Teaching Gallery Opens Semester with Mixed Media Exhibit by Sarah Walko, NYC Artist
January 11, 2017
The Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College announces So That I Might Speak to You of Your Magnificence, an exhibition of sculpture, installation and drawings by Brooklyn artist Sarah Walko, on view Feb. 2 through March 4, 2017. The Teaching Gallery is located on the ground floor of the Administration Building on the Troy campus.
Walko will discuss her work on Thursday, Feb. 2 from 3 to 4 p.m. in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center Auditorium, with a reception following from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Teaching Gallery. Both events are free and open to the public.
Through sculpture, drawing and installation, Walko explores the mythic possibilities of objects, images and imagination. The artist mines the unknowable space between her combined materials for new possibilities of narrative, essence and reality. Using such disparate found materials as animal bones, bird nests, gems, flora, texts and test tubes, Walko distills their enigmatic qualities through juxtapositions that establish unexpected tableaux or situations. As ancient alchemists sought in their proto-scientific experiments a physical manifestation for intangible transitions of spirit and essence, Walko funnels these new relationships between objects to evoke the irrational and the illusory much as a shaman unites good and evil or consciousness and physical existence.
Through these concoctions and micro-still-lives conjured from the crystals and new-age musings of chemistry and hard science, Walko says she seeks to create "experiences that allow one's perceptions to shift from the historical, to the narrative, to the scientific, to the alchemical and to the magical. The work is a call to look closer and see larger how interconnected we all are and to all things."
Walko holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. from the Savannah (Georgia) College of Art and Design. Her recent exhibitions include Earth Revisited, Film and Video, an exhibition on the Manhattan Bridge (DUMBO, Brooklyn); To Be Everything, Silo Gallery (New Milford, CT); Audubon and the Avian Experience, Marietta College (Marietta, OH); Ley Lines, University of Wyoming Art Museum, (Laramie, WY); Raising the Temperature, Queens Museum of Art (Queens), and You and I Do Not Come Lightly to the Blank Page, Roger Williams University (Bristol, RI). She has held residencies at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York City), I-Park Foundation (East Haddam, CT) and served as a teacher, lecturer or panelist at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York City); Endicott College (Beverly, MA); Kansas City Art Institute (Kansas City, MO); University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Walko is the director of Education and Community Engagement at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Summit, NJ.
Teaching Gallery exhibitions are supported by the Department of Fine Arts, Theatre Arts and Digital Media with assistance from the Cultural Affairs Program. All exhibitions are installed and staffed by students in Gallery Management classes.
Teaching Gallery hours
Tuesday, Thursday and Friday: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Wednesday: 1 to 7 p.m.
Saturday: noon to 4 p.m.
Sunday and Monday: closed
Directions and more information: www.hvcc.edu/teachinggallery
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Founded in 1953, Hudson Valley Community College offers more than 85 associate degree and certificate programs in four schools: Business; Engineering and Industrial Technologies; Health Sciences; and Liberal Arts and Sciences; and an Educational Opportunity Center for academic and career training. One of 30 community colleges in the State University of New York system, it has an enrollment of nearly 11,500 students, and is known as a leader in distance learning initiatives and workforce training. Hudson Valley has more than 75,000 alumni.