Opening Reception & Artist Talk Friday, March 18, 2022 7–10pm
Artist Talk at 7pm
Exhibition continues through April 29
In an exhibition that combines new and recent sculptures, Bonnie Collura presents work that demonstrates her self-defined identity as "part director, part fabricator, and part weird scientist."
Collura hybridizes physical materials, cultural references, and various signifiers to question presumed hierarchies found in art history, popular culture, politics, and consumerism. While the finished works either refer to or confound references to the body, Collura's methodology confounds the three-dimensional reality of the figure. As the body of a given sculpture turns in space, the viewer is inserted into the essential role of filling in the real and perceived gaps and collaborating toward the production of meaning.
Collura's work is highly-crafted in diverse ways—fabrics are sewn, quilted, curved, and folded while other disparate parts are cast and combined with the sewn forms into phantasmagoric iterations of the figure. Her work springboards from the presumed redundancy of figuration as a contemporary form into a space where statuary iconography meets with all the wild hybrid possibilities that seek to dismantle it. In doing so, the works function as effective platforms to investigate cultural, commercial, political, and spiritual presumptions embodied in the figure.
Frequently realized at human scale, they contain sufficient visible references to be vaguely familiar and recognizable while remaining utterly iconoclastic and alien. This hybrid nature in both form and appearance opens up their inherent sense of possibility. They are "figurative-fluid" with their outer forms sometimes shifting wildly based on the viewer's perspective. While they remain sculptures with form, the specifics of that "form" are in constant motion. As icons of the figure and as sculptural things, they contain and offer multitudes.
Bonnie Collura's multi-media sculptures, figurative textiles, and outdoor works have contributed to the dialogue of contemporary sculpture for over twenty years in exhibitions spanning the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and India. Reviews of her work can be seen in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, Art Net, Flash Art, BOMB magazine, Beautiful Decay, Tema Celeste, Sculpture Magazine, and numerous print and on-line publications. Holding a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University (1994) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University (1996), her work and research platform is the recipient of several honors, including a 1997 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and six research grants from Penn State University.
Toggling a rigorous studio practice with a dedicated teaching career has led to an investment of art's purpose through a younger generation in the classroom. This engagement has brought countless interactions which have enriched her life immeasurably. In 2021, she was the recipient of a prestigious Outstanding Educator Award from the International Sculpture Center.
Currently, Collura is a Full Professor of Art (Sculpture) at Penn State University teaching in the School of Visual Arts, College of Arts and Architecture. Prior to her appointment at Penn State she taught at Yale University, Columbia University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, University of the Arts, and Parsons The New School for Design. She lives and works in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania with her husband, Matthew J. Olson and their extraordinary cat, Louise Bourgeois.
This exhibition was made possible with program support from the Visual Arts Program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), general operating support from Erie County, and local business underwriting support from FIFTEEN.
Bonnie Collura - Mutable Bodies - 2022