About the Exhibition
Opening reception: Thursday, May 8, 6 - 9 pm
Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Dirt Made My Lunch, a group exhibition guest curated by Todd Keyser. The exhibition highlights the work of Philadelphia’s first year Master of Fine Arts students featuring Erin M. Riley, Kurt Freyer, Michael Treffehn, and Robert Scobey, some of the city’s most promising young artists. The title references a creative process that is raw and malleable and still growing.
Erin M. Riley is a weaver and a mixed media artist. Riley’s work deals with her emotional issues involving family, personal history and relationships, but attempts to render these issues visually with a certain veil of universality. Using found images or personal images, she subsequently translate them into the tapestry language or into collages coated in resin or other plastics. She is interested in the soft, fluid and yet excruciating process of tapestry weaving juxtaposed to the fast nature of paper collages that are then sealed in a hard, permanent, water-proof material.
Kurt Freyer's video work explores art making at its most basic level, but the work itself is suggestive of something far more profound, in that a decorated egg and some candles on a mud hill can be used to identify the structural language of the art making process itself. Freyer's proposition is rooted in the questions of what art is. Freyer's video captures how something as seemingly elemental as mud and pigment can be used to communicate profound structural meaning.
Michael Treffehn’s work explores notions of cultural and biographical identity. He is also interested in suggested narratives and in presenting stories, but not in telling them. The video included in this exhibition is very still, causing the viewer to focus on the limited narrative and imagine the rest. What the viewer is seeing is only part of the story; the rest they must come up with on their own.
Robert Scobey's pop colleges display schizophrenic consumer images that expand into the real space. They shed their imageness and become their own environment. The work suggests that we are indeed in the next stage of simulacra in which images become a total reality beyond our own control.
About the Gallery
Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art is the brainchild of independent curators and artists Sarah Eberle and Ben Will. Eberle and Will worked together on a number of underground curatorial projects. Sarah Eberle has an extensive background in visual art. After graduating from University of California at Berkeley, she worked for Worth Ryder Gallery and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Upon arriving in Philadelphia in 2002, she worked as the Gallery Store Manager for The Print Center and played a major role in the founding of Falling Cow Gallery as the inaugural Director.
Ben Will worked as an independent curator in London and Philadelphia, as well as working for a variety of arts organizations including Artistsspace in New York City. The two met while co-curating an exhibition, Squat, displayed at Tower Investments in Northern Liberties, now known as The Jenny Jaskey Gallery. Discovering a mutual love for contemporary art, Eberle and Will decided to open a gallery together. They bought a run down row home on the corner of Girard Avenue and Second Street in South Kensington, the heart of Philadelphia’s newest art neighborhood.
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