Patricia Bellan-Gillen: Listening to Jackalopes

March 14 - May 11, 2024

From Nicole Longnecker Gallery:

“Patricia Bella-Gillen “Listening to Jackalopes” opens featuring a group of drawing and collages on Thursday, March 14 with an artist Meet and Greet from 6-8pm at Nicole Longnecker Gallery, 1440 Greengrass. Dr. The artist will be in attendance. The exhibit continues through Saturday May 11, 2024.

“I am so excited to show this work to our Houston collectors,” said gallery owner Nicole Longnecker. “Patricia combines historical and recent events, fairytale, and comic imagery to create densely visual, yet humorous, drawings. Her work is amazing and must be experienced in person!”

ARTIST STATEMENT  “Somewhere in my brain, personal narrative mixes with fairytales. Historical events intertwine with the imagined and a veil of nostalgia blurs the border between fact and fiction. Sacred imagery moves about in the temporal lobe with iconic characters from children’s stories and recent news flashes picked from the Internet join the sagas of black and white television. My mixed media drawings and collages use these bits and pieces of visual history…the stones and bones of memory…to suggest a narrative and to engage the viewer’s associative responses.

 

Words are powerful. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

 

The sounds and meanings of words move me. A line from an old song moaning on a car radio and the strange sound of the word “cartouche” served as catalysts for this body of work. ‘Who will tell your story?’  The lyric offered a quiet reminder of the power and importance of words. Who tells our story?  Who writes our history?  Who defines our canons?

 

The word cartouche carries three meanings:  1. A cartouche is an ornamental architectural or graphic frame used to display a picture or inscription to honor a person or memorialize an event.  2. Archaeologists use the word cartouche to designate the lozenge shape that encloses a group of Egyptian hieroglyphs denoting the name of a Pharoah or a signifying a phrase. 3. A third description, defines a cartouche as a cache for holding gun powder or weapons.  This body of work employs the cartouche as the framework to contain and unite my accumulated and eclectic imagery.  The convergence of the three different definitions provides the glue that fuses the ideas together.

 

The Victorian fad of displaying taxidermy tableaus in the parlor, led many people to believe that jackalopes existed.  The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, serialized in a New York newspaper, convinced the public that blue goats and man-bats existed on the moon. The intricate colored pencil drawings are a personal meditation about how the past (or what we think we know about the past) is entangled with the present and how words, ideas, dogmas, policies, doctrines, memories, and legends can be weaponed.

 

The drawings and collages combine imagery generated through reading and study with imagery that is personal and intuitive.   Iconic figures from book illustrations and cultural, religious and dream symbols share the platform with the characters that appear and press on my mind with no explanation.

 

I would like my work to confront the viewer simultaneously with beauty and awkwardness, to offer servings of comfort and discomfort and to mediate grace with humor. I am continuously searching for a weird elegance. I place great trust in the viewer.  With everything said…in the end the work is simply a love and celebration of the act of drawing.

 

‘A world of disorderly notions…crowded into his imagination.’ –Miguel de Cervantes

‘Who will tell your story?’  — Neil Young”

ARTIST BIO Patricia Bellan-Gillen lives in rural Burgettstown, Pennsylvania adjacent to the West Virginia border. She is the Dorothy L. Stubnitz Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she teaches a variety of classes including Foundation Drawing, Concept Studio, Painting and MFA Seminar.

Bellan-Gillen’s paintings, prints and drawings have been the focus of over 35 solo exhibitions across the U. S., including venues in Washington DC, Chautauqua, NY, Las Cruces, NM, Albany, NY, Bloomington, IL and Portland, OR. Her work has been included in numerous group shows in museums, commercial galleries, university galleries, and alternative spaces. Venues have included: Hudson river Museum, Yonkers, NY, Chelsea Museum of Art, New York, NY, Frans Masreel Centrum, Belgium, and the Tacoma Museum of Art, Tacoma, WA. “

Reception: March 14, 2024 | 6–8 pm

Nicole Longnecker Gallery (Greengrass Location)

1440 Greengrass Drive

Houston, 77008 Texas

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