Exhibitions

COALESCENCE
Senior Thesis Exhibits | Class of 2023
On Display: May 2-6, 2023
Opening Reception: May 6, 4 p.m., Barrington Center for the Arts 

Each spring Gordon College Visual Arts presents senior exhibits in the Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts. Senior art majors develop a body of work and a personal artistic direction culminating in a gallery exhibit their final semester. Each senior chooses the media and conceptual thematic center of this work while meeting weekly with a faculty mentor and fellow senior artists. 

Ordinary Saints
On Display: August 2022–October 2022
Reception: Homecoming Weekend 

Paintings by Bruce Herman for a collaboration with poet Malcolm Guite and composer J. A. C. Redford. 
Part of Gordon College's 2022 Homecoming.

About the Exhibition: After many years of working with the human figure in an implicit narrative context, I decided to try to paint particular persons (instead of “types” or generalized figures that are subservient to the narrative). The traditional posed portrait was not what I was after; rather, I wanted to make an image that seemed to mediate the “real presence” of the person (as opposed to an idealized or flattering portrayal). When I completed the painting of my father, I suddenly remembered my childhood desire as a young artist: to make a painting of a person that “felt” like them even more than simply reproducing a likeness. I’ve included a couple of formal portrait commissions I’ve done for comparison. The requirements of formal institutional portraiture were a challenge, but I believe that I managed, in spite of these constraints, to communicate something of the person there as well.

About Bruce Herman: Bruce Herman’s art has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and most major cities in the US and abroad in Italy, England, Israel, Japan and Hong Kong. Herman’s art is in many public and private art collections, including the Vatican Museums in Rome, Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts and Hammer Museum Grunewald Print Collection in L.A. 

Herman’s art and writings are published in a 30-year retrospective in Through Your Eyes 2013, Eerdmans Books, Grand Rapids. His published essays are found in many print and online journals, including IMAGE, Comment, Books and Culture and many others. 

Herman has taught for three decades and curated over 100 exhibitions for Gordon College. He holds the endowed Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts at the school and is gallery director and art collection manager. 

Bruce Herman's Website
Instagram: @bruce.herman

Reflecting the Glory
On Display: October 2022–December 2022
Reception: October 29, 4 p.m.

Featuring new works in gold leaf by Sandra Bowden. 

About the Exhibition: I have come to see that my work as an artist is described best as seeking connections to our past. For over 50 years I have worked in a sequence of multiple series of paintings and prints related to archaeology findings, geological forms, early languages, musical scores, ancient illuminations and the history of art. Each of these areas of exploration has enhanced my appreciation for the great treasures from our shared past.

"Reflections of Glory" is my most recent work continuing this conversation of connections as a way to pay homage to the “Icons of Western Art.” This show highlights several gilded encaustic panels that recall many iconic paintings from art history. Their distinct shapes identify the historic work, but, because of their solid gold surface, allow the viewer to delight in the radiance of each panel while drawing on memory and imagination to fill in the forms.

Two multi-panel installations are featured in "Reflections of Glory." Forty encaustic gilded panels and forty black panels that are incised with text become 40 Days/40 Nights. Another multipanel work has 100 5”x 5” gilded squares and is entitled One Hundred Percent.

To complement the wall-mounted paintings, several artists' books provide a rich, three-dimensional dialog between the works. I have fixed open actual books, allowing the open face of the book to be the painted surface—many incised with text.

Artists do not merely put on canvas what can be seen. They try to uncover something beyond the range of the eyes. I believe that art is a means to illuminate both the interior life and the exterior world, both seen and unseen. I hope "Reflections of Glory" will lead those who see the exhibition beyond the edge of their consciousness into a place of splendor, wonder and transcendence.

About Sandra Bowden: Visual artist Sandra Bowden has been interpreting Scripture and her own spiritual walk through mixed media for more than 40 years. She has been acclaimed as one of the most unique, impressive and inspiring Christian artists in America. Bowden’s work has been featured in books, magazines and gallery shows across the United States, Canada, Italy and Jerusalem.

Her work fuses the vivid yet traditional imagery of the Old Testament—stone tablets and artifacts, Hebrew inscriptions, architectural depictions—with images of Christ’s passion, important music scores and God’s natural creations. She has issued several series of artworks over the years: crucifixion scenes, artistic use of text and color, new interpretations of classic religious artwork, even altered books with applied textures and hues. God’s grandeur and creativity shine through in each piece of her art.

“My Christian faith has been the driving force behind my art,” Bowden says. “I look at the making of a piece of art as a kind of doxology, a prayer or conversation with God. I don’t mean this in any mystical way, but my ideas come out of my theology and thoughts about God. I am something of a theologian, but one who translates those interpretations into visual form.”

Sandra Bowden's Website

Winter Exhibition 2023
On Display: January 20, 2023–March 3, 2023
Reception: January 20, 4 p.m., Barrington Center for the Arts

Featuring new mixed media and 3-D works by David Kasparek.

About the Exhibition: We understand our physical world through our senses. Our bodies collect experiences to shape how we understand the world around us. Media, technology and innovation extend our senses, propelling us forward in knowledge and understanding beyond the limits of what our senses can discern on their own. The metaphor of extension mythologizes and promotes what we mostly celebrate as “progress”—a neverending journey of expansion in human achievement. 

But what if the metaphor was inverted to see our senses, and our human attempts to extend our senses, as ultimately limited? This new way of conceptualizing frames our five human senses as a set of walls—a container obscuring realities beyond what even our enhanced physical senses can grasp on their own. My work for this exhibit is an exploration of this opposing metaphor of limitation. 

I titled each of the five walled forms/images in this body of work “Macroscopes.” Unlike a microscope that extends inward into the physical world, a Macroscope expands outward to investigate a larger reality not confined within the cell of our senses. 

Each Macroscope is meant to be an invitation to the viewer to see themselves in a cell that is physically limited but imaginatively expansive. By understanding our senses as limited, we ironically can imagine a transcendent reality that could exist outside our limitations. This reality can penetrate and radiate within the midst or our human container if we are willing and open to discern it and, most importantly, rely on one of our most intrinsically human senses—imagine it. 

About David Kasparek: David is a designer, artist and an associate professor of graphic design at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. He received his Master of Graphic Design (MGD) from the College of Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.

David’s ongoing personal and client-based work, as well as his teaching, focuses on creating meaningful visual form that communicates, shapes or creates content in compelling ways (through various media and processes).

His work has appeared in national and international publications such as Print Magazine, Design: Type: A Seductive Collection of Alluring Type Designs (Rockport), Design for Special Events: 500 of the Best Logos, Invitations, and Graphics (Rockport), The Big Book of Graphic Design (Collins Design), Graphic Design and Religion (GIA), Print Magazine, Typography 3: Global Vision (Duncan Baird Publishers) and Two-Color Graphics (Rockport).

He has exhibited his work at various venues, including Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA; Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA; and Biola University in La Mirada, CA (a joint exhibition with painter Daniel Finch).

David Kasparek's Website
Instagram: @d_kasparek
 

Student Exhibitions 
Findings 2023 
On Display: January 28, 2023–February 18, 2023
Opening Reception: January 28, 4 p.m., Barrington Center for the Arts

A mentor/mentee exhibition by current Gordon College art majors and art alumni.