Rochester Institute of Technology’s satellite art space,
Gallery r, closed its College Avenue doors at the start of the summer, and has
been replaced by City Art Space, located in the Sibley Building. Just steps
from the Liberty Pole, the gallery is making excellent use of a former retail
space on the first floor, and is marking an exciting trend of increased art
spaces in the city’s center.
The space
came together quickly. It opened almost exactly one year from when organizers
first looked at the space. Carpeting and drop ceilings were torn out in favor
of the sparse, industrial look of cement floors and exposed ducts and pipes.
Gallery lighting was installed, along with modular white walls to expand the
exhibition real estate.
The new
gallery’s downtown location gives the creative culture of RIT a more prominent
space in the center of the city, and potential for increased community
programming, says director John Aäsp.
Aäsp adds that like gallery r, the
new space will showcase work by faculty, students, and alumni, and it will
still serve as an experiential learning hub for undergraduate and graduate
students in gallery management. But it will also highlight community
collaborations and the melding of social benefit with design, he says.
And RIT
interior design students had a hand in the look of the space as well, Aäsp says. The students were asked
to design for flexibility, and the architects used students’ input to begin the
design process.
City Art
Space’s inaugural show, “Emergence,” features work by RIT professors Leonard
Urso and Willie Osterman. Each have taught at the school for more than 30
years, but recently realized they had never talked with each other about their
work, Aäsp says. Through
subsequent conversations and studio visits, they discovered common threads in
their work including mark making and visual mythologies.
The wide
open space gives visitors ample room to navigate installations of large works,
and the huge storefront windows allow passersby to view almost the entire show.
Urso’s work is monumental, whether it’s fabricated metal hands and heads that
bring to mind Greek or Roman ruins of gargantuan sculptures, or his large-scale
paintings of obsessively scrawled words carved into paint. One such painting, “Wilderness,”
is a tangled patch of the word repeated and layered, like brambles resisting
the order of a garden, the work looking like a punk band’s album art.
Rows and
stacks of Osterman’s murky tintypes of masks create a feeling of an inscrutable
pantheon’s presence. A wide variety of expressions are captured in these
portraits, from fearful to fanged and fearsome. Installed on one tall wall is a
series of ambrotypes that together roughly form a body.
And each panel includes a few translucent layers, giving a disorientingly
dimensional effect to viewing the torso, hands, and other parts as you walk
past the work.
In the early
spring, the gallery will host an exhibit of work by local, national, and
international artists who’ve taken part in WALL\THERAPY, curated by Erich
Lehman. And planned for the summer is a show about new Americans, organized
with the immigration office. In the fall City Art Space will once again
collaborate with Rochester Contemporary and Visual Studies Workshop to present the
reworked, multi-venue Rochester Biennial, which will involve select curators
and potentially additional pop-up spaces.
This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2018.
