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Community Corner

Visual Arts Center Premieres New Exhibit

New Tales for Our Age is an emerging artists exhibit that challenges stereotypes of contemporary art.

The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey hosted an opening reception Friday night for its latest exhibit New Tales for our Age. The combination of pieces in this series, which includes works from 10 New York and New Jersey area artists, prove that the telling of a story need not solely rely on words.

The numerous artworks that currently fill the main gallery and lower level feature an extensive range of media and techniques in order to create new ways of telling a tale and exploring contemporary issues.

Although there are many sides to the theme of “new tales,” several artists draw on the motifs and concepts of the classic fairy tale, reworking the genre to fit into a modern age. Roxanne Wolańczyk, a New York City based artist, uses digital technology to illustrate scenes that follow the struggles of a princess character managing a career and the responsibilities of motherhood in works from her Princess Series.

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Featured artists Aliza Augustine and Eun-Ha Paek also reinterpret the fairytale by creating artwork that incorporates a haunting side of experience and imagination and exposes modern female gender themes.

In her series Is it Safe?, Augustine achieves this through a variety of black and white photographs and still scenes created by posing dolls and dollhouse items.

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Alternatively, Paek uses digital animation coupled with painting in Hunger Like the Wolf, a piece inspired by the book Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow. Paek has produced animation for companies such as Nike Asia and her works have been screened at venues including Comedy Central and Sundance Online Film Festival.

The Columbian artist Alexis Duque employs similar fantasy motifs which initially attract his viewers, but the realities of his paintings actually uncover current social and political matters, including those dealing with poverty. Duque, whose artwork has had international exposure, currently lives and works in New York City.

Yukiko Nakashima draws on narratives based in childhood and adolescent memories. She creatively employs fabric, paint, and collected materials to communicate these recollections to the viewer in new ways. Her work Group Mentality, a freestanding fabric sculpture, is a comment on female adolescence and the pressures of trying to fit in while Red Shoes explores the limits and expressions of feelings and emotions within the human body.

Michelle Provenzano tells a story by depicting fantastic creatures and unexpected objects which the viewer can observe and experience as they intermingle in her drawings.

In one interactive piece called Magnetic Slips, viewers are encouraged to rearrange her creatures on an oversized magnetic Venn Disagram, placing them into categories entitled “Us” and “Them.”

Artists in this unique series also draw on comics and graphic novels to weave modern tales. Kevin Darmanie’s comic images have no definitive beginning or end and follow the character Kedar, the artist’s alter ego. The artist, who grew up on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, creates illustrations that wrestle with contemporary cultural, artistic, and philosophical concerns.

In a similar style, Gaku Tsutaja implements a storyboard format to create a narrative reminiscent of Japanese comics, often incorporating themes of death, fear, and uncertainty. These themes are especially evident in her 18 x 8 foot painting titled Extreme Prelude where observers will find figures in permanent struggle, affected by images of fire, and running from an unknown threat.

The characters in Alexander Kukai Shinohara’s paintings, drawings, and assembled pieces reflect the modern urban culture of New York City and social issues dealing with conformity. He uses written words and language on his canvases but also creates a story through the scenes and figures with which he places them. Shinohara comes from a family of artists, as both his mother and father have been recognized for their artwork in Japan and The United States.

In an unexpected art piece, Ravikumar Kashi, who is currently based out of Inida, plays with the idea of the printed book by creating one out of plaster with pages that cannot be turned. The result of his two displayed works, PushPush and Details Inside, provide a comment regarding narrative and its connection to the ways humans interact with words and images.

The current exhibit, which contains more than 50 works of emerging artists, was curated by Midori Yoshimoto, Ph.D., New Jersey City University and Aileen June Wang, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University and The Behrend College.

New Tales for Our Age will remain on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey until November 27 where viewers can discover the relevance of narrative in the world of contemporary art through the creations of these ten artists.

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