September 2 – October 17, 2014
Rechnitz Hall
DiMattio Gallery – First Floor
Opening Reception: Friday, September 19, from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

We interact with hundreds of people throughout our lifetimes, yet can we ever hope to grasp the intricate web of experience that makes them tick? Imagining the hidden realities of other people’s existences is a continuing theme in the work of artist Mavis Smith. “It’s not so much specific people or events, but the general sense of unknown depths that intrigues me”, says Smith. “It does not have to be dark; heroic acts toward total strangers or simple people rising to extraordinary occasions are equally in the mix.” Smith, who’s works are often done in egg tempera, brings an almost surreal aesthetic to her paintings that further suggests the dislocation of appearances and realities.

“I have a love/hate relationship with egg tempera. It’s a labor intensive medium, but the luminous effects you can achieve makes it seem worth it to me. I build up layer upon layer of thicker paint, alternating with sheer washes of pigment – back and forth, back and forth. The actual process is very meditative, and I believe it contributes to my subconscious imagination coming into play.”

Bucks County, PA resident Mavis Smith studied at the Pratt Institute in the 1970’s, and has exhibited her work in Holland and Switzerland as well as Santa Fe, New York City, and several venues in NJ and PA including a solo show in 2012 at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA. She is also a prolific illustrator and author of children’s books, having authored 10 and illustrated at least 75. This exhibition samples a range of Smith’s work from years past, as well as several new pieces, including both paintings and works on paper as well as some recent sculptural works incorporating egg shells.

September 2 – October 17, 2014
Rechnitz Hall
DiMattio Gallery – Second Floor

Inspired by mathematical models, literary sources, and his own social consciousness, Robert Emmett Mueller, artist, engineer, inventor, author, musician, puppet maker, and general wizard, is on a never-ending search for visual equivalents to his ideas.

“Such is his mind, and such is his personality that I know whatever he is doing artistically is a search for form, a search for beauty, and a search for the meaning of things”, said Bernarda Bryson Shahn, and artist and Mueller’s longtime neighbor in Roosevelt, New Jersey.

Mueller’s creations are largely varied.  They include woodcuts, like a recent triptych entitled: Ravages of Pre-emptive War; The Devil Stalks Baghdad; America’s Bitter Presence, whose theme is the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  Many of Mueller’s pieces can be found worldwide and are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the New Jersey State Museum, the Rutgers University Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum of London, and other museums worldwide.  He is also a painter who describes his personal style as “Mathematico-abstract.”  Mueller has written two books, The Science of Art, published in 1967, and Inventivity, published in 1963.

Mueller’s own “inventivity” took a circuitous route to art.  He grew up in St. Louis, where his father was a baker and his mother was a seamstress and milliner.  After serving in the Navy, he was sent to a college preparation program in Asbury Park and later graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After moving to New York City to study philosophy at New York University, Mueller began to meet artists from Roosevelt, which was begun as a planned workers’ community but had evolved into an artists’ colony that included, among others, Ben Shahn, and Gregorio Prestopino, both who influenced Mueller’s work.  Mueller moved to Roosevelt with his wife Diana Lobl, an attorney, in the 1950’s.  They now have two grown children, Rachel and Erik.

Mueller said that through Roosevelt he became “conscious of human inhumanity, moral and social problems, the depths of degradation, and the heights of elegance over which human nature ranges”, and he believes that artists should use their work to react to crises in society, to encourage protest, and to fight for economic, political, and human well-being.

In this exhibition, all of the above are skillfully communicated.

Image Caption: Classic Figure, 1996, Woodcut, 23 1/2″ x 17 1/2″

September 2 – November 14, 2014
Ice House Gallery
Opening Reception:  Thursday, September 25, from 4:30 – 7:00 p.m.

An exhibit about the empty homes and foreclosed dreams littering the American landscape in the wake of the foreclosure crisis.

Owning a home was once the American dream. At the peak of the foreclosure crisis, one in five American homeowners was either behind on their mortgage payments or in the process of foreclosure. Their empty homes and foreclosed dreams are powerful symbols of lives shattered and families devastated.

After a house is foreclosed upon there is a fleeting moment when the ghosts of the one-time owners are all that is left – before the houses are cleaned and returned to the real estate market.  The remaining signs of life photographed during this period of time echo the voices and footsteps that once filled these emptied houses.

I focused on empty homes, as they are immovable objects and stand in stark contrast to the highly mobile American dream. I chose not to focus on individual families in foreclosure because I wanted to explore the issue from a broader perspective. The final work is made more powerful by its lack of literalism and its attention to chillingly mundane objects.  An open-ended canvas, viewers can project their own ideas into the photographs – about home, America and family, into the empty spaces of the houses.

I started the project in April of 2009, with the goal of understanding the upheaval we are living through. I initially photographed in the Central Valley of California, an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis. Then, I worked in Rhode Island, which has a foreclosure rate very similar to California’s. To date, I have photographed in eighteen states.

My audience is America itself, including those who worry about the possible foreclosure of their own dreams, those who have already experienced that trauma and anyone concerned or interested in what’s happening to the American dream.