In The Moment

Collage Work by Ashley Roark, Barbee Hauzinger, and Christy Mitchell

March 2 – 31, 2018

Opening Reception:
First Friday Art Walk, March 2nd from 5 – 9pm

Collage by Barbee Hauzinger – ‘In Search of the Waganauts’

Ashley Roark, Barbee Hauzinger, and Christy Mitchell have much in common; females in their thirties creating collage artwork…though their styles range from minimalism to conceptual, crossing a wide spectrum of time and eras with their materials and visual media.

Collage by Ashley Roark – ‘Balances’

Ashley Roark sees paper as a place holder for memories. These assemblages create a language through the layering and manipulation of materials. Roark uses inspiration from typography to create form, space and movement. Her work utilizes vintage paper, acrylic paint, gouache, graphite, and wax. This new series illustrates Roark’s current experimentation with an expanded color palette, adding new elements of pale pink and sienna to her traditionally muted tones.

Collage by Barbee Hauzinger – ‘LIFE Magazine September 14, 1962’

Barbee Hauzinger uses collage as a way to actualize a landscape, a scene, and a place in time that could never be captured through her other creative passion, photography, exclusively with paper from vintage books and magazines.

In her ‘Where You’d Want to Be Series’, Hauzinger creates familiar yet curious scenes; snapshots that exude a sense of strange sense of nostalgia for the viewer.  The landscapes themselves are beautiful; star studded skies, ethereal heavenly bodies, pristine wildernesses. Yet there is something eerie and off about them, like these places may just be too good to be true.

The second series, ‘Age of Ads’ goes about dissecting and exploring American consumerism and commercialism through the use of ads from a single piece of print material. The piece featured above from this series uses only one magazine, LIFE Magazine September 14, 1962, dissecting the moment in time to one message; utopia can be created if you just buy the correct products.

Collage by Christy Mitchell – ‘Traffic Jam Uptown’ (detail)

Christy Mitchell creates a sense of nostalgia in her collages through the use of color and imagery printed in magazines from the late 40’s – early 70’s, though the artist herself never lived in those decades. Her choice of settings and the people depicted appear as if in a scene or a still of an imagined movie. Utilizing media from those specific eras, the content was ‘of the moment’ in those years, though when placed in fresh compositions the work takes on a new life, commenting on broader implications of our current place within society and with each other. The work is at times comforting, as though you could just go back ‘there’, paired with a voice in the back of your head, asking, ‘are you sure that you want to?’

In The Moment
On View March 2 – 31, 2018
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday 12 – 5pm

Filed under: Art Exhibits, Press, The Space | Tagged: art galleries in Burlington Vermont, art openings, Art Show, Ashley Roark, Barbee Hauzinger, Burlington Art, Burlington Vermont, Christy Mitchell, First Friday Art Walk, Space Gallery, Space Gallery Vermont, The Space Gallery | Leave a comment »