Chester Faculty Gallery Opening

Chester College faculty members Megan McNaught and Christina Pitsch will be showing their work at Fort Point Art Community starting November 6th, with the opening reception taking place on November 13th at 5:30. This event is free and open to the public.

The show, Patterned Tactic(s), brings together the work of Megan McNaught, abstract painter, and Christina Pitsch, sculptor. Both artists are linked by their use of pattern and repetition both in the process of making and in the finished imagery of the work. The show consists of free hanging life size clear deer sculptures surrounded by large-scale geometric net drawings. Both bodies of work are striking in their combination of inherent complexity with results that are quiet and deceivingly minimal in nature.

Pitsch’s technique of ‘mapping’ objects through the use of sewing patterns allows for the recreation of multiples in alternate materials and scales. The process of fabricating the sculptures begins with the actual drafting of sewing patterns from life size deer models. Through this process of breaking an object down and translating from 3 dimensional form to 2 dimensional parts there is a relationship that begins between object and artist. It is not only the method by which they are made but a meditation in repetition. Through a process of repetitively recreating each deer, piece-by-piece, the maker becomes intimate with the subject further developing the relationship between artist and iconography. By creating these animals in clear vinyl, cast plastic and acrylic sheet Pitsch speaks not only to what is there but what is not there. It is the skin, the shell, that is recreated, they do not, nor are they meant to stand solid as the original buck did. Instead they draw attention to that which is absent. In some ways these objects are both there and not there, speaking of absence and presence in one breath.

McNaught‘s work is focused on a process of accumulation, formal issues of image making, and the development of complexity through repetition of mark and shape. This work demonstrates a dynamic optical activity and illusion and explores the possibilities that exist by trying variations of single or limited elements and forms. The drawings are rigorous and measured with specific strategies of variation and planned patterning that often employ a division of the picture plane to set up field for a game. Slight differences within the drawings can snare the eye into a compare and contrast situation. In the Net paintings and drawings, the geometry takes on a life of it’s own, expanding and contracting across the surface using a simple solid geometric shape. The variation in the pattern that occurs is a result of a loose control of the artist’s hand.