Alternative Realities, Highly Imaginative Content, Video Game Bleeps – Even Walt Disney’s Head – Are Centerpieces of Montserrat Gallery’s “The Morning Exciting” Exhibition featuring Robert Amesbury, Ronnie Bass, David O’Reilly and Alexia Stamatiou.

BEVERLY, MA- August 24, 2010 -- Montserrat Gallery is pleased to announce The Morning Exciting, an exhibition featuring Robert Amesbury (Los Angeles), Ronnie Bass (New York), David OReilly (Berlin, GR) and Alexia Stamatiou (Boston). The show will run August 28 to October 23, 2010. This multi-media exhibition transports viewers to alternative realities through audio-visuals, imaginative content, and the imposition of essential life questions.

Ronnie Bass’s composed performance in the retro-futurist video piece Departure from the Shed captures the excitement, uncertainty and anxiety of a spaceship’s take-off into outer space. With low-tech components and a hand made spaceship, the video depicts the artist as an astronomer with his assistant, a mysterious blanketed figure, as they imagine their life elsewhere and the possibilities of the unknown. Accompanied by the rhythm of lyrics and drumbeats, two phrases remain on repeat to emphasize inventiveness, suspension, and the ultimate escape.

Alexia Stamatiou’s series of gouache paintings Rapture tells a story of the Premillenialists, a popular Evangelical sect, which believe in the resurrection of Christ, followed by Armageddon. The artist was inspired by the imagining of Premillenialtists moving to the woods, removing their clothes, and waiting for Rapture. The artist uses flatness, geometric structures, and saturated colors to reference the emblematic storytelling methods of folk art. With the elaboration of myth and reality contextualized within the artist’s fantasy, the viewer is confronted with the question of functionality of spiritual belief in today’s society.

David OReilly’s animations take viewers in a fascinating journey that includes hooded figures, skulls and Walt Disney whose head eerily play a role in the commentary of the world famous corporations effect on culture. WOLF2016, reveals a creature familiar of the innocent 1950s cartoon such as the Roadrunner, discovering the expired body of one of his own and dragging it into the sky as a sacrifice, trailing a ribbon of blood in its path. Incorporation with the rise and fall of opera music, upbeat Electronica and video game bleeps, the artist explores the transformation within the reality of death, both threatening and transcendent.

Robert Amesbury’s paintings of flowers and insects live as windows onto waking dreams. The use of smooth surface, impeccable line and saturated color conjure otherworldly qualities of lush and fantastical nature scenes. The surreal colors of the flowers and insects enhance the circumstances of the hybrid settings, questioning how we represent the natural world and how we inhabit it over time. Through Amesbury’s effusive landscapes, the captivating earthly qualities of matter become exaggerated. The viewer becomes instantly captivated in the surreal visions.

WHAT
Exhibition: The Morning Exciting

WHERE Montserrat Gallery, 23 Essex Street, Beverly, MA

WHEN
Exhibition Dates: August 28- October 23, 2010
Gallery Hours: Mon- Fri 10am-5pm, Thur 10am- 8pm, Sat 12-5pm

EVENTS
Reception: Thursday, September 2, 6-8 pm

Gallery Talk: Outreach Coordinator Maggie Cavallo will give a Gallery Talk on September 2nd at 11:30am.

Event: Contemporary Cocktail, A conversation with video artists Ronnie Bass and Ethan Berry, Montserrat Faculty. Friday, October 1, 7-9 pm Student lounge, 3rd floor, 23 Essex St.

For more information about the exhibit, please contact Leonie Bradbury at 978-867-9623 or visit us at www.montserrat.edu/galleries. Gallery programs and lectures are free and open to the public.

About Montserrat College of Art
Montserrat College of Art is an accredited, private, residential college of art and design offering the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, art education certification and year-round classes and workshops for adults through its Continuing Studies programs. Visit us at www.montserrat.edu.

Contact Information

Leoni Bradbury

Gallery Director

Montserrat College of Art

Contact via E-mail