An Opening Reception will be held at the Emerson Gallery on Saturday, Jan. 22, from 3- 4:30 p.m. The public is cordially invited to attend.
Ella Gant has been a Hamilton faculty member since 1991, teaching both photography and video production. In her work, she uses a range of media to create installation pieces in which, as she explains, she seeks "to use recognizable imagery to reduce ordinary philosophical and psychological predicaments to tangible, human terms." In her new piece, One Hundred Years, Gant explores the idea of romantic love and its illusions using video, film, a life-size plaster cast of herself, and a number of found objects.
Thomas Mazzullo has taught drawing at Hamilton since 1998. His recent work includes prints and drawings that depict insects enlarged to reveal their structure in intricate detail. In the suite of lithographs entitled Royalty, which presents four common insects, Mazzullo has created a formal portrait of each insect, in the style of the seventeenth-century printed frontispiece. His current drawings are done in silverpoint, a medium that has been only rarely used by artists since the sixteenth century.
Bruce Muirhead, who has taught at Hamilton since 1983 (and at Kirkland College since 1972), is committed to both painting and printmaking (etching). His works, which depict both landscapes and figures, are based on memory. Muirhead's figurative paintings have a dream-like quality. As the artist explains, "...objects and images float in-and-out of focus like reflections in a mirror." In his landscape paintings Muirhead focuses on the environment, space, light and the panoramic views of the horizon in upstate New York.
Robert Palusky, who has been a faculty member at Hamilton (and before that at Kirkland College) since 1969, works in glass. Mixing media and technical approaches, Palusky creates sculptural works in which disparate elements are combined in jarring as well as harmonizing ways. In his figurative works, animals, birds, human creatures, and a wide assortment of everyday objects come together in fantastic combinations.
Ann Reichlin, who has taught sculpture at Hamilton since 1997, constructs large sculptural objects from industrial materials in which she explores the conflicting geometries of overlapping rooms and other spaces. In her new piece, Snare, she has created a transparent mass of metal lathe and steel grid that relates to the structures of animal traps as well to the way water is shifted in a canal lock. The piece, which shimmers with reflected light, is both delicate and threatening.
William Salzillo, a faculty member at Hamilton and Kirkland since 1973, is a painter who has explored the landscape of California, the American Southwest, and Italy in his recent works. Salzillo, who is drawn to vibrant light and color, sees his landscapes as metaphors for sensual pleasure that communicate the intensity of particular visual experiences.
Sylvia de Swaan has taught photography at Hamilton since 1997. Since 1990, she has been engaged in a photographic project entitled Return as a means of exploring the almost forgotten world of her childhood. A Romanian-born Jew who was uprooted and displaced by WWII, de Swaan has used photography to form a bridge, visually and metaphorically, to a time and place that had become an abstraction to her.
In addition to the Opening Reception, a number of special programs will be presented in conjunction with Multiple Perspectives. Gallery Talks by the artists will be given on three Wednesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. On Feb. 2, Ella Gant and Robert Palusky will discuss their work. On Feb. 16, Thomas Mazzullo, William Salzillo and Sylvia de Swaan will speak. And, on March 8, Bruce Muirhead and Ann Reichlin will talk about their work. Both the exhibition and programs are free and open to the public.
The Emerson Gallery is located on the campus of Hamilton College, in Christian Johnson Hall. The Gallery's hours are weekdays, 12 – 5 p.m., weekends, 1 – 5 p.m., during scheduled exhibitions when school is in session. For further information and wheelchair accessibility please call the Emerson Gallery at 315 859-4396.
