Rich Fedorchak
Artist Statement:
As a collage/assemblage artist, I tend to work in an intuitive fashion starting with a single image or background that has sparked my imagination. As further elements are gradually added, they often find there own place in the final composition over time through trial and error. Thus, I often don’t know when I first start a new piece where it will end up. The final image and it’s “meaning”, if there is one, gradually unfolds in the process. In thinking about my particular aesthetic recently, I realized that I tend to create gently surreal mystical utopian worlds that present an alternative to the sometimes harsh realities of life in the 21st century. I think that my work may act as an antidote to the daily news of human and animal suffering, violence, racism, and global environmental disaster. Perhaps by creating worlds of wonder instead of endless wars, I can achieve some sort of self-healing. As the visionary artist Alex Gray so eloquently wrote in his book The Mission of Art, “The artist of the twenty first century will have to look deeply into themselves and ask hard questions about the mission of art. Is art merely the fashionable expression of artists’ egos and a reflection of the world they live in, or can art become a healing path that reveals the beauty and holiness of our selves and our world, projecting an ideal of what we and our wounded world may become.
Work
Featured Work
Biography:
I am basically a self-taught artist with little formal training, although I have attended classes/workshops at the School of Visual Arts ( New York, NY ), the Woodstock School of Art ( Woodstock, NY ), and AVA Gallery and Art Center( Lebanon, NH ).
My involvement in the visual arts began in the mid- 1970’s when I started making films under the influence of American avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage , Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. A chance encounter in 1974 with the works of of the late American artist Joseph Cornell was pivotal to my artistic development. His art exposed me to the magical and transformative power of collage and the found object.
Other artists who have had an effect on my aesthetics include Romare Bearden, Rene Magritte, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Wallace Berman, Louise Nevelson, Edward Kienholz, Lucas Samaras, Anna Mendieta, Clarence John Lauglin, Betye Saar, Larry Jordan, Jan Svankmajer, Jess, and Max Ernst.
Venues where my work has been exhibited include the Barron Art Center ( Woodbridge, NJ ), the West End Cultural Center ( Long Branch, NJ ), the Hunterdon Art Center ( Clinton, NJ ), the Woodstock School of Art ( Woodstock, NY ), 80 Washington Square East Galleries ( New York, NY; juried small works competition ), Limner Gallery ( Hudson, NY ), New Hope Art Center ( New Hope, PA ), Concord Center for the Visual Arts ( Concord, MA ) and Lake of Dreams, a no longer extant cooperative artist’s gallery in Flemington, NJ, which I was a founding member of. In January 2014 I had a solo exhibit of my collage, assemblage, and film work at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH. In 2019 I was the artist in residence at the Frederic Remington Museum in Ogdensburg, NY.
I continue to create and screen experimental films in the Super 8 film and digital video mediums. In recent years my films have increasingly featured elements of abstraction from nature and cutout animation. Venues where my films have been screened are the Splice This! Film Festival ( Toronto, Canada ), Cine Salon ( Hanover, NH ), Experiments In Cinema ( Albuquerque, NM ), FilmOneFest ( Atlantic Highlands, NJ ), the Winnepeg Underground Film Festival ( Manitoba, Canada ), the Montreal Underground Film Festival ( Montreal, Canada )and the United States Super 8 Film and Digital Video Festival ( Rutgers University, NJ ) where, in 2003, one of my films won a grand prize in the best experimental film category. I have presented programs of my films at the Haverhill Experimental Film Festival ( Haverhill, MA ) in 2014, at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design( Boston, MA ) in 2017, and at the 8Fest ( Toronto, Canada ) in 2018. I have also been a guest lecturer and presenter in the Film and Media Department at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.