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Indepth Arts News:
"Jerry Di Falco: QUANTUM CREATIVITY: RELICS OF THE OLD PHYSICS AND OF THE NEW ART"
2007-11-01 until 2007-11-30
Da Vinci Art Alliance
Philadelphia, PA,
USA United States of America
One of Philadelphia's most prolific artists, Gerard (Jerry) Di Falco, will exhibit his newest works at the Da Vinci Art Alliance from November 1-30 in a solo show entitled, "QUANTUM CREATIVITY: RELICS OF THE OLD PHYSICS AND OF THE NEW ART". The gallery -- at 704 Catharine Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- is located just three blocks below South Street. The Opening Reception will be held in conjunction with First Fridays on November 2 from 5:00 to 7:30 pm. The gallery will also host a Closing Reception on Thursday, November 29, from 5:00 to 7:30 pm, to honor this special artist. Jerry Di Falco has been a Premiere Portfolio Artist at absolutearts.com since
On Sunday, November 11, Di Falco will present a slide-lecture at 3:00 pm entitled, "My Evolution in Art from 1977 to 2007"; questions and answers will follow. The artist will discuss major periods of his career, which include: "Altered Perception-ism" and Political Installation Art ; Architectural and Optical Realism; and, "Spiritual, Liturgical, and Sacred Art". A Performance Art Event will occur on Sunday, November 18, at 3:00 pm; DaVinci artist, Marcy Morris, will interact with Gerard Di Falco's "spiritual" works as she dances to music (electronic and acoustical) composed and played by two musicians. Poetry and the spoken word will also be incorporated into her piece.
This will be Di Falco's twentieth solo-show in Philadelphia; he has exhibited in 250 solo and juried-group shows in other European and U.S. galleries, including those in Alexandria (VA), Atlanta (GA), Baltimore (MD), Barcelona (Spain), Cincinnati (OH), Glasgow (Scotland), Los Angeles (CA), Madrid (Spain), Minneapolis (MN), New York City, Pittsburgh (PA), Richmond (VA), Washington, D.C., and Wilmington (DE). His works are represented in private and public collections in the aforementioned cities, as well as in (partial list) Alameda (CA), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Ardmore (PA), Boston (MA), Bryn Mawr (PA), Camp Hill (PA), Cape May (NJ), Collingswood, (NJ), Chicago (IL), Columbia (SC), Denver (CO), New Brittan (CT), Florence (Italy), Fort Lauderdale (FL), Jersey City (NJ), Haddonfield (NJ), Havana (Cuba), Honolulu (HI), London (UK), Miami Beach (FL), Memphis (TN), Newport (RI), Murcia (Spain), Novo Scotia (Canada), Ocean City (NJ), Olympia (WA), Paris (France), Princeton and Princeton Junction (NJ), Provincetown (MA), Reading (PA), St. Davids (PA), St. Petersburg (FL), San Francisco (CA), Santa Clara (CA), Seattle (WA), South Bend (IN), Stratford (NJ), Taos (NM), Toronto (Canada), and Utrecht (Netherlands).
Di Falco believes that today's artists owe it to themselves, history, and art to be as versatile as the Renaissance artists of the Fourteen- and Fifteen-Hundreds; consequently, he has worked successfully in many genres, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, assemblage, works-on-paper, mixed-media, environmental art, Italian folk-arts, book-art, installations, and new technologies. Gerard has been profiled in the Marquis publications of WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA and WHO'S WHO IN THE WORLD since 2004, and now into next year's editions of 2008. He has also won several prestigious grants, including one from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (NYC, 2002, $30,000) and two from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (1987 and 1992). In 2002, he was selected to hold the position of "Resident Artist" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in its award-winning educational program, Art Futures. Di Falco also received a Teaching Fellowship from Drexel University (1984-1985) in its world-renowned graduate school of Arts Administration, where he earned a master's of science degree with a dual major in Visual Art and Curatorial Science.
As a painter, Di Falco is known for his vivid palette and daring subjects (e.g. "Societal Genres", Nexus Gallery, 1988, which premièred his Wönderbread Family paintings; "The Madrid Paintings", Nexus Gallery, 1992; and, "Art of the State", Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, 2007). He also established a reputation as a conceptual artist through his pioneering work in installation art (beginning in 1985). In ART GOLF (Nexus Gallery, Philadelphia, 1986, and Pop Network Gallery, NYC, 1986), he constructed a miniature golf course that satirized aspects of the Art World (e.g. "The Art Dealer's Hole", "The Minimalist's Hole", and "The Sand Trap: Being an Artist in Philadelphia").
Ever since his two-year tenure with Creative Artists Network in 1994, Di Falco's art has become more introspective. In this latest show at Da Vinci (as in his Solo there in 2000), the artist continues to explore his ever-growing interests in "spiritual dimensions" found in art. His expressions of "the sacred" have matured over the past thirteen years, as well as his signature boldness of: artistic style; technique; and, vision. Di Falco gathers inspiration for his spiritual work from his, "academic and independent studies over the past thirty years in the areas of folklore, sacred geometry/numerology, comparative religion, theology, and mysticism." He is especially interested in reading about and conducting researching into the Kabala, Early Christianity, the Gnostic Gospels, and the Divine Feminine/Goddess cults. Consequently, the artist will show 136 ("a very sacred number," he insists) assemblages which he titles, "RELICS". These gold-painted, mixed-media works on stretched canvas (all are eight-inches-high by six-inches wide) contain bones, skulls, natural/found/cast objects, minerals, and gold-leaf; this "Basilica of Relics" celebrates what Di Falco calls, "the amazing nexus between God (as Creator/Artist) and "Humanity" (as creator/destroyer). These RELICS push the limits of painting by crossing over into fiber-art and relief-sculpture; moreover, they strike a strange, yet primordial, balance between visionary and liturgical art. They are also reflections of possibilities . . . of where humanity may soon find itself (as a relic) if it does not follow the artist's path . . . of creation.
Gerard will also exhibit fourteen, STATIONS OF THE CROSS (an Anglican- and Roman-Catholic Lenten meditation tool), as well as a few "altar-installations," which incorporate his painted icons. An introduction to his most recent conceptual and environmental work (which will be in-progress until October 31, 2008) will also première in this exhibit. This multi-media/genre piece (which has the working title of, "Morning's Glory/Dusk's Pride: Vines from Philadelphia (2007) return on All Hollow's Eve (2008), Part One) will be a combination of: sculpture; happenings-across-spaces-places-and time-zones; video; poetry; seed-planting; photography; digital art; public sacred ritual; performance art; and the evolution of disease and healing. It will primarily involve sculptures constructed from organic materials onto which morning glory vines will be grown; this will occur in various locations across the urban and rural United States. Seeds for these vines, which were from plants grown on Di Falco's center-city Philadelphia balcony, were harvested on August 24 of this year (the day on which the artist discovered that he had cancer). The work will further be explained at the exhibition via digital photographs and poetry in an altar dedicated to "Our Mother of the Realm Purple". For information about this exhibit, please call 215-829-0466 to reach the gallery's information line, or go to www.davinciartalliance.org. For a more comprehensive review of his work, one can see his webpage at absolutearts.com, the internet's most expansive visual artists'-bio presence, by going to www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/g/gerarddifalco/.
Hours on Fridays and Saturdays are from noon to 6:00 pm, and on Sundays from 2:00 to 5:30 pm. To view this exhibit at other times, private showings will be available for the convenience of: collectors; media representatives; gallery owners; and museum/independent curators. Interested parties need only telephone the gallery's answering machine to discover how to arrange a private viewing.
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