Artists Talk by Rachel Sitkin, Michael Farrell and Steven Pearson Thursday, June 28

Artists Rachel Sitkin, Michael Farrell and Steven Pearson will speak about their work on view in the “_______scape” exhibit at VisArts which runs through August 10th. Rachel Sitkin’s “Minescape” gouache paintings of enormous resource mining pits are beautiful contradictions.  The noisy, dirty, industrial operations appear serene and still. Sitkin takes an aerial view that brings to mind a slowly passing surveillance spy drone. Her paintings reflect an eye that is both obsessively attentive and coolly detached.  She hints at the power of politics, economics, and technology to shape of the land. Michael Farrell’s “Memoryscape” drawings of landscape-like forms and textures hover between recognition and recollection. The work has the quality of a vague memory loosening itself from a fog and slowly consolidating into a resonant impression. The brilliant color, overlapping patterns of Steven Pearson’s vivid paintings allude to the daily “scape” of hyper-connectivity and floods of data. His complex and hypnotic paintings suggest that getting lost in the spell of visual entrancement is a way to be in place and in motion at the same time. The eye dives into and spins off his “Hyperscapes”.