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Art graduate Mike Homer ’00 is curating the exhibition
Building Steam, an exhibition of emerging artists from New York, will run through Oct. 18 in the Grossman Gallery of the Williams Visual Arts Building.
The exhibit, which is being curated by art graduate Mike Homer ’00, features 11 artists investigating concepts of critical mass and emergence through numerous disciplines. The works relate to a social or scientific system as well as socio-dynamic situations through abstract and representational means.
A reception, with music by loud & sad (musicians Joe Houpert and Nathan Mclaughlin), will be held 3-5 p.m. Sept. 28. Homer will host a curator’s talk noon Sept. 29 in the Williams Center for the Arts room108.
Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday. The gallery is located at 243 North Third St. For more information, contact Michiko Okaya, director of art galleries, at x5361.
Artists in the exhibit are Benjamin Butler, Jose Luis Cortes, Peter Garfield, Anna Von Mertens, Ryan Mrowzowski, Rosemarie Padovano, Duke Riley, Eliza Stamps, Kako Ueda, Joy Whalen, and Will Yackulic.
“Participating artists investigate ideas of urbanization, social or scientific systems, repetition, and accumulation,” says Homer. “Although the work may vary drastically in its appearance, the binding thread is an interest in how a seemingly random system can have order and how that order evolves from the complex process of art making.”
Examples of works include Anna Von Mertens’ Dawn (Left Illinois for California, April 15, 1859), 2007. Using a computer program that calculates the actual stars seen at any chosen historic moment, she tracks the paths of fading light of the night’s stars against that of the emerging day. In Untitled (Kick Ball Mural), Jose Luis Cortes kicked a dirty soccer ball against the wall over 500 times to create an elaborate and intricate site-specific drawing. Duke Riley has produced a large, intricate, tattoo-like drawing, Be Good or Be Gone, which incorporates groups of debaucherous pirates among modern emblems.
Homer has worked as a gallery assistant at Howard Scott Gallery in New York City; assistant to the director at Peter Blum Gallery Chelsea in New York City; and is currently dealer’s assistant to the president at PaceWildenstein gallery in New York City. In 2006, he curated Real Property, at Gallery on Dean, Brooklyn, N.Y., and in 2005, Hey Moxie at the 210 Gallery in New York City.
Homer was also part of the 2000 Men’s Basketball team, which won the Patriot League Championship and was the first Lafayette team in more than 40 years to receive a bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Lafayette College Art Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.