FAR & WIDE National
In the Press
June 16 – July 15, 2018
Reception: Saturday, June 23, 4 – 6 PM
Panel Discussion with juror Daniel Belasco: Sunday, July 1, 4 PM
MAIN GALLERY
JUROR: Daniel Belasco, Executive Director, Al Held Foundation
AWARDS: Arthur Harris Best in Show Award $500, Nicholas Buhalis Award $500
FAR & WIDE has been an important regional exhibition for the past 7 years. This year FAR & WIDE expands its reach to encompass artists living and working within all 50 states of the U.S. With this bold move into the future, WAAM stakes its claim to national significance as it approaches it centennial anniversary in 2019. The theme for FAR & WIDE National is “little big things” and with its 24” size limit for submissions challenges artists to demonstrate how much emotional impact and conceptual depth they can convey in a small work. The juror for FAR & WIDE National is Daniel Belasco, Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Sandra Bertrand
Jane Bloodgood-Abrams
Yang Chen
Petros Chrisostomou
Brittney Ciccone
Marieken Cochius
Susan Spencer Crowe
Melanie Dion
Gina Dominique Hersey
Lynne Friedman
Judy Glasel
Celeste Hanlon
Mary Janacek
Darryl Jenifer
Clare Kambhu
SeungTack Lim
Rebecca Murtaugh
Danielle Muzina
Chantelle Norton
Archil Pichkhadze
Pamela Poquette
Isaac Roller
Charlotte Schulz
Zachary Skinner
Ken Tannenbaum
Robert Toyokazu Troxell
Stuart Vance
Claudia Waruch
Patricia Weise
James Westwater
Scott Wixon
Jayoung Yoon
Monika Zarzeczna
In a world turned upside down, is art a mirror or a corrective lens? The artists selected here—33 from among 192 entries—captured my interest because of their poignant responses to this question. Each work is an accomplished vision of the world of today, containing an amalgamation of craft and concept that compels the viewer to think simultaneously “wow” and “huh.” Furthermore, these works can be grouped in larger conversations through shared formal strategies, some of which include an accumulation of repeated forms, two shapes in dramatic tension, eccentric narratives, irregular perspective, and the domestic uncanny. These works are tributaries flowing into a larger river of Surrealism, invented in the 1920s to liberate personal psychology and critique the prevailing bourgeois normative values. Nearly a century later, aesthetic modes of Surrealism remain relevant today because they afford effective methods of capturing the paradoxes and instability of life. In their individual fashions these artists visualize the spaces between internal and external that can be both exhilarating and terrifying.
Daniel Belasco, May 2018
Tags: 2018 Exhibitions, 2018 Past Exhibitions, Far and Wide, Main Gallery, past
