> Lisa Spera : Artist’s Statement

My Current work as a Photographic Artist is conceptually based on Objects and Subjects as found in their environment.

This current show theme refers to Assemblies of: Onlookers, Overseers, Overlookers and various other forms of people watching people and people seeing things. This theme will explore the opinion that society (with a few exceptions) would prefer to watch events unfold as opposed to get involved in order to change things for the better, as well as explore an additional theory that generally people prefer to be Visually Entertained. I AM also be a “Participating Onlooker” while I record these events and activities occurring in local surroundings.

Lisa Spera
Photographer

> Kenneth B. Miller : Artist’s Statement

My art has always been about fragmenting the image and then reassembling it to see how the pieces fit together or don’t fit together. One of my goals is to shatter the image or the background while leaving enough clues to form a coherent image from the remnants, and in this to show scenes in a way that is visually engaging and playful.

My shaped oil paintings are created out of a single piece of canvas. Behind the canvas is a wooden frame with protruding pieces that make the paintings appear to be a group of fragments assembled together. These paintings attempt to tell more about the scene they portray than a conventional painting, showing passage of time, curving space to describe the whole room, or isolating single items the human eye would focus on if we were in the place being painted. Though the fragments are not connected to one another, the pieces form a single image.

More recently, I have used photography and collage, with acrylic paint and pencil, to fragment space. By combining abstract painting with concrete photographic images, I fragment a scene but provide a surface of visual clues to make the image appear whole to the casual viewer. These paintings begin with a photograph, usually a landscape scene, which is often composed of several separate images fused into one scene. I cut the photo into pieces and arrange them on a canvas board, and then recreate the whole image using acrylic paint, sometimes with additional photographic pieces layered on top of the image to add a dimension of concrete realism. The paint layers are semi-transparent, and close inspection reveals layers of collaged paper, paint and photograph pieces that create visual textures which would otherwise be impossible to portray with paint itself.

Ken B. Miller