“ANTIFORM,” a new exhibition featuring unconventional work by New York artists Lindsay Packer, Mitch Patrick and John Ross, is on display until February 18 at the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery located in the Staller Center for the Arts.
The exhibition features art that is meant to relate the viewer to their own environments, either physical, perceptual or digital. Its title, “ANTIFORM,” is inspired by an art movement of the late 1960s, during which artists began to experiment with more materials and processes.
“The most important thing about this exhibition is that it’s experiential,” said Karen Levitov, director and curator for the Zuccaire Gallery. “It transforms the space. We blacked out the windows to control the light, as there are many projected light pieces and videos, and pieces that use light. I think that the experience of the exhibition is really what’s important.”
The three artists collaborated to construct most of the exhibition’s pieces on-site using materials they found around the Staller Center. The exhibition is filled with optical projections that highlight aspects of the gallery space, and also includes some video pieces that were made previously. “ANTIFORM” is the first exhibition that Packer, Patrick and Ross have worked on together.
During a salon held by the gallery, Lindsay Packer, one of the artists, explained her artistic process. She was excited that the Zuccaire Gallery had stage lights that she could use in constructing her art, and she explained that she uses white light and red, blue or green lights to create different colors to make the optical projections seen in the gallery.
“It always amazes me that red and green, when you put them together, make yellow,” Packer said. “You put these two rays of light together, and they interfere with each other and combine to make a new color. But they both still exist.”
The set-up period for “ANTIFORM” was different than other exhibitions hosted at the Zuccaire Gallery — usually the art is shipped to the gallery and an artist may or may not help put it together. But for this show, the artists worked together at the gallery to create the exhibition.
“It was really kind of an intense residency period,” said Levitov. “The artists were in the space working for almost two weeks.”
This is the first exhibition of the Spring 2017 semester at the Zuccaire Gallery. There are three exhibitions scheduled for this semester, including “ANTIFORM,” one exhibition in the summer during the Stony Brook Film Festival, and two more professional exhibitions in the fall.
“With all of our exhibitions — some of them are really beautiful, some of them give you something to think about, some of them are political — our goal is to give people something interesting to think about and learn about, and to use their brain in a different and creative way,” Levitov said.
There are five galleries on campus for students to visit and enjoy different individual art exhibitions, each hosting a few exhibitions every year.
“I think it’s super important for people to come see art, even for students who aren’t in the arts, just to see how other people see the world and think,” Maggie Avolio ‘19, an art student in the MFA program who helped construct the exhibition, said.
As the semester continues, make sure to visit the Zuccaire Gallery and the other galleries on campus to take some time to enjoy the arts and culture on campus.
— By Joshua Pietzold
Joshua Pietzold ‘18 is a journalism major interning with the Office of Communications and Marketing.
Add comment