What We Leave Behind

Artist Statement

The Evolve Urban Arts Project is proud to announce our upcoming exhibition What We Leave Behind featuring encaustic collage artist Marty Ittner and painter Michele Cormier. Both artists create visually dense works that reference the discarded physical and emotional remnants of our busy lives.

Ittner places us in the shoes of an archeologist discovering the cultural and natural debris that has been left behind. Each collage is created using variegated layers of wax and paper, forcing the viewer to visually dig through the components. Our reward is discovering fragments of ephemera, organic specimens and incised typographic forms within the framework. The encaustic process encapsulates each assemblage, creating the photographic equivalent of a snapshot in time. These seemingly random scraps provide only limited, imperfect impressions of a prior civilization, leaving the viewer to ponder the cultural significance of these items.

Cormier’s paintings, ranging from moody abstracts to calculated still-lifes, encourage us to recall the human interactions we leave behind. Her series featuring simple red chairs and stools is a display of relics from a series of human interaction that took place. The event that brought us and this inanimate object together (a concert in the park, a child’s birthday party) has faded with time, leaving chairs casually strewn about the landscape as the sole indication of the gathering. Similarly, her abstract works in the exhibition evoke distant emotional recollections of her native Acadian culture and it’s colony that was founded on Canada’s east coast.

What We Leave Behind runs through October 30th, 2010. The Project space is located in the Pierce School Lofts at 1375 Maryland Avenue, NE, in the H Street Arts and Entertainment District. Hours for the Project are:

Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 1-7pm
Tuesday and Thursday: 1-4pm
Saturdays: 11am -2pm