Selections: Works from Fine Arts Faculty

Selections: Works from Fine Arts Faculty

September 5–December 18, 2017
Reception, Tuesday October 3, 5–6:30 PM

Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 9:30 AM–4:30 PM

Selections features a collection of paintings from five faculty members in Pratt’s Fine Arts Department: Bill Carroll, Joe Fyfe, Jen Mazza, John O’Connor, and Jason Stopa.

There will be an artist’s reception on October 3, from 5–6:30 PM in the President’s Office Gallery, located on the first floor of the Main Building on Pratt’s Brooklyn Campus. Light refreshments will be served.

Selections will be on view through December 18, 2017.

FACULTY BIOS
Bill Carroll’s RED series are silhouettes of single buildings, derived from a decade’s worth of sketches that he composed while hiking through New York City. The paintings are concentrated images, pared down to the most essential visual information, organized and numbered. They capture the weight and presence of each building’s unique personality. Carroll is the Program Director of the Studio Program at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. He has been involved with the New York art world for more than 25 years; prior positions include Dia Art Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Gallery Director for Charles Cowles Gallery and Elizabeth Harris Gallery. He has lectured at the New York Foundation for the Arts, Bard College­­­­­­­, Cranbrook Academy of Art, F.I.T., New York University and School of Visual Arts. He received his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute and M.F.A. from Queens College.

Joe Fyfe is a painter and art critic, based in New York City. His paintings are deceptively simple. Using acrylic paint on primed burlap and jute, he limits his palette to a few colors in each work. His works have been exhibited in places as diverse as New York City, Philadelphia, Paris, and Hanoi. He was awarded a 2002 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and has received a Fu­­lbright Fellowship in addition to fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and MacDowell colonies. He received his B.F.A. from the University of the Arts.

Jen Mazza’s recent paintings translate between the digital/machine-made and the artist-made. She engages with the idea that a painting is a machine: both object and system, at once receptive and productive. In each painting there is an apparent dualism between the hand and the machine: from her painterly negotiation of traces of the machine, the flaws in the images she references, to the tight brushwork in the utility patterns turned wall-paper. Significant awards include residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Jentel Foundation. Mazza received her B.A. in Visual Art and Spanish Literature from Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and an M.F.A. in Visual Art from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

John O’Connor develops his drawings through idiosyncratic systems, making visual what is ordinarily invisible. He begins each drawing with a subject of interest and through haphazard research collects data and begins to experiment with it. He completes one part of the drawing, responds to what he’s put down in a Rube Goldbergian way, and continues until the drawing is complete. Chance is an important element of the process, eliminating a purely aesthetic and personal approach. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, and is represented by Pierogi Gallery, New York.

Jason Stopa is a painter and writer who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been reviewed in BlackBook and Interview Magazine. Stopa is a contributing writer to Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Whitewall Magazine. He received his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 2010.