The next Side By Each exhibition series at Starlight Studio and Art Gallery features a couple of “collecting” artists – Marc Tomko (lead image), and Starlight artist Alison Mantione. The work of artists Ray Barret and Larell Potter, and Debbie Bowers, will also be on display at the exhibit, which opens on Friday, March 16. Kyle Butler is the lead curator of the exhibition series. Butler is working with Starlight staff to exhibit works by Starlight artists, as well as visiting artists. The exhibit will be on view through mid April.
“The work of two artists (Tomko and Mantione) who each collect for reasons both habitual and creative,” says Butler, “Alison Mantione collects from the world around her seemingly indiscriminately: broken jewelry, discarded packaging, pins, bottle caps, a damaged license plate, broken bike parts, and more, all from the proverbial discard bin of gutters, yards and sidewalks. The found objects are organized by date-discovered, placed in bags or other containers, and labeled in Mantione’s idiosyncratic handwriting that is as much flourish as it is text.
“Marc Tomko’s collecting practice is more introspective: keeping whatever objects, tools, and ephemera that have played a role in his life and occupy a space in his psyche. Tomko has a similarly low threshold as Mantione for what constitutes a worthwhile object: cheap toys, weird housewares, impulsive sculptures, remnants of previous creative projects, and so on. But his collecting has more to do with archiving the strange paper trail (object trail?) of his past and analyzing aesthetic and psychological tendencies through the objects. A small series of these objects will be exhibited along a line of rotating platforms. Tomko’s inquisitiveness toward his own psyche also compels him to make impulsive drawings and paintings where the resultant scrawl is regarded more as a record of a particular moment than it is a static artwork. Tomko will exhibit some of these 2D works, but as videos shot from his own vantage point as he rummages through them and picks out strange details.”
Starlight Studio presents Tomko, Mantione Collections
Friday, March 16, 2018
6- 8 PM
Starlight Gallery, 340 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202
The event is free to the public
For more information, visit the Starlight website at www.starlightstudio.org.