ReCollect:

The Burgeoning GoggleWorks Museum Collection

Cohen Gallery East,

GoggleWorks Center for the Arts

Opening: Saturday, August 15, 2020

Since 2016, GoggleWorks Center for the Arts has welcomed dynamic artists to make work in its studios over a multi-week period, taking up residence in downtown Reading, PA. Each year, these experiences result in creative connections with the local community and culminate with an exhibition of objects, media, and installations made over the course of the residency. Works on view in this exhibition are selections donated from these resident artists to the nonprofit’s fledgling museum collection.

The nine artists who participated over that time represent five different countries. The artwork comprises a wide variety and combination of materials and disciplines, often made in more than one GoggleWorks studio: stained glass, acrylic and watercolor paint, hand-built and thrown clay, sign-painting, assemblage, installation, multi-media, 2D printmaking, and 3D printing.

If the collection is broad in scope, it is yet narrow in context. GoggleWorks invites artists who are each dedicated to unified goals: expanding artistic boundaries, engaging the local community, collaborating with other artists and makers, and experimenting across materials or disciplines. The work exhibited in this show explores the intersection of high-quality, established and emerging international artists with the unique character of the GoggleWorks creative community.

In addition to the works on view in the Cohen Gallery East, some works from the collection are permanently installed as public art throughout the campus. Inquire with the GoggleWorks staff to visit these, including a giant wood carved totem pole, an enormous assemblage of fish, a 40-foot-wide glass mosaic, hand-painted signs, and a stained glass panel reimagining Alice in Wonderland.

GW Summer Artist-In-Residency

The Summer Residency Program at GoggleWorks is a 10-week appointment designed to introduce new energy and interests into the GoggleWorks community with an emphasis on facilitating experimentation and cross-disciplinary projects. Every summer GoggleWorks selects three resident artists. Artist applicants can select between a portfolio or project based application. Residents should be self-motivated and enthusiastic, dedicated to their artwork, and enjoy working with other people in a community studio setting.

Bartosz Beda

I like to explore political issues in my work. These issues often expose themselves in hidden meanings. Art has often educated and opened eyes to social and political issues. I want to believe that my paintings reveal on the canvas a kind of intellectualizing of the internal human conflict of reality and hope, and of my conflict as well. I would hope that they draw the viewer into a consideration of fear, love, anguish, and other human emotions in conflict, and because the conflict is ongoing, there can be no successful end to the search for comfort, no matter how much we might hope for it. Ultimately, the futility of the search is an absurdity, or so I think these paintings discover. Who we essentially are in the world is not who we would be. Always the conflict. I feel it when I paint.

I would like to focus my work on the issues of the immigration in European countries that has been allowed since 2005, as well as the immigration of Mexicans trying to enter the United States illegally. The work I plan to make will symbolize their unheard voices. I like to explore political issues in my painting. These issues often expose themselves in hidden meanings. Art has often educated and opened eyes to social and political issues. I hope my paintings can do the same.

Bartosz Beda

Untitled, Part I

oil on canvas

2018

Bartosz Beda

Untitled, Part II

oil on canvas

2018

Dan Gabber

Dan reimagines historically Jewish objects through the use of digital fabrication techniques. By using techniques, such as 3D printing and laser cutting, to create vessels a dialogue is developed between the historical sources and modern technology. This imparts conceptual layers of understanding to tools that are seen as “cutting edge”.

"My work focuses on showing that 21st century technology and ceramic art are not mutually exclusive. Methods of rapid prototyping are closely associated with cutting edge technology and are assumed to be opposite of or have no to relation to art. However, my digitally fabricated objects prove the opposite."

Dan Gabber

Jar

porcelain, plastic

2019

Mahsa Biglow

I am from Iran, the country that for the last forty years (after the 1979 Islamic Revolution) has been defined by its distorted, manipulated, and extremist identity depicted by western media. I moved here about two years ago to pursue an MFA degree. Through my practice, I translate every day and banal encounters with people and places into a means of speaking about my past traumas, memories, and dreams. In my country, everything is related to politics. The politicians’ decisions that may or may not result in more sanctions on Iran have a direct impact on people’s lives daily. It is almost impossible not to be political in Iran, keeping updated with the latest news is an essential survival skill since our basic needs are dependent on politics, from the price of groceries that fluctuates every day, to certain medicines that are not easy to find, to not being able to travel to most countries. Therefore, to me, the seventy’s overused phrase, ‘the personal is political, and the political is personal’ is a living reality where both personal and political is chaos.

I am interested in expanding the space between binaries through art: be it two countries in conflict or contradictory feelings. I believe art brings different shades of grays to this black and white time that we are existing in. My work pursues a gray space for ambiguity, to blur lines and borders. I explore the possibility of creating a shared space where the two very different ‘self’ and ‘the other’ can meet and co- exist. My practice is a means of understanding these intersections, to process and unpack my relationship to my country of origin, Iran, from a distance. It highlights the duality of beauty and the grotesque by glorifying the horrible face of reality in an exaggerated way.

Mahsa Biglow

You were all in black in my dream

photo collage, text

2019

"You were talking to me about how much

stronger you feel when you are vulnerable.

You were saying, wait, what were you saying?

Oh: you were saying how much you love

starring at the sun, so that you partially

go blind for a few seconds. So that you

can feel the ectastic state of being embodied.

You were considering wearing only black so you

can feel how it is to be colorless since black

absorbs all the colors."

Michael Siporin Levine

Using a mixture of observation and process, I create images with open-ended narratives, blending autobiography, history and invention. Personal experiences and human relationships I encounter on a day-to-day basis, provide the departure point for my work. By referencing recognizable and personal objects in a print, drawing, video or installation, I create imagery recalling a specific event. I want the viewer to get lost in the image by questioning what they are looking at, and then use recognition of objects, shapes, space, and figures, to interpret a possible narrative as they find connections to their own experiences. By using daily activities as a departure point for narrative, I find metaphor, symbolism, and absurdity in the mundane, using reality to inform imagination.

Through technique and process, I allow an initial idea to change, abstract, and evolve. Although I use drawing as the foundation of my studio practice, my interest in letting the process inform my decision-making, has led me to use various printmaking techniques, collage, as well as video, animation, and installation. Working with and against a technique encourages my experimentation with the medium, allowing a greater opportunity for chance and discovery to play a role. Whether it is manipulating a digital video, charcoal drawing, or relief printmaking, I embrace the honesty, rawness, and personal quality of my hand in the art-making process.

Michael Siporin Levine

Cassette Repairman, Study

oil and acrylic on cut plastic transparency, tape, epoxy, glass, wood

2019

Cassette Repair Man.mp4

Michael Siporin Levine

Cassette Repairman

video

2019

Karina Mago

Karina Mago is a Venezuelan artist currently traveling throughout the United States. Raised in Caracas, then promptly transplanted to South Florida, she crafts images that are inspired by an immigrant’s sense of displacement. She received her BFA from Florida State University with concentrations in ceramics, painting and printmaking.

“My work is informed by my experiences as a Venezuelan immigrant; one who, like many, has lost the ability to both physically and emotionally return to her place of origin because she no longer belongs there. An individual whose fate was sealed by a decaying government that has ignored the needs of its citizens, while feasting on unceremoniously earned riches. I make in order to cope with that sense of loss of place, but also to celebrate the fact that I was lucky enough to escape. I am currently infatuated with the word assemblage; A combination of objects that at first seem unrelated, yet when placed within “order” in a space, they create a functioning balance. Like memories themselves, these objects can exist singularly, but only when assembled together do they reveal a larger, layered narrative. I seek to fully integrate the mediums of print and ceramics within a body of work, creating a number of installations that will speak of not just my experiences and memories as an immigrant, but encompass the ideas of displaced, shifting, fractured landscapes and their effects on any individual as a whole.”