Fragments

Fragments
January 3 – January 21, 2023
Reception: Friday, January 6th, 5-8pm.

Strata Gallery presents its second Annual Juried Exhibition, Fragments with a special reception on January 6th from 5-8 pm. David Olivant, president of Strata Gallery, selected the work of 42 artists from 16 states for inclusion. A strong pool of applicants submitted a total of 740 artworks. Each artist selected has their own distinctive take on fragmentation.

Chad Cleveland’s painting deals with the shifting and fragmenting architecture of the human face. Ghislaine Fremaux sees the face as a fleshy palimpsest of experience and suffering. Lauren Dana Smith makes overlayed and fused fragments cohere into digital composites that are both part and whole. For Jessamyn Plotts, the worried paint smears seem a visceral response to media overload, the confusion of sentient and digital realities. Mona Monroe speaks of “fragmented remembrances and histories” and the title of her selected work Trying to Keep it Together is testament to the centrifugal forces of fragmentation.

Fragmentation can be pictorial and actual, so cropping is also dismembering. This is stark and explicit in the dramatic Caravaggesque photographs of Andrew Michael Joseph. Jason Myers’ cropping plays darkly humorous havoc with the phallic implications of cones and hydrants that yield tightly wrought, compressed compositions.

In sculpture, artists can be real about fragmentation. Perhaps that’s why so much sculpture in this exhibit is only implicitly three dimensional. Bryan Florentin’s photographs appear sculptural in a trompe l’oeil tradition, but they record temporal stages of physical collapse that are only accessible to the camera. Kristen Franyutti’s work fuses overlays and juxtaposes a cocktail of biological and technological hybridity. Her Vitriolic Altercations remain fastened to the traditional picture plane, but only just.

This exhibit displays multifarious and meaningful possibilities for art to embrace, embody, subvert or reject, the diverse modes of fragmentation that alternately inspire, transfigure, confuse or degrade our collective and individual human experience. Strata Gallery is open from 10.- 5. Tuesday – Saturday. For more information about Strata, the current exhibit, and the future schedule of events, please visit the Strata Gallery website and Instagram.

Artists: Anders Johnson, Andrew Michael Joseph, Anikke Myers, Anna Bush Crews, Ash Hagerstrand, Beth Johnston, Bobbie Jansen, Brooke Cassady, Bryan Florentin, Brynn Higgins-Stirrup, Carla Caletti, Chad Cleveland, Chloe Hanken, Ellen Jantzen, Erin Mickelson, Gabriel Garcia, Ghislaine Fremaux, Holland Houdek, Jack C. Straton, Jason Myers, Jessamyn Plotts, Jim Bowling, Katerina Hazell, Kelsi Walters, Kristen Franyutti, Lauren Dana Smith, Lita Kenyon, Lucien Koonce, Michael Borowski, Mirabel Wigon, Mona Monroe, Rick Yasko, Robert Hoerlein, Robert Riojas III, Samira Hemmat, Scott Nellis, Tamara Zibners, Ted Moore, Terri Sanders, Valerie Huhn, William Mark Sommer, Zoe Spiliotis

Masks required.