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February Issue
2011
if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC, Features
Works by Janet Orselli
if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC, is presenting
the exhibit, Janet Orselli: The New York Exhibition, on
view through Feb. 13, 2011.
Just back from her second solo exhibition at the prominent O.K.
Harris gallery in New York City, Columbia native Janet Orselli
will be showing a selection of her New York show at if ART Gallery.
In the exhibition's found object constructions, Orselli, who lives
in North Carolina, combines clogs, roller skates, shoes, shoe
forms and a mouse trap on wheels with seemingly unrelated found
objects such as a rusty toy car, an egg beater or a violin part.
The exhibition also will include several of Orselli's crutches
juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated objects, called "Impedimenta,"
which were exhibited at O.K. Harris in 2007. OK Harris is the
gallery of legendary New York art dealer Ivan Karp.
"These imaginative means of locomotion," Orselli says,
"are joined together by hand to form entirely new entities.
Engaging and thought provoking, these found object constructions
with their rich visual histories evoke the past while outrageously
rolling toward the future."
"My raw materials are leftovers from the past, or what some
might call 'worn out stuff'. These objects have a story to tell
- if we listen. All of them want to move some more. Each struggles
to get ahead - some drag a weight behind them, others have a shell
to break through, and still others - await takeoff. They are all
trying awfully hard. Ultimately they attain arthood by releasing
their object identity and joining others in a new (lively) purpose."
Orselli (b. 1954) is an independent installation and performance
artist. She has had solo shows at O.K. Harris gallery in New York
City, the Turchin Center for Visual Arts in Boone, NC, and at
the Sumter Gallery of Art in Sumter, Charleston's Gibbes Museum
and the Burroughs & Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, all in
South Carolina, and elsewhere. Her installations have been featured
at Schopf Gallery on Lake, Chicago, IL, Holter Museum of Art,
Helena, Montana, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana,
and in three consecutive Accessibility Project events in Sumter,
SC.
Orselli's found object constructions have been in national group
exhibitions throughout the country. In 2001, she was selected
to create a two-room installation for the South Carolina Triennial
at the SC State Museum. That same year she was also awarded an
artist scholarship by the SC Arts Commission to attend Anderson
Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 2005, she received the prestigious
Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship.
O.K. Harris owner Ivan Karp, as the co-director of Leo Castelli
Gallery in the 1960s, was instrumental in launching the careers
of pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg,
Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman and John Chamberlain. Karp also
was the first to exhibit in New York work by prominent contemporary
artists Duane Hanson, and many others.
For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings,
call the gallery at 803/238-2351 or e-mail to (wroefs@sc.rr.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2011 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2011 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.