Abington Arts Center opens eclectic summer solo series.
By Matt Schickling
Wire Staff Writer
Even in its 75th year, Abington Art Center (AAC) continues to attract exceptional artists and art lovers to the 27-acre campus in Jenkintown.
On June 5, AAC opened the popular Summer Solo series with a reception hosting the work of four contemporary artists. While it seems odd that a solo exhibit would feature more than one artist, the series is organized in such a way that individual focus is brought to each.
The artists’ works are shown in four separate galleries within the AAC, only a few steps away from one another. The room-to-room contrast offers viewers an eclectic mix of mediums and styles, while allowing space enough for each gallery to feel like a standalone exhibit. In this way, the series couples the energy and variety of a group show with the immediacy of individual display.
Nancy Moldofsky, one of the exhibiting artists and an art instructor at Montgomery County Community College, is showing a mix of digital photography and digital fine art, mediums that may seem similar, but are actually quite different.
“(Digital fine art) is all digitally comprised. They’re based on several photographs, objects that I scanned and parts that I hand-rendered,” Moldofsky said of her work.
One work includes the scanned image of a deer skull she found on her five-acre property in Worcester, manipulated and nuanced with photography and watercolors. Each of the elements was combined digitally to comprise one cohesive vision. She used this method to compose many of her displayed pieces, but her other works include digital photography featuring photos taken in places like Kenya, Peru, Cape Cod and her own backyard.
Just down the hall from Moldofsky’s gallery is that of William DiBello, an instructor and former undergraduate student at Temple’s Tyler School of Art. While his work focuses on digital media, it differs drastically from Moldofsky’s in its execution. DiBello uses painting as a means to comment on the differences between hand-rendered and digital artwork with attention to historical perspective.
“I see painting as a very slow way of seeing and as a way of processing phenomena. There’s a human component to it, there’s an intuitive component, there’s a process component. Everything is done through slow additive means,” DiBello said. “With digital media, because it’s generated so quickly and processed so quickly, there’s not time to meditate on the nature of it.”
Gerard Brown, who also teaches at Tyler, occupies the gallery adjacent to DiBello. He has previously taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Moore College of Art and Design and other colleges. Many of his displayed paintings includes the manipulation and combination of signal flag images.
Florence Moonan, the final featured artist, as part of her showing includes artwork that utilizes an unusual canvas — vinyl records.
“Everything I do is inspired by music. I held onto them all these years and always thought I was going to do an art project with them, I just never could come up with the right idea,” she said. “So last year I just decided that I’d paint them.”
But her method does not simply include applying paint to unused records. She sanded parts of them down, used various tools, paste and acrylic paint to create a combination of textures and colors that implements a physical and aesthetic appeal to the pieces. Her musical inspiration does not end there. The gallery also features a series of acrylic paintings, this time on canvas, inspired by the three acts of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera Madame Butterfly.
The Summer Solo Series runs through July 27. The AAC galleries are open Wednesday through Sunday, generally from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $5.
For information, visit www.abingtonartcenter.org.
