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A group show featuring Peter Symons, Julie Krofcheck and V.Mae, September 20-October 26, 2006.

Peter Symons

Born in Cork, Ireland, Peter immigrated to Lyme, CT in his youth. Inspired by philosophers, nature, and artists, he received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has decided to return to school. Peter is now pursuing his MFA at Pratt institute in NYC.

"Each moment is the culmination of all previous moments coming together in the creation of a new world. I mirror this process in the creation of artworks. I make work by solidifying liquids, capturing movement as the record of its history. I use glue in paintings because it is viscous, allowing pigment to float as it captures the flow of color. I use hot glue in sculptures because forms are created as the material flows, cools and captures its own history.
Glue is a material that nearly everyone has experienced first hand, but not as an art material in its own right. Through the exploration of its material nature I feel that I am bringing out its inner potential and bizarre beauty. Glue is bodily: thick, flowing and visceral. The semi-translucent hot glue becomes a stand-in for the essence of a living body--but not only the body: the rendering of the work and its lack of color give the work a ghostlike quality. The work exists as both a living body and the ghost that lingers on. The works float like ghosts, thin and otherworldly, but are also solid and corporeal. My artwork is innocent and corrupt, funny and sad, but the works feed off this opposition, and in doing so, achieve a balance.
My artwork is the realization of captured moments. Each piece is like looking into a crystal ball where the past can be discovered and the future speculated on. It clears the fog of a constantly changing existence into a brief view of a solid reality."

Julie Krofcheck

Julie is currently working as an artist and freelance photographer in the Cleveland, Ohio area. Though her formal education is in printmaking, she now combines traditional drawing with photography in digital collages that become part of resin casts.

"In 2004, my work consisted of digital prints mounted on deep, rounded edge cardboard panels with acrylic paint. It was suggested to me that in slides, the pieces looks as though they were made in sardine cans. In a way, they were sardine cans in a conceptual sense; dense collections of disparate images forced together into relatively small compositions.
The idea of sardine cans served as a basis for what I am making now. I began by actually fixing images inside sardine cans and pouring resin on top. The result was dark and unreadable when left inside the tins. Once removed, the images gained a depth and translucency that wasnít there when they were simply mounted on top of panels. The layers of resin serve to forever embed the images with one another. The transparency offers an opportunity to reveal or hide various elements of an image. The scenes, objects, and imaginings from my standard domestic days are able to appear in varying degrees of clarity, reflecting the clarity with which they appear in my mind. The resin also has a certain thickness to it, both when it is liquid, and once it has set up. The implication of progress and motion occurs often in my work, and this thickness serves to slow it.
The result is a depiction of what goes through my mind at the end of every day. A murky collection of fragments floating together and forming quirky relationships."

V.Mae

Award winning fine art photographer, V. Mae (aka Valerie Mae Sherrington) grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a professional event photographer with a focus on lighting, composition and photojournalism, she uses her fine art projects to challenge her artistic vision and offer inspiration.

"The newest series ìNYCî came about on a trip to attend the Lucie Awards in Manhattan. The images all have a singular point of focus that grasps the viewers attention for only a moment, before releasing them back amongst the hurried pace of the bustling, bold city."