Providence College Galleries [PCG] is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring Studio Art Professors Lynn Curtis, James Janecek, Heather Leigh McPherson, Eric Sung, Judd Schiffman, and Stephen Lacy, who exhibits artwork under the art moniker Academy Records.
Outside the classroom and beyond campus, Providence College Studio Art faculty members are active, creative practitioners who make significant contributions to the arts. Their artwork and studio practices use the same interdisciplinary, research-based approaches to making art that they teach in their courses. They simultaneously examine the contexts and histories that inform both their own artistic production and visual culture-at-large. They all at once create, engage, and educate with the art and artists of our time. All at Once—A Providence College Studio Art Faculty Showcase provides the Providence College community and local public a chance to connect with the College’s own working artists and their ideas.
The artworks in this exhibition also highlight the broad spectrum of media and formats prominent within Providence College’s Studio Art program and contemporary art. In PCG’s Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery, drawing professor Lynn Curtis’ experiments with mark-making, layering, and surface on paper reflect the idiosyncratic natural world in and of which the artist documents and observes. Professor James Janecek, who teaches a range of courses from traditional printmaking to digital imaging, exhibits intaglio and digital prints that blur the lines between representation and abstraction to conjure a wide range of natural and artificial imagery. And just as his photography and Community Lens courses encourage, Professor Eric Sung’s large-format photographs of monuments and memorial sites demonstrate the critical viewpoints that engaged citizens must take when interacting with and shaping communal space.
In PCG’s Reilly Gallery, painting professor Heather Leigh McPherson’s glowing epoxy wall reliefs illustrate how painterly techniques, symbolism, and composition go beyond mere canvas substrates. Academy Records, aka sculpture and design thinking professor Stephen Lacy, presents an art installation combining simple engineering, site-specificity, and three-dimensional design to connect his subject matter—landscape and memory—with music and film histories. Ceramics professor Judd Schiffman’s multi-component wall work demonstrates clay as a medium that is as ripe for experimental narrative-based art as it is for functional art objects.
