Bluestone Fine Art Gallery: Amie Potsic, Danielle Bursk and Gregory Brellochs

DoN had not been to Old City in a long while for a First Friday art crawl, parking and traffic sucks, so, DoN took the bus.  $2.00! with live entertainment included ; ), and a chance to watch the cityscape go by, delivering DoN to the intersection of Market & 3rd Streets right into the hubbub of street artists, musicians and even a puppeteer capitalizing on the monthly crowds of young couples and art lovers.  A short stroll down Third to Vine Street is the new Bluestone Fine Art Gallery, just around the corner from the Painted Bride.  The current show includes work by three artists – Amie Potsic‘s photographs, Danielle Bursk‘s ink on paper and Gregory Brellochs‘ charcoal and ink drawings.  The artists are using different media but the theme of the wonders of nature run through the show like a stream of consciousness.

Bluestone Fine Art Gallery: Amie Potsic

Amie Potsic, Made in China: Yangtze River, archival pigment print

“My mission is to create a process, an action comes from that, whether it’s experiencing more art or it’s doing something political.  That’s the hope, I mean, so,  you see something like this, you see something in these images and you have a conversation about it, then you see images about that in the news, then you get an e-mail about signing a petition, and then you see a thing about going to a demonstration and you do something!”  Amie Potsic‘s scroll-like photographs of trees have a sense of being foreign, the Chinese calligraphy, done by a poet in Taiwan, and the perpendicular typography subtly leads the mind’s eye across the ocean to a distant land.  But these trees are probably shot right here in Philly presenting the bewildering notion that maybe China owns these trees and therefore made them.

“Because it’s a cumulative effect of impressions and influences and with all that, nobody does anything.  Part of the reason I do this work, some of it was done in Rittenhouse Square, the most chic section of Philly, and there was a very graphic demonstration by a Chinese group that follow the Falun Gong religion, which essentially is Buddhism.  But you’re not allowed to practice organized religion in China in that way.  So people were jailed and tortured physically and there was a demonstration in the middle of Rittenhouse Square with patients on gurneys being mock-tortured, it was shocking, I got the materials they were handing out and that made me reference my audience with the Dalai Lama and learning about what happened in Tibet and putting those two things together.  At the same time I was photographing images of trees in this sort of long scroll format and realized they look like Chinese scroll prints, I saw the demonstration and had been thinking of these issues and all these things came together to form this project.”  The metaphors, memes and memories exuding from Potsic’s photographs are like an epic poem which stirs the mind with beauty, mystery, wonder with trepidation for the future and forgotten lessons from the past.

Amie Potsic @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery in Old City, Philadelphia.

Danielle Bursk, Avalon, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Danielle Bursk, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Danielle Bursk, ink on paper @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

DoN commented to Danielle Bursk that he noticed her drawings now include a defined horizon.  “The horizon line is the most control you can exert as an artist and I just wanted to try something that was more of a landscape…but the work is also inspired by the ocean.  I grew up in Florida, I spent a lot of time at the beach, I still go to the beach quite a bit, if you just sit and stare at the ocean there’s a lot that goes on.  I don’t like it to be too representational, so if you approach it thinking that way you can see that it also looks like hills or a tidal wave, with all my work I like an open ended-ness where you can bring what you want to it and interpret it how you want.  So, yes, there’s definitely a horizon line, it’s sort of a landscape but not quite.”  DoN also noted that Bursk’s drawings could be considered still life like a close up of fabric or fur, “…even something under a microscope.”  Danielle Bursk explained to DoN how she’s trying new things like working with a square image as opposed to rectilinear and smaller works using oblique strategies to force changes in her work with arbitrary constraints.  Even though the horizon line is consistent across the smaller works in the show, each one is unique and separate from the others.  “In fact, I took each one off the wall before I started the next one because I didn’t want to be influenced by it, I was excited when I looked back because some are really dark, some are a little lighter, some have bigger movements, so they all work very differently.”

Gregory Brellochs @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery

Forest Floor, graphite on paper, Gregory Brellochs @ Bluestone Fine Art Gallery.

Gregory Brellochs is an art professor at Camden County College and is a father of two, “I came on there seven years ago now, they brought me in to teach sculpture and design…and it really gives me the opportunity to shape the program, work with the curriculum, and have direct contact with a lot of the students and we’ve turned it into a much stronger transfer program.”  DoN asked where Brellochs finds time to create his heroically scaled drawings?  “I just got done with these large curving drawings, you saw one at the CFEVA gallery, that was the fourth one that I’ve done and there’s one that I thought I had finished maybe a year ago and then I just had to go back in and basically quadrupled the detail.  The minuteness of the branches and roots, that became the longest drawing that I’ve ever done, the most labor intensive went over four hundred hours of drawing.  Um, but, it’s something I love to do.  And once the kids are in bed, I make a pot of coffee and up to the studio I go to work until I’m too tired.”

DoN asked if the images came out of Gregory’s mind?  “Yeah, I always work from my imagination and it’s really important to me that that’s how I arrive at that image because it’s not meant to be just a facsimile of Nature, a repetition of something that exists but something that really comes out of the mind’s eye.  All as a process of drawing, so that sometimes I don’t start with a composition in mind but a general form language…working with tree root-like structures I kind of allow it to evolve and I find that I am much more in tune with the work when I approach it that way without preliminary sketches or some kind of fixed idea in mind, it allows me to breathe life into the work because it evolves organically.”

The Bluestone Gallery of Fine Art will be open this weekend, October 15th and 16th, as part of the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours 2011,  Gregory Brellochs will be hosting.

Photos by DoN