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PORTIA MUNSON: prints, paintings & sculptures
GALLERY TALK & ARTIST'S RECEPTION
FRIDAY, APRIL 16TH
5:00- 7:00PM
THE LIEBOWITZ GALLERY
(red barn at the corner of Hurlburt and Alford Roads)
GALLERY HOURS:
Friday - Sunday 12 -5pm
and by appointment 413-528-7389
^ Portia Munson, 7 roses surround bat, 2009
Portia Munson is a visual artist who works in a
variety of media including installation, sculpture, painting, and photography. Munson’s conceptual installations and
sculptures are created with found objects, and deal with social issues such as
gender, environment, and consumer culture.
Her still life
paintings are perceptual, drawn from direct observation of isolated objects
also addressing major themes in contemporary society. Portia Munson creates large-scale photographic prints using
flowers as her medium and the scanner as her camera. Munson arranges fresh flowers
grown in her Catskill New York gardens directly on the glass scanner bed,
capturing detailed configurations in high resolution scans. Creating mandalas that in Eastern
religions represent the universe, Munson meticulously arranges flowers into
orbiting combinations of color and shape, constructing large fantastical
flowers. Every constellation is
unique to a moment in time, preserving what is in bloom on the day that it is
made. Printed on rag paper, with
archival inks, the optical intensity of color and pattern of each arrangement conjures
the utopian beauty of nature and the spiritual quality of meditation.
The Pink Project is an exploration of the
color pink, a culturally loaded color that has been projected onto girls and
women. The installation is made up
of thousands of inexpensive products that are either produced or packaged in
the color pink. These pink
plastic objects -- fake nails, tampon applicators, hair clips, makeup, cleaning
products, mirrors, baby pacifiers -- seem to be trying to imitate and perfect
the body, perfect nature. In these installations, the discarded items assume
new value and meaning, showing the marketing of femininity and how our culture
infantalizes women.
Portia Munson (b.
1961) resides in the Catskills in NY.
She had her first one-person show at White Columns in 1993 and has
exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions including: The New Museum, NY,
Art in General, NY, Museum of Contemporary Art/Finnish National Gallery,
Helsinki, Finland, Kunstahallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odensec, Denmark, Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WY and
Yoshii Gallery. Portia Munson is currently part of a
three person exhibition, Debris at
PPOW Gallery in NYC that runs through April 24th. She also has an upcoming solo
exhibition: Color Forms at Mass MoCa,
North Adams, MA opening Fall 2010.
^ Portia Munson, Pink Project, detail, 2007