Born in 1994 in Tucson, Arizona, Bowen Schmitt began developing his artistic practice from an early age and pursued an arts-focused education at Rogers CAPA middle and high school in downtown Pittsburgh. Bowen’s work is heavily influenced by experiences of space and time, having moved around constantly as a child and traveling extensively internationally, his work deals directly with his environment and everyday experiences. Bowen received a Bachelors of Fine Art from Tyler School of Art with a focus in Sculpture in 2016. During his time at Tyler, Bowen distilled his vision of work into paintings, sculptures, and video that depicted the sublime, feelings of escape, distance, and transformation, pulling references from past experience and childhood.
Bowen has shown work widely within the Philadelphia art community, at Goldilocks Gallery, Great Far Beyond, and Vox Populi, and was represented internationally by TAG Roma Gallery in Rome, Italy. He has an upcoming solo show at Kitchen Table Gallery, Philadelphia, this June.
In between his time in school, Bowen opened and now directs an art gallery in Philadelphia, PA called Great Far Beyond, whose mission is to showcase and represent young emergent artists in a project space setting. Since opening the Gallery in November, 2015, Great Far Beyond has produced eighteen shows and shown over forty artists from Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New York. Since graduating, Bowen lives in Philadelphia, PA and has focused his time on directing Great Far Beyond, creating work and developing his personal artistic practice, and supporting the artist community in Philadelphia.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrtransistor/sets/72157676221707534
http://sofyamirvis.com
Terrill Warrenburg is an interdisciplinary artist and graphic designer living in Philadelphia. She works full time at Locks Gallery and is a curator at Little Berlin, an artist collective in Kensington. Terrill is interested in incorporating as many mistakes as possible into her artistic practice. Exploring the relationship between digital manipulation and delicate yet deliberate hand drawn mark-making, Terrill never considers her work complete and returns to her “paintings” at any time. Terrill graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with her B.A. in Fine Arts with \ Art History and French minors
http://www.terrillwarrenburg.com/artwork
Kyle Triplett, originally from Spearfish, South Dakota, is a ceramic and digital media installation artist based in Ruston, Louisiana. Triplett earned his BFA in Ceramics from Southeast Missouri State University in 2008, completed Post-Baccalaureate Studies at Louisiana State University in 2009, and received his MFA in Ceramics from Ohio University in 2013. Currently, Triplett serves as Assistant Professor of Studio Art within the School of Design at Louisiana Tech University where his teaching practice focuses on ceramics, sculpture and digital fabrication. Triplett’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including exhibitions as part of the National Council on the Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) and the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemet, Hungary.
My work explores elements of constructing a sense of place through the layering, mediation, and remediation of information. This in turn opens questions of the natural and artificial experience of landscape, the picturesque, and the romantic notions of the sublime. Within my work, place exists as an idealized space, a space where infrastructure and architecture are stripped away, replaced by my own structures of performance and intended objects. I am interested in the visual elements of the natural world, those that act as bookends for our experiences with sky and ground. Ultimately, I wish the work to induce a form of transportative experience; for the viewer to be placed at the axis point of a vast panorama of nostalgia and expectation, the past and future, distance and adjacency, longing and satisfaction.
Since 2013, The Philadelphia Podcast Festival (PPF) has sought to entertain and educate using the digital medium of podcasting. From July 14-23, 2017, more than 55 live podcast recordings will be happening at 8 venues throughout Philadelphia. PPF 2017 features 45+ local podcasts as well as Sawbones, Call Your Girlfriend, The Flop House, and Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.
Wait, what's a podcast??
Oh, right. Good question. So the short version is: a podcast is a bit like a radio show that you download from the internet. A lot of podcasters use them purely to entertain people but any business, organization, or individual can use a podcast to share information. This keeps their fans, customers, members, or friends updated on what they’re up to. You can use it to broadcast any message you want into the world. Podcasts are an excellent example of independent media.
Audio is recorded, posted online, and retrieved on demand by listeners. Some folks listen to podcasts at their computers, others put them on an mp3 player and listen to them while doing other things (jogging, driving, etc.). If you listen to someone's podcast regularly and become a fan, sometimes it's fun to go meet them in person and see their show live. Hence, PPF. Come on out, it's fun.
http://www.phillypodfest.com
The title of this exhibition is a homage to two famous works--AaronDouglaspainting, uilding More Stately Mansion which links the labor history of African American men and women with the foundation of great civilizations, and the Chambered Nautilus, a poem by Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Sr. that uses the imagery of the mansion to represent the “self” and the nautilus as a noble creature that symbolizes continual growth and therefore continual re-building of the “self.”
These works are a jumping off point for two ideas. First, The United States owes their iconic structures, infrastructure, and heritage to the contributions of people who had little to no power in an imbalanced power structure just as many of the wealthy elite, particularly of the gilded age, owe their station in life to this same power structure. Second, those of us that create, have an uncanny ability to create “something from nothing”. Since the nature of art making requires constant self examination and evolution of skill and concept, we are in many respects, a symbol for perpetual growth just as the nautilus is for Holmes.
In response to the discussion of the class divide that has been at the forefront of political debate, ore Stately Mansion will harken back to a historical symbol of wealth inequality, the gilded age of the 1800s and 1900s. This was a time when great American mansions were built, largely on the backs of slave, non unionized, and/or new immigrant laborers. These mansions have continued to be highly valued in today's society as beacons of the American Dream. Asking artists to transform the gallery space into a rendition of these iconic structures through interactive work made from free materials is a way of investigating the artist’s role in the class divide, the role of the class divide in the exclusionary stigma in the arts, and the value system of the American dream.
The following is a list of visual artists selected to make interactive work for this exhibition based on proposals they submitted in November, 2016: Tiernan Alexander, Jim Dessicino, Stephan Dobosh, Siri Langone, Lauren McCarty, Harry Sanchez, Dena Shottenkirk, Steven Earl Weber, and Zach Zecha.
