Resonant Visions: Rich Fedorchak and Peter Thomashow | E.N. Wennberg Gallery | Opening reception: Friday, October 18, 5-7 PM
Conversation with the artists: Friday, October 25, 5:30-6:30 PM
Rich Fedorchak and Peter Thomashow are artists, musicians, and scientists all at once. In their early lives, they each worked as medical professionals, so, as collage and assemblage artists their work is executed with precision: paper snipped in the tiniest of cuts or building tableau vignettes with intricate bits. Both artists are collectors of odd artifacts, toys, and paper ephemera. Whether the past reinvented or the future unknown, both serve as sources of inspiration for sci-fi surrealists like Fedorchak and Thomashow. With everlasting wonder, each piece in the exhibition is a planetary experience casting the viewer as a time traveler lost in a resounding note– or vision.
As a collage/assemblage artist, Rich Fedorchak tends to work in an intuitive fashion starting with a single image or background that has sparked his imagination. As further elements are gradually added, they often find their place in the final composition over time through trial and error. Thus, he often doesn’t know when he starts a new work where it will end up. The final image and its “meaning,” if there is one, gradually unfolds in the process. He states, “In thinking about my 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, I can achieve some sort of self-healing. “
Peter Thomashow’s work is a trip into memory. It attempts to capture moments and preserve, immerse, re-visit, and experience. Remembering is an exploration, a dream, a continual revision, it is not static – it always changes and re-invents. It is paradoxical that preserving moments results in change, and as we strive to hold and cherish, we create something new; the present becomes the past as soon as it occurs. He is drawn to deep memories of childhood, these allow him to re-visit adventures to the Far Rockaway boardwalk, Coney Island, and the New York World’s Fair, as well as visits to his grandfather’s candy store in Brooklyn, family cross-country trips, and spending hours in old and rare bookshops – these are important events that cause him feel like he’s been involved in a lifelong treasure hunt. Many of the objects he’s collected over time have found their way into the artwork that you will see in this exhibit. As with memories, dreams are as important to him, he feels that dreams are memories experienced in the subconscious. In his work, Thomashow is interested in creating a sense of the dream state through the genre of surrealism. His process begins with the objects, some found, and some collected. They are arranged by how they speak to each other, sometimes in harmony and other times as tension. A dialog and synergy amongst these seemingly disparate objects offer clues to obliquely connected memories and dreams that Thomashow finds comforting.
Biographies:
Rich Fedorchak is a self-taught artist with little formal art training. His involvement in the visual arts began in the mid-1970s when he started making experimental films under the influence of American avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Kenneth Anger. A chance encounter in 1974 with the work of the American artist Joseph Cornell exposed him to the magical and transformative power of collage and the found object. Other artists who have influenced his aesthetics include Romare Bearden, Rene Magritte, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Frida Kahlo, Edward Kienholz, Betye Saar, Jess, and Max Ernst. Rich Fedorchak is a longtime AVA volunteer he lives in Thedford, VT.
Peter Thomashow’s collages and assemblages are in several private and public collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia including the permanent collection at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. He has contributed essays, “The Old Curiosity Shop” to Cabinet Magazine and “At the Open Gate” to The Saranac Review. He was also the subject of the article “The Doctor Who Paints Radios” in The New York Times and was featured in Metropolis and Industrial Design magazines as well. He exhibited and sold Technobadges at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney, and Guggenheim Museum bookstores. He performed and exhibited (Main Street Museum) utilizing a kinetic assemblage, electric guitar, and analog electronica; and was featured in Seven Days Magazine: “Collecting the Collectors,” “Toy Story,” “Vermont Artist Peter Thomashow Goes Outside;” and Artscope and Hyperallergic. Peter Thomashow is a retired physician, musician, and artist who lives in Vermont.
