Event Details

PORTIA MUNSON (Bridges Program Visiting Artist)
April 2 - May 15
Reception/Gallery Talk: April 16, 5-7pm
The Gallery at Liebowitz
Hours: Friday - Sunday 12-5

On Facebook: Bard College at Simon's Rock Gallery/Exhibitions
Exhibitions Office: 413.528.7389
Contact: Margaret Cherin, Exhibitions Curator, mcherin@simons-rock.edu

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.