Rochester

New exhibits open at PCCA

» Click on image to view full size « Photo provided Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman’s sculpture series, “Portraits of a Soul” will be featured in the main gallery of the PCCA along with work from three other artists. Photo provided Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman’s sculpture series, “Portraits of a Soul” will be featured in the main gallery of the PCCA along with work from three other artists.

ROCHESTER — Two new exhibits opened at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts last weekend.

“Four: Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman, Lynn Galbreath, Cristin Richard and Sioux Trujillo” and “Kyohei Abe: Minimal Landscapes” both will be on display at the PCCA, 407 Pine St., through Feb. 17.

Exhibition Director Mary Fortuna said the PCCA is turning its main gallery upstairs over to four artists who work in different media, with distinctive, personal approaches to their respective materials for the group show, “Four.”

“The first person we saw in that show was Evelyn Bachorski-Bowman … and we immediately started looking for other artists whose work would really complement what she was doing without overpowering it. We didn’t want to put it with something that was too similar; we wanted to make sure it was in a nice, balanced show,” she said.

The show was really put together by intuition and visual interest, according to Fortuna.

“We weren’t thinking about a theme or a common idea that they were pursing. We really were just thinking about really starting from just the look and the emotional feel of the work,” she said.

Milford resident Bachorski-Bowman’s sculpture series, “Portraits of a Soul” — a group of emotive sculptures that use raw, textured plaster and encaustic to depict the emotional state of her subject — is on display as part of the show.

Bachorski-Bowman said the series is a group of emotive portraits of her “mentally challenged brother.”

“They are figurative pieces, most of which that are suspended, from the ceiling, so the figures are not really standing on their own. They are very symbolic in the fact that he is very dependent. He is also nonverbal, so the pieces have a certain angst about them, about the inability to communicate,” Bachorski-Bowman said. “The interesting thing about them is that’s my story, and how they came about, but you don’t have to know my brother and my experience to understand this feeling of helplessness. There are things that people can relate to, and you don’t even have to know my story — that’s the key about them.”

Galbreath, of Bloomfield Hills, presents drawings from two bodies of work for the exhibition — “Eccentric Objects,” an ongoing series of mixed media drawings on mylar, set within 3-D constructions, and “Talk,” a series that utilizes graphite, gold leaf and metallic markers on paper, with associated found objects. Both series reference humanitarian and social issues the artist is concerned with, Fortuna added.

Richard, of Detroit, works primarily with hog and sheep casings, creating wearable sculptures and installations that draw on her interest in fashion and the body. Fortuna said her translucent dress sculptures manage a fine balance between tough and ethereal, eerie and graceful. In discussing her work, Richard said in a statement, “the skin-like medium becomes a loaded metaphor, which speaks to the human condition, while creating an underlying narrative on materialism and over indulgence.”

Trujillo, of Detroit, brings a fiber-based installation that incorporates multi-colored threads, felt and fiber objects to the show. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the College for Creative Studies and has worked in the Detroit art community for 13 years as an artist and administrator.

PCCA also welcomed noted Detroit-area photographer Kyohei Abe for a solo show in its first floor gallery.

For this show of minimal landscapes, Fortuna said Abe draws on his background in architecture, along with his photographic skills. Abe says he tends to build compositions that are clean, well ordered, and simple in content and composition. He said in a statement that the works in this series present “uncluttered, dreamlike environments composed of simple formal elements,” and there is “an implied narrative whose meaning seems just beyond our grasp.”

Fortuna said Abe has been around for a long time, and is a well known and well-loved in the area and all over the country.

“He is a very solid photographer, and his work here draws on his interest in architecture, in that it’s very clean and very structured and very carefully composed. He did include a couple of still lifes, but it’s primarily these little imaginary landscapes with very few elements and very limited color. It’s just interesting to see the kind of tensions he can pull out of these really simple elements, just in how he composes and arranges things, and how he shoots and prints them. They are very beautifully made prints,” she said.

Admission to the exhibits is free and open to the public. For more information, call the PCCA at (248) 651-4119 or visit www.pccart.org.