themselves and their environment. “Through their use of light they become ethereal, inviting the viewer into the realm of magic,” Soppeland says. “Art may not be magic, but it can be a powerful mirror of what we want to believe.”

A professor of art at the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron, Soppeland studied art at the University of Colorado in Boulder and went on to receive his MFA from Ohio State University. He has shown his work in more than three hundred exhibitions on four continents and has been awarded four Ohio Arts Council (OAC) Individual Artists' Fellowships.

Sculptor Tom Vance, a faculty member at the Tyler School of Art in Elkins, Pa., draws much of his inspiration from the practices of architectural construction and the relationship between landscape design and the architecture that it accents. Vance responds to the building process, from the architect's blueprint that gives visual form to a conceptualized space, to the integration of natural elements with the building through landscaping. He says his work gives a nod to the artificiality in landscape design, which posits nature as a wholly intellectualized space, trimmed and pruned to create the desired effect.

“That said, I'm often taken by the way nature resists the urges of the gardener to maintain order, instead meandering along a path guided by sunlight and nourishment,” Vance explains. “The work links this informality with the formal and serves as a way for me to make physical these interests.”

New Hampshire painter Richard Allen has always felt an underlying tension between his need to express feelings about the natural world and the essential abstract process required for this expression. Originally a landscape painter whose work was rooted in the light, color and spirit of Maine, Allen's recent work is still inspired by the natural world, yet the content is more varied and ambiguous, the format more abstract.

Acrylic paint has replaced oil as Allen's preferred painting medium—and through the use of collage—color, texture and a structural tension between geometric order and random playfulness have become the dominant characteristics of his current work. Allen, an art teacher at the Tilton School, is “never completely content” and views each work as “an invitation to engage in the next, and each work is an attempt to further clarify my personal landscape.”

Colby-Sawyer, founded in 1837, is a comprehensive liberal arts college located in the scenic Lake Sunapee Region of central New Hampshire. Students from 25 states and seven foreign countries learn in small classes through a select array of programs that integrate the liberal arts and sciences with pre-professional experience.

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