Prima Materia

Opens November 7, 2024 through January 4, 2025 with a reception and gallery talk, November 14 5:00-7:00 PM (talk begins at 5:30), 301 High St W, Glassboro, NJ 08028.

All three artists are experienced makers actively creating provocative artworks that relate to materials and techniques associated with crafts such as embroidery, beadwork, decorative paper folding and cutting, and elements from the scenic arts. Their efforts consistently yield marvelous results, including novel sculptural objects, sumptuously detailed and evocative two-dimensional works, and challenging mixed-media installations that appeal to the senses through their impressive individual and collective visuality. Whether anchored on the wall or displayed in the round, the works selected for Prima Materia generate visual and spatial synergies imbued with a powerful combination of subtle yet vibrant energies and symbolic archetypes. Not unlike living entities, these works exert their agency upon us, in a sense “arresting” our sensorial attention through their ability to convey something tangible and concrete about the ephemeral and transcendental nature of the creative impulse.

Engaging with the alchemy of creativity through expertly crafted artworks, Prima Materia is essentially visionary in scope. Subsumed within the effervescent flow of macro and micro historical trends that have shifted the definition and reproduction of fine art worlds into supporting the creation and display of art that can be technically described as “craft-oriented” and vice versa, Prima Materia contributes to ongoing discourses around creative interdisciplinarity to push and expand the collective vision of contemporary art in 2024. Each of the three artists has striven to diversify what art is and what it can be made of, into unique forms bounded by expressive materiality.