Exploration of collage as an approach to art-making using a wide range of found materials
Thursday, July 14, 2022 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Potter Gallery
A survey of the past ten years of artist Paul Bright's work, Matter of Style explores collage as an approach to art-making with works created from found materials in a variety of media, including paper, books, video, sound, and performance.
An opening reception will be held Thursday, July 14 from 5–8pm in SECCA's Potter Gallery. The reception is free and open to the public, with an artist-led gallery tour at 6pm.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
We've all heard the phrase, "oh, it's just a matter of style." But what does "style" mean when an artist's work consists of found and manipulated material from different sources, and when the work is not restricted to a single medium or "look"?
In his work, Paul Bright uses collage as an approach, not just as an art-making technique. It emerges from his "dialogue" with and concentration on found materials; found paper, found objects, found situations, found text, found images, and found sounds. Bright's work does not offer us an encompassing "style" in the usual sense. Instead of an obvious visual consistency, all of it shares a common basis in found "matter." The exhibition Matter of Style includes paper collages, video, an e-book, sound collages, an artist book, and a collage fashion performance.
Matter as question, matter as substance, substance as style.
de/collages (collages from found, torn and taken material)
minor interventions (direct and sometimes topical collages)
[im]provvisorio (image-pairs of found objects as a book)
respiro (a video of the rhythmic movement of air)
wall (an e-book chronicling an urban surface)
bassa moda (a de/collage fashion event)
sound collages (just like it...sounds)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Paul Bright was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in Winston-Salem, NC. Following a university concentration in printmaking, Bright adopted collage as an approach, and continues to employ it across mediums. His professional history includes exhibitions, projects, residencies and collections in the US, Germany, England, Canada, Scotland, Italy, and Switzerland.Bright has also maintained an active parallel life as an arts professional in art museums, history museums and art galleries, as a graphic designer, exhibition designer, and curator. He is currently the Director of Art Galleries and Collections at Wake Forest University. He recently curated the exhibition substrata: the spirit if collage in 76 years of art for the Reynolda House Museum of Art, which is on view through July 31, 2022.