GALLERY HOURS: Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm

GALLERY TALK: Sunday, May 15 at 3 pm with Robert Blackson, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Temple Gallery

Philadelphia, PA - Vox Populi is pleased to announce May's exhibitions.

Julianna Foster, Kirkwood

Foster’s new series of photographs, Kirkwood, depict fantastic scenarios that occur in everyday settings. Unlike much of her past work, the human figure is absent in these images. But traces of its existence can be found in the vacant domestic architecture and in the events that take place within it.  Tapping into the tradition of magical realism, Foster depicts the "unreal" in an utterly realistic manner.  Foster began exploring these ideas in a previous series of work, From Morning On, which took its inspiration from the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and was exhibited at Vox Populi in 2009. 

 

Brent Wahl, Group Show

Fabricating three-dimensional "situations" that move through contextual and visual shifts is an ongoing interest for Wahl. Investigating cultural phenomena, abstraction, architecture and illusion are recurring themes. For Wahl, abstraction has often been the "glue" that binds together disparate visual forms in his work.

In Group Show, Wahl refocuses his core interest in abstraction in full force. Drawing on his fascination with the optical and sp atial shifts that happen between three-dimensional structures imaged in two-dimensions (via optics), he embraces a playful and experimental stance with this work. Collaborating with himself, he compiles a "group show" of imagery that is at once thematically linked and visually diverse.

Zach Rockhill, its own mirror/nocturnal opposite/solar void/concrete absence

For his exhibit its own mirror/nocturnal opposite/solar void/concrete absence, Rockhill extends an investigation into the formal properties of negative space and sculptural inversions begun in the fall of 2010.   In the spirit of that investigation the current exhibit is loosely based on Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Beckett's Endgame in his book of essays Must We Mean What We Say?  Rockhill stages a mise-en-scene of associative visual links drawn from a vocabulary set in minimal, performance and conceptual art that is meant to deploy Cavell’s "hidden literality" - a seemingly willful effort to thwart comprehension where meaning is missed because  “it was so utterly bare – totally, therefore unnoticeably, in view.”

 

Zach Rockhill's work engages a range of practices and concern, drawing broadly from philosophy, architecture, science fiction, and art history.   Rockhill holds an MFA from Rutgers, Mason Gross School of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Kansas.  His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.  He is currently adjunct faculty at The Cooper Union in New York City.

PULL YOUR COAT TO THIS

Humans live with an innate desire of belonging and inclusion.  This along with reaction or more extreme rebellion has fueled moves into tight-knit groups and subcultures.  Tacit communication within these groups is necessary and adds to exclusiveness and bonding.  PULL YOUR COAT TO THIS (1950’s Harlem jive for "let me tell you somet hing") features four artists whose work deals with secret handshake business between specific people and their "on a need to know basis" signage.  Michael Bizon, Erin Zona, Anders Johnson and Alee Peoples draw from the language of hobos, Lesbos, fabricated groups and recluse madmen.  Among these groups sense of humor, myth, horror and sex are specific codes, winks and nudges that otherwise go unnoticed by the population at large. 

AT FOURTH WALL

Barry Doupé

Curated by Kevin McGarry

Barry Doupé (b. 1982 Victoria , BC) is a filmmaker living in Vancouver.  He holds a Bachelor of Media Arts Degree from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design (2004). He is also a member of The Lions collaborative drawing group, Jarry and Crazy Weapon. His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Lyon Contemporary Art Museum, Pleasure Dome and the Tate Modern.