RODRÍGUEZ CALERO. The Collage medium is a kind of surrealist art in which bits of flat materials are pasted together in an incongruous relationship for a symbolic or suggested effect. This blending of elements offers an open-ended means to construct ideas and feelings of an instinctual and emotional involvement and gives pursuit to my own personal expression and ideas.

Compositions of the human figure, breaking, decomposing and rearranging, create a puzzle of sorts, which is complex and fascinating like human nature. These conceptual images transcend abstract poetry and humor to a social and political urban presence and evoke an image of familiarity and sentiment.

Collage has a language and reason, which is impelling and enables me to translate an area of imagination, creative inventiveness, and intuition in visual form.

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PAM COOPER: My window installation in this exhibition displays various sizes of paper houses with small windows cut in them, all placed in a space where you are not just looking in a window but also out of a window behind them. We all love to peep through windows to watch other lives playing out. The importance of windows became very apparent during the Covid lockdown, many people taking up birdwatching as a new interest. If possible, that was a time to slow down and take an interest in what is just outside your living space. Inside the gallery you can indulge your guilty pleasure and peep through the windows and become the voyeur.

Inside the gallery, ‘Apron I’, the first in the series of aprons, contains small books detailing some of the occupations a ‘housewife’ or ‘househusband’ deals with, as well as holding down a full-time job in many cases.

‘Paper Doll’ is a corner installation of paper dresses on hangers that can be interchanged with the dress the girl is wearing. This work comments on the fact that today, girls and boys are being brought up in an American society that values beauty, dress and popularity above all else.

All my work is mainly handmade abaca paper with the addition of diminutive wooden furniture and found objects. Each piece of paper is made specifically in the size and shape I need for each work. After completing a piece, I build another sculpture out of archival foam core to protect it during storage and transport. Some of these can also be seen in the window installation.

 

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DANIELLE SCOTT is a mixed-media assemblage artist who grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her work expresses politically and socially charged messaging . She recently received the 2021 Artist of the Year from ESKFF , which is the Eileen S. Kaminksy Family Foundation Artist residency Program in Mana Contemporary , Jersey city.

A soft-spoken artist, Danielle has begun to use her art as a conduit to explore bold; fearless,thought-provoking work – work which draws its inspiration largely from her own journey and life experience. Her latest pieces are brazen offerings conveying the intense beauty and wretched pain the artist absorbs from the world around her. She creates using photo montage, found objects, paint, raw materials, old books and collage. From vivid paintings to piercing photography to striking sculptures, all of Danielle’s artistic offerings aim to arrest the viewer and transport them away from the pretentious and into a realm rooted in truth.

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BRYANT SMALL is an Award Winning artist who lives in Jersey City, NJ and balances a social marketing and media career in New York City. Bryant has a love of culture, color, and all things sparkling. In his art, he loves to toe the line of free abstraction with vibrant color blending and pushing beyond pretty. His Alcohol Ink pieces are free-flowing, unpredictable, and levitate from the page.
Recognized as a Conception Arts, Global Art Collective 2020 and 2017 Award For Excellence Winner, and selected as one of International Art Market Magazine’s Gold List of Top Emerging Contemporary Artists, Bryant has shown his work in several collective and individual shows throughout the United States and has pieces that are part of Private Collections around the Globe. He lives by the words: “Broken Crayons Still Color… and a little glitter and sparkle NEVER hurt anybody!” Bryant is constantly creating and being inspired and sharing his work daily on Instagram- @BFLY777.

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KATIE TRUK: People look at pantyhose as a single-use object these days. Dollar store nudes bought because their legs were cold wearing a skirt or dress. Yet stockings have been around for hundreds of years. Before 1590 stockings were woven out of cotton, linen, wool, or silk. Higher hemlines made stockings out of silk popular in the 1920s. DuPont introduced nylon in 1939.
1959 pantyhose was created. Nylon pantyhose are not biodegradable and can take 30-40 years to fully decompose.

I’ve been using hosiery since I was a kid, wearing them or using them in crafts projects. The 1970s loved their hose art. It’s such an amazing material that fascinated me with its rich color, patterns, and textures. I’ve been sewing them and creating artwork since 1999.

My sculptures aren’t paintings, a medium that has been around for hundreds of years. I really don’t know how long they will last through time. In the twenty-some odd years I have been using them, I am still amazed by their durability, even in some of my oldest work. Do I worry about my legacy? A bit. But all I have is the here and now. Time will have to be something that the future will have to deal with if they choose.

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He curated Gallery Aferro, Activate: Market Street from 2011 – 2019. This critically acclaimed, yearlong exhibition displayed installations and two-dimensional art in store windows on one of the busiest streets in Newark, NJ.

Some other shows include: The StoreFront Gates Project and several murals and pop up shows for the City of Newark and Yendor Arts, several shows for Gallery Aferro, Newark Open Doors, Paterson Art Walk, Paterson Great Falls Festival, Newark Artfront Galleries, and Hoboken Diggable Arts Festival as well as other independence projects.

Originally from the Paterson, NJ area, he studied at Kean and Montclair State Universities. He has exhibited his works throughout the NY Metropolitan and Caribbean areas and his work is part of The Newark Museum of Art and The Zimmerli Art Museum permanent collections.

Born in Juncos, Puerto Rico and raised in Paterson, New Jersey, Lopez uses the visual storytelling of traditional realism to convey complex commentary on the intersection of faith and modernity, the strength of family, and the multidimensional contemporary urban experience.

The decades the artist spent under the Pentecostal doctrine, a bold color palette informed by both abstract painting as well as older traditions of icon-making, all meld to create Lopez’s kaleidoscopic worldview. His artworks reveal a restless, deeply engaged spirit closely observing not only his immediate environment but the larger historic trajectory of national news.

Lopez asserts, “Originally, I studied business and fine arts at Kean University and at Montclair State University and was prepared for a life in the corporate arena. But my life’s journey has led me back to artmaking and my true passion. My work shows my voyage from that life choice to now.” In just four years since leaving the business world to focus on art, Lopez’s work has appeared regularly in tri-state area exhibitions at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, The Bronx River Art Center, The Center for Contemporary Art Bedminster, NJ, Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, New Jersey City State University Gallery, Kean University, Rupert Raven Contemporary, and others. Currently, he is a resident artist at Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ