Keene State College’s Carroll House Gallery got a taste of the whimsical and macabre this past Thursday, Feb. 26. The Carroll House Gallery held an opening reception for three new exhibits, entitled “Fancy,” “Groups” and “…For Liam.”
According to the KSC Art Department’s description of the exhibits, “Fancy” is an exhibit by Manchester, New Hampshire artist Christina Pitsch, “Groups” is an exhibit created by Concord, New Hampshire artist Megan Bogonovich and “…For Liam” is a group show of ceramic artists from across the United States.
Courtney Heck, a first-year student and psychology and studio art major, attended the event for class credit but also because of her own curiosity. “I wanted to see the pieces and stuff because I’m in ceramics [class] right now,” Heck said. “It’s cool that they’re doing ceramics stuff too,” Heck continued, “I haven’t been to a gallery before, but I know people that have and it’s usually drawings and paintings and stuff with minimal ceramics.”
Caroline Alm / Arts & Entertainment Editor
Artist Megan Bogonovich described what went into her creation of the exhibit, “Groups,” “Everything is usually whimsical and colorful. There’s usually a blend of abstract imagery and more realistic imagery kind of fused together. The theme of the show is groups — to have multiples of things. It’s sort of like mini installations.”
“I wanted to make something that, if you bury it in the dirt, a million years from now we can dig it up,” Bogovich continued, “It’s a materialist addiction. I think a lot of people who are ceramic artists — you get hooked on it. You’re either the type that likes to deal with it or you don’t.”
Bogonovich, who now teaches at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, explained how she first became involved with ceramics. “I went to art school in Baltimore, Maryland,” Bogonovich explained, “I was a painting major, but in my last semester, I took one ceramics class at a community college in Baltimore and I just got hooked on it. I went to grad school in Montana. It’s like a little thing you get hooked on — you get obsessed with [it].”
Art major Aedan Lake said she was most taken with artist Christina Pitsch’s exhibit, “Fancy.”
Pitsch’s exhibit incorporated themes of both deer antlers and deer hooves. Her piece at the center of the room consisted of multiple golden chandeliers atop one another, going from ceiling to floor, with ceramic renderings of deer hooves in place of candles.
“I think it’s really unique to things that I’ve seen done here before. It’s a ceramics show but she’s also combining ceramics and sculpture, which I think is really neat,” Lake explained, “And the title of the work is ‘Fancy,’ which, when you see hunting memorabilia, you don’t usually think ‘fancy.’”
According to the artist description at the exhibit, Pitsch is a “mixed media artist working in installation, sculpture and print-making. Her work is a hybrid of materials and techniques driven by larger conceptual questions of cultural iconography and gender identification. Frequently her work uses animals (and fragments thereof) to tell stories about the complexity of relationships.”
“I’ve been working with imagery related to deer for many, many years,” Pitsch said.
“In a lot of my work it’s been about both the masculine and the feminine. So I started to make all of this work that was about this idea of the fetish object, or this notion of beautiful, but in this really alarming, fragmented sense. So, for me, the deer iconography was so intertwined with sort of the work that I made that it was only natural that I would start with the deer head,” Pitsch articulated.
Pitsch spoke of the different concepts that went into this specific piece. “The most recent stuff in the last few years have gone more towards this idea of ‘collecting’ in terms of like a fetish object. This piece here began as this direct reference to this idea of a ‘lucky rabbit’s foot,’” Pitsch explained.
The artist also explained her reason for incorporating golden chandeliers into the overall concept of the piece, “A lot of it is also about, kind of like, ‘What do different people perceive as opulent?’”
According to the Art Department’s artist description, Christina Pitsch is currently a practicing artist in Manchester, New Hampshire and her recent shows include New Works at the Kingston Gallery, Boston, Massachussetts and Beasticon II at the Mark Miller Gallery, New York City.
If interested in seeing the artists’ pieces, the exhibits will be running from Feb. 26 until March 28 in The Carroll House Gallery located on Main Street next to the Alumni Center.
Caroline Alm can be contacted at calm@kscequinox.com
