Wind by Laurel Lukaszewski. Courtesy of the artist..
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10 from 5pm to 8pm
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Artist’s Talk: Saturday, October 8 at 2pm
Curated by Jennifer Lindsay, Other Worlds of Imagination brings together two sculptors, Laurel Lukaszewski and Joseph A. Corcoran to create site-specific and collaborative installations as well as new sculptures for the Brentwood Arts Exchange.
Lukaszewski’s hand-built and extruded sculptural elements demonstrate a wholly contemporary perspective on Japan’s ageless aesthetic influence. These forms range from abstract and spontaneous to exacting and naturalistically detailed. The unglazed black, white, or delicately hand-tinted clays she favors ground her spontaneous compositions with a graphic, almost documentary quality. In the spare and elegant surface details that make each of her forms uniquely evocative, and in the contemplative spaces she creates from her arrangements, Lukaszewski transfixes, preserves, and displays experiences and observations at the moment of their utmost intensity and poignancy.
A master of the transmission and diffusion of light through glass, Corcoran blends clear and opaque glass to create complex color effects that can be brilliant and singing as well as subtle and mysterious. Guiding the blown glass as it reacts with the air during the cooling process, and forming it into his signature sensuous, organic shapes, Corcoran then assembles spectacular systems of one-of-a- kind elements delicately balanced on one another, sometimes supported by sculptural, hand- forged armatures. Grounded in the language of organic abstraction, his sculptures suggest a complex, evolving, and interdependent biology – at once familiar and strange – dynamic, yet premised on shifting definitions of fragility and strength.
The works on view, from objects to installations, reveal how both artists allow the essential properties and even the unpredictable characteristics of ceramics and glass to guide their synthesis of form, selection, arrangement, and narrative content in the expression of the whole.
Brentwood Arts Exchange is the main gallery at the Gateway Arts Center located at 3901 Rhode Island Ave, Brentwood, MD. For more information call 301-277-2386 or visit arts.pgparks.com.
