May 18 - June 20, 2025
Scott Vradelis - Waiting Room | Janet Passehl | Alison Ruttan - Individuation in Bonobo Grooming Habits | Steve Riedell - Paintings on Paper | Anna Gleeson
CLOSING RECEPTION - FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2:30-6:30pm
WAITING ROOM
Scott Vradelis
The pieces in this exhibition came at the end of a body of work called “Winter’s Poem for Spring”, in the Winter of 2021 to Spring of 2022 . It is a visual poem. The idea was that this body was the gift that Winter, as it faded, gave to Spring, as it arose. In this way, the pieces call to mind that all forms follow this pattern. It celebrates the process of rising and falling, noting it, engaging as best as possible, generating a response, then letting it go. The paintings, like all communications of this type, are one way of asking the viewer to, “Consider it this way”.
The works are made on prepared Dibond panels, and prepared archival museum board each backed with painted poplar. The scale varies slightly but is approximately 12” x 8.5”. The pieces included can be described as having a “ground” plane with a nearly central form. The hues, value relationships, temperatures, type of marks, numbers of paint layers, substrate used, and other attributes, vary from piece to piece. The paint used is a “custom blend” of dispersions in various acrylic binders and additives, allowing for a specific non-reflective quality to the surface.
Scott Vradelis earned an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, travelled to Europe to study painting, then lived and worked in Manhattan and Brooklyn as a painter for 18 years. Since moving to Elkins Park just outside Philadelphia in 2004, he has worked to establish and successfully operate a local business, has helped his wife Catherine raise their three now grown children, and continues to paint, study, and practice.
He has investigated, and continues to investigate a wide range of subjects on his own and with the generous help of others. They include particle physics, chaos theory, aesthetics, archetypal psychology, various forms of music, and many aspects of painting from multiple traditions including prehistoric image making, early Asian painting, western Postmodernism, and for the past ten years has engaged in the practice and study of various aspects of early Buddhism.
AL’S OFFICE
Janet Passehl
These works are small poems characterized by white space, tension and texture. Nothing is extraneous. They tell their own story.
Janet Passehl has been working primarily with plain cotton cloth since 1990, staining, folding, ironing, cutting, and draping. In 2022, she learned to weave and now makes her own material on a floor loom. For more than thirty years, Passehl has worked as Curator and Collections Manager for Sol LeWitt and his collection of work by other artists. In this capacity she was deeply affected by sustained exposure not only to LeWitt’s art and processes, but also those of Kazuko Miyamoto, Eva Hesse, Fred Sandback, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Daniel Buren, as well as artists of the Italian Arte Povera movement. She traveled widely in Europe and sought out the work of old masters, in particular Italian and Northern Renaissance, and Dutch and French landscape. At the same time, Passehl continued to develop her own unique aesthetic vocabulary, eventually arriving at a position of great restraint.
Passehl’s art has been shown New York City, New England, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Norway, Australia, China and Korea. She is represented in several private and museum collections.
Passehl is also a writer, with one published full-length poetry collection. Her poems and essays have been published in journals and artist’s catalogues, and have also been featured in art exhibitions in the form of hand-made books or audio installations.
AL’S OFFICE
Alison Ruttan - Individuation in Bonobo Grooming Habits
Over the summer of 2004 I had an opportunity to spend time in Atlanta at the Yerkes Primate Research Station. This was later followed up with a residency in 2005 at Wild Animal Park in Escondido, California. I was exploring possibilities for future projects and was primarily interested in observing the posturing, gesturing, timing and inter-activity within chimpanzee social groups. One of the ways I initially learned to identify individual bonobos was by their facial hair grooming. The animal keepers would help me learn their names by pointing out the wide center part Akili was sporting or Loretta’s penchant for a severally plucked forehead. It was only when I got back to Chicago that I began to think that there might be more to this strange grooming practice.
I began to track information on this. In speaking with current and retired zookeepers at The San Diego Zoo many lament that at one time the bonobos all had beautiful black glossy coats. It turns out that this all changed with the arrival of Vernon, a bonobo brought over from Germany in the 1970’s. He apparently is the culprit. Vernon arrived at San Diego zoo with severally plucked legs and a bad temper. Bonobos don’t like a lot of tension and work hard at easing it, group grooming and sex are social tools they use with great frequency to ease social tensions. With Vernon around they did a lot of both. The personalized grooming styles seen in my photographs originated from this period in the zoo’s history. When the bonobos were moved to others zoo’s they brought this trend with them, hair grooming such as this is now practiced in every American Zoo that has bonobos. The “styles” you see are not random but carefully groomed for consistency. They do not change unless the individual moves to another community.
This series playfully embraces an anthropomorphizing of bonobo grooming it is also questioning assumptions on what is a legitimate measure of intelligent behavior. Traditionally tool making has been the sign of higher intelligence in species, but why not individuation and self-adornment? My project suggests that social tools, especially those that can be seen as learned behavior versus instinctive actions are in fact the beginnings of socialization and culture. Bonobo' in captivity, it appears, are expressing themselves through distinct and individual “hair styles”.
Alison Ruttan’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Photography”, Chicago, Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, California, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Illinois, Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, Orange, California, Galerie Wit, Wageningen, Netherlands, Gallery TPW, Toronto, Canada, Rocket Gallery, London, England, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois, The Drawing Center, New York City, New York, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has been written about in Art In America, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, Art Papers, Chicago Magazine, New Art Examiner. Awards include The Illinois Arts Council, Jerome Foundation, Art & Technology Residency; Wexner Museum, Artists Residency; Wild Animal Park. She is a Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ruttan is a project-based artist whose work focuses on a topical investigations. The Medium is always specific to each project. Her work has commented on Human Behavior in relationship to Primates, the conflicts in the Middle East and the more recent work, looking at global warming and it’s effects on homes in coastal communities.
MELANIE’S OFFICE
Steve Riedell - Paintings on Paper
Steve Riedell was born in Inglewood, California in 1954. He studied art at Moorpark College, in Moorpark, California and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. After leaving school he taught at Otis Parsons in Los Angeles for two years before moving to New York City to pursue his career in painting. While there he also taught at Pratt Institute School of Art in Brooklyn. He later left the city for a brief stay in Cincinnati, Ohio before settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1999 Steve had his first solo exhibition in Philadelphia at Larry Becker Contemporary Art, an experience he credits with being crucial in the further development of his work. In 2002 his work was included in ‘Beyond the Pale: Material Possibilities’, at the Neuberger Museum, Purchase , New York, curated by Dede Young. In 2007 Lawrence Carroll invited Steve to exhibit with him at Studio Trisorio in Italy. The exhibition, ‘ A Conversation Between Friends’, was presented in Rome And Naples. In 2011 he exhibited his Folded-Over Paintings at Larry Becker Contemporary Art for the first time, works which he is best known for. In 2013 he had a solo exhibition at Studio Trisorio in Naples, Italy; ‘Place and Memory’, that would then travel in part to Castello di Postignano in Umbria, Italy in 2014. Riedell is the recipient of The Elizabeth Grant from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City in 1999, The Pollock / Krasner Grant in painting in 2000, and the PCA Grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 2001. He has been a finalist for both the Gottlieb Grant and the PEW Grant from the PEW Fellowship of the Arts in Philadelphia. Steve currently lives in Philadelphia and Milford, New Jersey where he maintains his primary studio.
SHELF
Anna Gleeson
Here are some vessels I’ve made since moving to New York two years ago. I take volumes and ways of working from things I see around me; buildings, loaves of bread, bodies, puffer coats, kitchen sponges. There’s always a question of what holds things up and what pulls them down; what degree of slump or stiffness they have, how much weight they carry and whether they have any degree or pride, status or shame.
Born and raised in country NSW, Australia, Anna Gleeson studied at Sydney College of the Arts. She works across print-making, painting and sculpture and has exhibited widely across
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