Description
Build Community by Janice Gossman
mixed media (acrylic paint, paper, acrylic medium, archival ink, gesso on canvas)
30 x 30 inches
Year created: 2024
Description: A circle with black and white marks surrounded by 16 yellow rectangles. Each rectangle is a line drawing of a human face with a unique expression.
Connection to the theme: As we head towards a period of profound uncertainty, distrust, and divisiveness, it is more important than ever to build community and connections, focusing on ways in which we can help and learn from each other.
Artist Statement: For years, I have been exploring ways in which I can use various techniques and materials to create images, objects, and environments in which the ordinary may become mysterious, and through which the viewer might be left with something unresolved. Over time, I have come to realize that more than half of the artwork I do can later (months, years, decades) be repurposed altered, and built upon. I might today consider a painting finished, and decide sometime next month or in a few years that it needs something more to be done with it. In other words, most of my artwork, whether I am aware of it or not, is still evolving.
Bio: I was an art teacher for 31 years in New Jersey public schools, and have enjoyed teaching and learning from students of various ages and backgrounds. Sometime around the midpoint of my teaching career, I discovered that putting time and energy into creating my artwork, rather than taking away from my dedication to teaching, actually made me more effective in the classroom with my students as an art-making role model. I had become better able to empathize with them as they worked through their creative processes.
I have explored, and continue to explore working with a wide range of techniques and media including but not limited to drawing, photography, printmaking, painting, ceramics, and sculpture, and I have exhibited work in New York and New Jersey.
not for sale
