Gallery

June 8th - July 13th

The busy environment and cheery colors crowding the gallery belie the underlying theme of artists Terry Slade and Ron Throop – their individual responses to the collective anxiety and concern facing humanity. In post-Covid America, over 20% of adults live with anxiety, so it’s no surprise that the work of these artists reflects a certain state of angst. As Terry Slade remarks of his semi-abstract, sculpted heads, “Each figure appears lost in thought and alone, but each one is also collectively and relentlessly staring into a future fraught with the unknown.”

Self-taught Oswego painter Ron Throop, in embracing the principles of the British Stuckist movement, has unselfconsciously created the paintings exhibited as a sort of psychological self-portrait, a “neurotic’s journal” as he terms his current body of work. Stuckists believe that painting in this way enriches society by “giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience.” (Stuckist Manifesto) His paintings are left unframed to reduce the arrogance of formal presentation and to keep them affordable both for the artist to create and for the viewer to take home.

Sculptor Terry Slade, professor emeritus of Hartwick College, has long been influenced by ancient monuments as a way to understand how humans exist in their environment. An exhibition of Roman marble heads placed on thin columns inspired the grouping of Slade’s heads, creating community within isolation.

Ron Throop- Paintings