Readers taking a spring day trip to the Laurel Highlands this weekend may enjoy a stop at Westmoreland @rt 30, where an exhibition of sculpture by Adrienne Heinrich and painting by Brian Geary continues through Sunday.
Ms. Heinrich is a long-admired Murrysville-based artist and 2002 Pittsburgh Artist of the Year with chops in painting, sculpture and mixed media, much of that represented in this exhibition. It’s somewhat a mini-retrospective pulling from various past periods of her work.
While she has addressed various components of the human condition, memory for example, she shines most in her evocative, at times enigmatic, consideration of women’s lives. This is exemplified in “Bride,” the stoically deported figure sporting one large red breast/Amazonian shield. The objects embedded in the cast form and the bride’s veil of red Christmas tree netting are symbolic of wedding rituals and duties to come.
Many works are feminist, perhaps subconsciously so, ranging from a suspended protective cradling nest to a wall-mounted swirl of receding circles that may be read as vaginal. Inviting, foreboding, comforting, accepting, celebratory and disappointed are among the attitudes reflected in Ms. Heinrich’s oeuvre, which comments on the unruly complexity of life with its conflicting ambitions and demands, romanticism and reality, sacrifice and reward. This expression is supported by a sensitivity to material wherein tactility triumphs in a range of media including reeds and paper, wax over fabric, cast silicone and wood scarified by burns. Light projects from within some works and penetrates others, adding vitality and depth.
Mr. Geary is a native of Scottdale, Westmoreland County, who returned to the area in 2012 and lives in Greensburg. He earned a bachelor’s degree in painting from Edinboro University and a master’s in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. Post-graduation, he taught at the university’s Richmond campus for four years and then at its Qatar campus for six, returning from the Middle East in 2012.
He is also interested in the effect of light, using it to give dimensionality and vibrancy to hyperrealistic imagery painstakingly rendered in oil. His subject matter is the mundane — draped fabric, signs, a plucked chicken — privileged by sometimes theatrical staging, medium and the concomitant investment of time that oil paint requires. Colors acquire intensity through several layers, and one painting may take a month of eight-hour days to complete. The visual play between colors and between radiance and shadow is a major component of his compositions, completed with exacting scrutiny of the object designate (which can question beyond the sum of its parts). His influences, Mr. Geary says, are 17th-century Dutch painters such as Vermeer and American trompe l’oeil painters William Harnett and John Frederick Peto.
The Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s temporary home is at 4764 Route 30, east of Greensburg. Admission and parking are free. Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Select permanent collection works are exhibited on the second floor. Information: 724-837-1500 or www.wmuseumaa.org. both cq
Poetry/book workshop
An Ekphrastic poetry and unique book arts workshop will be conducted from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday april 25-26 at Westmoreland @rt 30 by Kathleen Mendus Dlugos, associate professor of art and associate of fine arts program director at Westmoreland County Community College; Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli, painter, printmaker and poet; and Cynthia Ferrari, book artist, painter and art adjunct faculty member at WCCC.
Lunch and all workshop materials will be provided ($75). Space is limited. Register at 724-837-1500, ext. 119, or www.wmuseumaa.org.both cq
Warhol appointment
Congratulations to Kenycq Marshall, who has been appointed director of exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum beginning Tuesday. april 28 Mr. Marshall’s extensive experience as consultant working with artists and museums to design, fabricate and install interactive artworks and complex installation projects will ensure the quality of Warhol exhibitions mounted here and globally, a museum release says.
An exhibiting artist, Mr. Marshall holds degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of Tennessee. His consulting projects have included the 2012 steel and fog sculpture “Cloud Arbor,” a collaboration among artist Ned Kahn, landscape architect Andi Cochran and the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum; and specialty fabrication for Scott Hocking’s 2012 Mattress Factory installation “Coronal Mass Ejection.”
“Keny’s experience working for a range of art and natural history institutions prepares him for the breadth and diversity of The Warhol’s collection, which includes both traditional art objects and unusual archival items,” said museum managing director Patrick Moore.
Post-Gazette art critic Mary Thomas: mthomas@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1925.
First Published: April 22, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
