Compound Fragments

ALBANY CENTER GALLERY PRESENTS A DUAL-ARTIST EXHIBIT BY LOCAL ARTISTS AND EDUCATORS KATHERINE CHWAZIK AND TARA FRACALOSSI

Albany Center Gallery announces an upcoming two-person exhibition featuring the contemporary work of Katherine Chwazik and Tara Fracalossi. “Compound Fragments” will open July 8 and run through August 12 2016, with an Artist Reception from 5 to 8 p.m. July 15.

Chwazik and Fracalossi influence their Capital District communities through their roles as high school art teacher and fine arts professor, respectively. But while serving as art educators and bearing similarities as artists, they nonetheless create work that possesses two undeniably unique identities.

The pieces on display demonstrate the use of layers and repetition to create a whole image. Chwazik conjures depth, light and space by layering materials with a special color harmony. The repetition of imagery in Fracalossi’s work has a similar effect: Seemingly mundane images repeated, fragmented and precisely arranged over a large composition tell a story with a poetic flow in her pieces. One layer or image alone can create a completely different outcome if removed from the context of the work.

Together, these two artists show clearly the impact that individual elements can have in tandem.

Katherine Chwazik is a regional artist who employs a variety of mixed media processes such as sculpture, painting and printmaking. She currently focuses on architectural themes that use layers of material to demonstrate various visual effects that reflect both urban and rural settings. Her architectural compositions are designed to have a sense of ambiguous familiarity that resonates with the viewer in many ways. A recent graduate, Chwazik received a master’s degree in studio arts from The College of Saint Rose, in addition to a bachelor’s degree in art education, drawing and painting.

Fracalossi uses photography to capture and preserve daily fleeting moments in her ongoing, ever-expanding work, “Archive.” Composed of tens of thousands of images sorted into prescriptive categories, her sprawling Archive is the source of all her output, which explores an evolving language of images selected, composed, combined and re-combined in accordance with various rules. The resulting works map the commonalities, disjunctions and arbitrary collisions that form the basis of any language, any thought, any mode of being. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University at Albany and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Vermont, and studied at Syracuse University in Florence, Italy. She has exhibited locally and internationally and is assistant professor of fine arts and founding director of the Teaching Gallery at Hudson Valley Community College, SUNY, in Troy.

An opening reception for the two-person show of Chwazik and Fracalossi will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. July 15. The public is invited to attend.

Exhibit Sponsors; Ann Pfau and Dave Hochfelder