Outside the Centers/On the Edge
Main Floor Gallery
October 6 – November 26, 2006

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Cities are widely perceived as being fertile ground for cutting-edge, experimental art movements, while art produced in outlying areas is often considered provincial and traditional. This exhibition presents the work of fifteen artists, all living outside the Commonwealth’s two major urban centers, who take unconventional approaches to their work in materials, content and form. Their works demonstrate that just because the perspectives of these artists are influenced by their more “remote” locales they do not lack formal sophistication or theoretical rigor. While there is no significant thematic thread in this show, all of these artists are linked by the fact that they must rely on creative resources different from their urban counterparts. All deal with the same questions: How does living outside of the financial and cultural centers affect one’s artistic reputation, and how does your location impact the way you approach art making and the work you produce?

Perhaps not coincidentally, virtually every artist in the show visually and theoretically challenges conventional notions of space and the environment. Some of the artists produced art for non-traditional spaces they felt were aesthetically bereft, as illustrated by Lisa Austin’s Child Garden for the ICU, an idea derived out of her own experience in a drab hospital. Or Amara Geffen’s Read Between the Signs, for which the artist worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to produce an aesthetic and environmentally-friendly screen to cover its storage lot in Meadville. The screen, which represents several notable landmarks, is made entirely of recycled road signs. Others, such as photographer Christine Welch, look at the way humans irrevocably alter the “sublime” landscape. Several other artists in the exhibit raise environmental awareness by using recycled and non-traditional materials. David T. Collins reinvents the classic form of the teapot, giving it a weathered, recycled, machine-like look, and Georgette Veeder recycles cotton rags into paper which she then casts as sculpture.

Outside the Centers was organized by a consortium of Pennsylvania museums and university galleries, with the support of the Picture Pennsylvania Traveling Exhibition program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. The exhibition was co-curated by their directors: Erie Art Museum (John Vanco); Pennsylvania College of Art and Design Gallery (Kristy Krivitsky); Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University (Dan Mills); Sharadin Art Gallery, Kutztown University (Dan Talley); and Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art (Michael Tomor). The Erie Art Museum exhibition program is supported by a grant from the Erie Arts Endowment.