RSS
Home
Messages in paint and print at Renaissance Court Gallery
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Flight, Pat Lagger, photo courtesy of online profile at Chicago Artists Coalition
The works of Pat Lagger and Nancy Staszak are currently on exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center’s own Renaissance Court Gallery. This colorful and diverse selection of works, gathered under the theme “Messages” range from paintings to traditional printmaking.
Working in oil on canvas and monoprints, Pat Lagger explores the patterns and graphic lines of butterfly wings. Pat’s butterflies are “metaphors for spiritual transformation”…and a study in the language of natural design.” The rich hues and seductive value of these thirty-six inch square works invite close inspection and meditative gazing. Lagger captures the glittery powder of the scales on a butterfly wing with her transparent glazes, layering, inscribing, sanding down and painting over. These works attain an ambiguity, referring obliquely to the mark making of man, suggesting Lagger’s own “alternate conceit” that perhaps our marks of language occurred to early man through the lines in a butterfly wing.
Lagger’s work can be found on the Chicago Artist’s Coalition web gallery, at www.caconline.org/artist.asp
Insert photo caption or credit here
Nancy Staszak’s work ranges through a variety of printmaking options, including woodcuts with Chine colle, wood intaglio/collagraphs, and clay monotype. The expressive lines and bold colors of Staszak’s study of the urban landscape invite the viewer to see connections. Nancy is “fascinated with the utility poles, power lines and cellular towers so omnipresent in our environment…look[ing] as though they have been tossed by some storm and suddenly frozen fast along our streets.” Marked by the strong lines and ultimately contradictory juxtapositions of human mythic archetypes with the infrastructural lines of the energy grid that supports our modern technology, Staszak asks us to see the two levels of our existence, physical and inner realms. Involving a strong geometric element, “If you look up from any crossroads, the apparent intersections of multiple wires frame diamonds and skewed quadrilaterals in the sky,” Nancy’s prints explore two realms. The messages of spirit and human growth occur in works such as Ascending, where the eye moves through three images. The first is a turtle, from there we visually pass through a building from our urban landscape, arriving finally at the top image, a simplified mandala.
Crows 6/10, Nancy Staszak, photo courtesy of Lisle School District
Staszak’s work can be found at www.kaneland.org/shared/fineartsfestival/artists.html& through the school where she teaches third through fifth grade art, Tate Woods
www.lisle.dupage.k12.il.us/vnews/display.v/SEC/Schiesher%7CArt
The Renaissance Court Art Gallery is a part of Chicago Department on Aging, and is located in the Cultural Center building at 77 E. Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois. This exhibit is free and open to the public.
For information about the Cultural Center egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalContentItemAction.do
For more information about programs with the Department on Aging
egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalDeptCategoryAction.do
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
