New Media Art
October 3 – November 1, 2018
Presented at University Place Gallery, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge MA
A Small Group Show featuring Wally Gilbert, Gloria King Merritt and Dorothy Amore Pilla
Events
Opening Reception | October 4, 6-8pm
Artist Talk | October 11, 6:30-7:30pm
About the Exhibition |
This exhibition is composed of three digital new media fine artists, using a variety of techniques to interact with technology in their creative process.
“Every generation invents a new artistic technique or medium to create new ways to express the concepts, thoughts, and feelings of the age. Just as the painter’s brush is an extension of their hand, so the computer is the extension of the creative mind.” Gloria King Merritt, Artist
About Wally Gilbert | Digital artist Wally Gilbert had a full career as a Molecular Biologist. Awarded a Nobel Prize in 1980 for discovering a rapid DNA sequencing method, he also co-founded Myriad Genetics and Biogen. Wally Gilbert is a professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Since the early 2000’s, he has been creating visual art, amplifying the information in digital photographs using computers, enhancing and transforming the lines and colors into a new and vibrant art form.
“Years ago, I discovered that I could make large prints from images taken with a small digital camera and that these prints carried an emotional and aesthetic impact. It was then that I began making digital images as art.”
Works in this exhibition are printed directly onto the surface of aluminum with a high gloss laminate that enhances the intensity of the colors.
About Gloria King Merritt | Gloria King Merritt trained in a variety of traditional fine art techniques and media, through a series of apprenticeships, including drawing, painting, metal, resin, color theory, and film. Her teachers encouraged a sound classical education, as well as experimentation beyond the boundaries of tradition.
In 1976 she was introduced to digital art through her teacher, Nathaniel Jacobson, a Yale educated Color Theorist and research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. In 1980, she worked in video as Art Director at the CBS affiliate broadcast television station in Boston. By 1985, she was working professionally with cutting- edge art involving technology. By 2011, she was working exclusively as a digital and new media artist, embracing technology that compliments and enhances the creative process, and blurs the edge between traditional media.
Digital painting is painting with light, on back-lit screen, forming layers of varying transparency, and creating a virtual three dimensional image. When the layers are merged, and the image is complete, it is translated to a final substrate, such as resin, metal, canvas or paper, using archival pigments suspended in a medium. This allows the digital painting to be viewed within a contemplative personal space or gallery.
About Dorothy Amore Pilla | Dorothy Pilla was influenced by her experience as a print maker, painter and creator of non- traditional quilts, reflected in the layering and multiple images in her digital art on metal.
The medium allows for a plasticity of the images central to her work.
“My work, printed on aluminum, represents not what was actually seen, but rather impressions of what I saw. My images speak to energies that power nature and the endurance of living things. Each image starts with a simple “snapshot,” a moment in time encountered and captured. Photography is the medium that brings to life imaginings that are fueled by encounters I have with commonplace things. I go beyond representation of what actually was and visually speculate on what might have been. And so I deconstruct and transform reality from mundane representation to complex images that embody the essence of the subject”
Dorothy was previously Director of the Art Education Program for Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts which is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was also the curriculum consultant for Massachusetts Department of Education, serving as the Chair for the Integrated Curriculum Development Committee responsible for the development of the Boston Arts Academy.
