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Professor Barbara Penn |
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Barbara Penn makes paintings, drawings, prints and combined-media installations. She uses literary, poetic and everyday sources in her work and merges them with personal and socio/political themes.
In her monotype, Penn positions a medieval diagram of a woman’s surgical procedure to address the evolution of culture. In early times, surgery would have been used for medical reasons only. More commonly today, rationale has yielded to “the cosmetic” end in itself. Societal pressure “to nip and tuck” as a means to eternal youth is big business. The viewer might contemplate what this says about us as a culture of women—Whom are we changing for? What role does ego play? Is there an alternative in finding self-acceptance?
The primary image in the print borrows from an early record of facial surgery. Penn purposely combines it with Victorian-era script from nineteenth century poet Emily Dickinson. Dickinson used plus marks (+) and dashes (—) between words as a kind of variant language, playing with alternatives to end a poem— seen here in her words “ + swelling + fitter for ”. In the few poems published in Dickinson’s lifetime, alterations “in print” happened without her consent, to her great dissatisfaction. Her wittingly eccentric grammar, syntax and punctuation were regularized and stripped away of her finely honed sense of poetic intension, in many of her works. According to numerous scholars, editions of her work assembled after her death, (even up to the 1950’s), were abundantly altered. These changes were meant make (SEE MORE) |
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Moira Geoffrion is Professor of Art, School of Art and Distinguished Faculty Fellow, University of Arizona. Her sculpture and mixed media installations have been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States and in several cities in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Africa. She has been a featured artist in art festivals in Bulgaria and is currently working on another of a series of public art installations for parks, neighborhoods, and public transit locations. She has served as artist in residence in Zurich, Switzerland; Perth, Australia and several U.S. locations and participated in art research tours in India, Sierra Leone and Malawi. Her work has been shown in 36 solo exhibitions and 190 group shows during her career.
Geoffrion has been represented by Sonia Zaks Gallery, Chicago; and currently by Mark Sublett Modern Gallery, and Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, AZ. She was featured at (SEE MORE)
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Rooted in the collage and assemblage traditions of the Surrealists and the West Coast Neo-Dada artists, my work reveals a fascination with the symbolic content of found objects and appropriated images. Materials such as rusted metal, printed papers, and deteriorating mirrors used in combination with painting and drawing on board become metaphors for psychological states of being. My works examine how we selectively assign certain symbols, colors, and marks to represent memories, the passing of time, and cultural perceptions. No matter how far removed we are from an event, person, perception, or emotional state, certain images can (SEE MORE) |
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