Psychogeography Exhibit Opens in the Hewitt Gallery of Art
Open gallery
Psychogeography explores artists’ responses to place [and displacement] in real and imagined spaces. From the psychic to the specific, from recollection to recording, the works in this exhibit recreate the power of place in the human imagination.
The nine artists in this group exhibition have traversed the globe, from the North Pole to Egypt, from Tibet to Italy, and from Flatbush to Central Park. Some travel in the imaginative realms, others may never leave the studio.
This exhibit takes inspiration from the notion of derive, or “drifting,” a word coined by French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord, one of the founders of the Situationists International movement.
Exhibit Details
The show is curated by Hallie Cohen, MFA, Director of the Hewitt Gallery and Professor of Art, and will run from April 1, 2019 – May 1, 2019. Join us for the opening reception:
Opening Reception
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
6:00 – 8:00 pm
Marymount Manhattan College
221 East 71st Street
New York, NY 10021
About the Artists
Frederick Brosen’s exquisite, highly detailed watercolors capture the light, the architecture, and the aura of a New York City street or a Florentine strada, while Ben Paljor Chatag’s watercolors deal with “inner qualities” he discovered in Tibet before emigrating to the U.S. Taiwanese-born Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s large-scale black and white photographs of the iconic Central Park are based on the Chinese lunar calendar and call to mind the vertical format and multiple perspectives of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Dahlia Elsayed makes “fictional landscapes in pictorial spaces that are simultaneously flat and real, based on pairing diasporan narrative with a terra firma.” Ellie Ga not only walks, but floats, drifts, and dives into real and psychological worlds. Both storyteller and fortuneteller, she transports us into a poetic universe by means of multi-layered narratives, metaphor, images, and text. KellyAnne Hanrahan’s 50 States of Being Outside depict not the physical landscape of each state in the Union, but individual states of mind. Her source material comes from videos of camping trips posted to YouTube and are translated into a painterly language that comes in a variety of sizes and shapes. Inner, seemingly unimaginable scenarios within the natural world are portrayed in Sarah Olson’s delicate ink, watercolor, and pastel drawings, while Emily Hass reconstructs a personal history through research of archival architectural records from the city of Berlin, circa the 1930s. Finally, Matthew Jensen’s interdisciplinary practice is “infused with walking, collecting, mapping, and historical research. All of [his] work is unified by landscape and how a place is experienced.”
Jensen took current MMC art students in a Drawing II class on a “psychogeographic” place-based learning walk from the art studios to Central Park and back. The students then collaborated to create a large-scale drawing that mapped and recorded their experiences and discoveries. This work is being displayed in the Hewitt Black & White East Gallery alongside Jensen’s own work.
About Marymount Manhattan College
Marymount Manhattan College (MMC) is an urban, independent, liberal arts college. The mission of the College is to educate a socially and economically diverse population by fostering intellectual achievement and personal growth and by providing opportunities for career development.
MMC offers a B.A. in Art and a B.A. in Art History. The Art and Art History Department offers students a program designed to accommodate the artist, the designer, and the historian. Within this flexible program, Art majors have the option to concentrate in Studio Art, Photography, Graphic Design, or Animation and Illustration. In addition, all majors may choose from a number of minors, including Arts Management and Art Therapy.
Published: April 01, 2019
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