3rd Rochester Biennial
July 13–September 14, 2008
The Rochester Biennial is an invitational exhibition of work by six contemporary regional artists working in a variety of media. Largely dedicated to mid-career artists with a demonstrated commitment to their craft, the show also includes one artist selected on the strength of his or her entry in the previous year’s juried Rochester Finger-Lakes Exhibition.
The artists selected for 2008 are Ronald Gonzalez (Johnson City) with mixed media installations; Sue Huggins Leopard (Rochester) with artist’s books; Susan Lakin (Rochester) with photographs; Todd McGrain (Ovid) with bronze sculpture and drawings; Juan Perdiguero (Oswego) with drawings; and Melissa Sarat (Preble) with paintings.
This exhibition is underwritten by the Elaine P. and Richard U. Wilson Foundation and by gifts in memory of Diane Holahan Grosso.
Cell Phone Tours
Use your cell phone to hear all six artists talk about their work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 1-29. Read transcripts of the artists' cell phone tour talks.
Artist Lectures
Artist Statements
Detail of Found Heads (2006–08)
Use your cell phone to hear Ronald Gonzalez talk about his work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 22-24.
Over the years I have worked with objects and natural materials to make figures that explore themes of vulnerability, pathos, mortality, transformation, and dissolution where the transience of things, including art, is connected to the body in the context of an ephemeral human condition. The installation Found Heads uses found objects as points of departure to explore the boundaries that link the body to the world of things. Within this collection of figures there is a shared psychic indeterminacy, a tragic consciousness, and object mentality that gives a face to the dead things among us.
The found head objects situated on skeletal frames stare back as personifications of memory, touch, attachment, and association. As a group they are bound together in an aesthetic field of play that reveals their deeply hidden essence through a time-worn and fringe existence. For me these figures exist in a realm of imagination where metaphoric thinking is the norm and things are as much a part of us as we are of them.
Elizabeth and Don (2006–07)
Use your cell phone to hear Susan Lakin talk about her work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 3-15. Elizabeth and Don is stop 14.
These photographs examine two alternate dimensions, one in the television screen and the other of the room containing the television. I photograph my subject’s reflection on their inactive television set by enhancing the screen’s mirror image with artificial light and later removing the camera digitally. This leaves the viewer questioning, at first, whether the television is tuned to a program, playing a video, or reflecting an environment.
I’m interested in issues of reality versus representation, how mass media forms our perception of identity and its influence on shaping the self, and the blurred line between public and private spaces as seen in the cultural phenomena of reality TV and blogging.
Today we are so interactive with electronic media that we connect with screens via our televisions, computers, and handheld devices every day. How these screens frame our world reflects on our lives.
Green (2007)
Use your cell phone to hear Sue Huggins Leopard talk about her work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 16-21.
Anything that moves through my consciousness and decided to stay awhile and take shape might become a book, or a collage, or some—thing.
Lately, my concerns have been:
| the heart | apprehension for our future |
| things that fly | pioneer roots |
| reverence for nature | fears of time passing |
| 19th-century literature | Scotland |
In the search for meaning and connection, a story unfolds through the process and only becomes clear to me in the making. Seemingly disparate elements coalesce through trial and error to become whole. The passage of time is embodied in the object.
I’m about to go to Scotland. Maybe my heart is in the Highlands. There is always a story, wherever, Or something like that. I’ll try to let you know.
Great Auk, driven to extinction, 1844 (2007–08)
Use your cell phone to hear Todd McGrain talk about his work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stop 29.
They cannot dive out of a cloud, nor clap their wings in thunderous applause. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather, they live forever by not living at all.
—Aldo Leopold, 1947
The Lost Bird Project immortalizes five North American birds that have been driven to extinction in modern times, including the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, and the Heath Hen.
I model these forms to contain a taut equilibrium, a balanced pressure from inside and out—like a breath held in. The sculptures are meant to be melancholy, yet affirming; the smooth surface, like a stone polished from touch, conjures the effect of memory and time.
The culmination of this project will be the permanent installation of these memorials at locations that are most associated with each bird’s decline.
Perro Gris Lluvia (2007)
Use your cell phone to hear Juan Perdiguero talk about his work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 1-2.
My work is deeply rooted in figuration, coming from the tradition of the Spanish Baroque School. I create images that are classical in appearance but strongly contemporary in the way they are conceptualized and rendered. Ink spread on the flat space of the photographic emulsion conveys either a tense calmness or frenetic flight, reflecting the chaotic condition of our urban environments and consumerist culture.
Above all, I strive for simplicity and balance. I manipulate the technical borders between painting, drawing, and photography as a way to create images that attract, seduce, confront and engage the viewer’s subconscious mind.
Ritrina (2005–07)
Use your cell phone to hear Melissa Sarat talk about her work. The tour is free but regular cell phone charges apply. Call 585.627.4132, stops 25-28. Ritrina is stop 26.
I was reared in the 1950s on the grounds of a Louisiana mental institution. My work is still inspired by the patients there, and by the wild boars, snakes, magnolias, toad frogs, purple-fringed passion flowers, culinary delights and mystical symbolism of the South. I often use myself as a model, getting into character by donning costumes and theatrical make-up.
My experience in a successful battle to prevent a truck stop from building over the recharge point of the sole aquifer in our rural community, and my current efforts to oppose factory farms in New York State due to their negative impact on the environment and human health, have birthed my depictions of fierce guardian archetypes. Together with painted birds, animals, fish, frogs, flora and food, they speak to the dire importance of biodiversity and water, air and food quality as our globe teeters on the environmental tipping point.
