Ongoing @ if ART: JANET ORSELLI: The New York Exhibition, Jan. 13–Feb. 12, 2010 @ if ART

JANET ORSELLI: 
THE NEW YORK EXHIBITION
January 13 – February 12, 2011
@
if ART Gallery, Columbia, S.C.
Opening Reception: Thu., Jan. 13, 2011, 5 – 9 pm.


For a PREVIEW, CLICK HERE.
For ARTIST STATEMENTS related to this exhibition, CLICK HERE.


    Just back from her second solo exhibition at the prominent O.K. Harris gallery in New York City, Columbia native Janet Orselli will be showing a selection of her New York show at if ART Gallery, January 13 - February 12, 2011. The opening reception is Thursday, January 13, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.
  In the exhibition’s found object constructions, Orselli, who lives in North Carolina, combines clogs, roller skates, shoes, shoe forms and a mouse trap on wheels with seemingly unrelated found objects such as a rusty toy car, an egg beater or a violin part. The exhibition also will include several of Orselli's crutches juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated objects, called “Impedimenta,” which were exhibited at O.K. Harris in 2007. OK Harris is the gallery of legendary New York art dealer Ivan Karp.

“These imaginative means of locomotion,” Orselli says, “are joined together by hand to form entirely new entities. Engaging and thought provoking, these found object constructions with their rich visual histories evoke the past while outrageously rolling toward the future.”

“My raw materials are leftovers from the past, or what some might call ‘worn out stuff’. These objects have a story to tell -- if we listen. All of them want to move some more. Each struggles to get ahead - some drag a weight behind them, others have a shell to break through, and still others - await takeoff. They are all trying awfully hard. Ultimately they attain arthood by releasing their object identity and joining others in a new (lively) purpose.”

Orselli (b. 1954) is an independent installation and performance artist. She has had solo shows at O.K. Harris gallery in New York City, the Turchin Center for Visual Arts in Boone, N.C., and at the Sumter Gallery of Art in Sumter, Charleston’s Gibbes Museum and the Burroughs & Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, all in South Carolina, and elsewhere. Her installations have been featured at Schopf Gallery on Lake, Chicago, IL, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, Montana, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, and in three consecutive Accessibility Project events in Sumter, SC. Orselli’s found object constructions have been in national group exhibitions throughout the country. In 2001, she was selected to create a two-room installation for the South Carolina Triennial at the S.C. State Museum. That same year she was also awarded an artist scholarship by the S.C. Arts Commission to attend Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 2005, she received the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship.

     OK Harris owner Ivan Karp, as the co-director of Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, was instrumental in launching the careers of pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman and John Chamberlain. Karp also was the first to exhibit in New York work by prominent contemporary artists Duane Hanson, and many others.