Editor's Note: This item has been updated to reflect a change in the date of the opening reception and the start of the exhibition.
The artists and architects in the exhibition, “Construction Time Again,” on view from Jan. 19 to March 8, in Hicks Art Center Gallery creatively respond to social, cultural, architectural, ecological and environmental sustainability in urban and rural environments through their projects.
All are welcome to the opening reception from 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Jan. 24 in the gallery on Bucks County Community College’s Newtown Campus, 275 Swamp Road..
Named after the title of the 1983 studio album by Depeche Mode of the same name, the participating artists and architects in “Construction Time Again” employ diverse materials, subjects and medias to address the impacts of construction and demolition on buildings, lands and people over periods of time in numerous locales.
As the lyrics of Depeche Mode’s song, “The Landscape Is Changing” decry, “Now we’re re-arranging, There’s no use denying, Mountains and valleys, can’t you hear them sighing,” the objects and works in the exhibition challenge us to evaluate our collective responses and responsibilities to outcomes of our presence on Earth and to seek new ways of sustainable resourcefulness.
As a basis to the exhibition, seeing through filters of air, water and traceries of building sites is vital to interpreting what is constantly changing in the environments that surround us. But what are the nuances of perspective when atmosphere, distance and other phenomena are constantly mediating our vision both indoors and outside?
Gwen Kerber’s floor installation serves as a launchpad to visualize how we perceive not only the natural world but also built environments. Arden Bendler Browning’s AR video/painting works collide gestural, seemingly abstract paintings with buildings and landscapes.
Diane Burko’s diptych, “Deforestation 1 and Deforestation 2” confronts the fact of the Amazon’s rapidly diminishing natural filter that prolongs life on earth head on. Jean-François Delorme’s mixed media sculpture “Broken” represents the Earth being barely held up in space while breaking apart.
Deborah Riccardi and her sister photographed her father in the devasted buildings and surrounding property after a fire. Videos and printed plans documenting several of architectural firm Frederick Fisher and Partners’ exemplary projects, including its rehabilitation of Guyot Hall at Princeton University, are featured.
Soo Kim’s sliced and cut image constructions simultaneously obliterate and piece together land and cityscapes that conflate what we imagine to be real or built through our memory and historical events. Parts of Nicolo Gentile’s sculptures were fabricated using melted down metals from a building that once housed the 12th Street Gym in Philadelphia, once a vital hub to the gay community.
Kristen Neville Taylor’s recent body of work “End of Days” reveals myths and lore around the evolution of the sand mines of the New Jersey Pine Barrens that are mostly vanished. The Bucks County Historic Association’s Mercer Museum allowed Hicks Art Center Gallery to borrow two objects that were once used to pump and to channel water: one from the earth and one from a barrel.
While all the artists, architects and museums and their objects and projects in “Construction Time Again” are very different in appearance each are examples showing us what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen to our environment in a collective effort to help all to see how we can keep our Earth a place that is habitable for many generations to come — not just a few.
Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m.
For information, visit https://hicksgallery.bucks.edu.
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