The future of painting and image-making was the core of two day symposium at Rutgers University Fine Arts. With introductions to more than a dozen amazing painters, fantastically futuristic images, meme trees, 3D linticular prints and vast amounts of computer-based presentations in four information packed presentations.   DoN likes to go someplace cool for his birthday like NYC but Bruce Garrity one of the coordinators reached out to DoN about the symposium; it turns out Camden is pretty damn cool.  Libby Rosoff of artblog (OMFG!! – a blog legend) was the moderator for Friday’s panel, “Painting,  So What?“, Libby & DoN had only met through Facebook and now we actually know each other in real life.  Rosoff lead a strong discussion of the relevance of painting and what constitutes painting in the world today and really kept the discussion and presentations on target.  Each artist did a video presentation and talk about their art and then Libby moderated questions from the audience with the panel offering thoughtful opinions on what constitute art today.  

The symposium was organized by Margery Amdur and Bruce Garrity who authoritatively and wisely organized panel discussions about art and the relevance of image-making in the post-modern age.  The art on view in The Stedman Gallery is post-post modern contemporary with a futurist beam of thought-bubbles enveloping the diverse media on view in the galleries.  The future is here and it’s about “experience design”, from Camden to Outer Space and back, the dual show at Stedman Gallery and Hopkins House is a retrofitted future fantasy.

 Amy S. Kauffman – a UArts Alum, Holla Back, Girl! – makes her mark by folding tootsie roll, gum and candy wrappers in endless numbers of little paper boats or paper chains such as this enormous coil @ Hopkins House Gallery.  

Pam Longobardi mixes objects that have drifted loose from the giant plastic pollution blob floating in the middle of the oceans with images of plastic bits that have been deformed and reshaped by the ocean and cast up on the beach – check out driftwebs.com .  Pam’s story of how she discovered these objects is totally engrossing, as are her paintings such as “Surge” a painting full of the tension of tidal waves and fragile power grids.

DoN collected so much information to share about the other panelists including Carol Prusa‘s entrancing dome drawings with fiber optic lights, Liz Brown‘s dioramas of mismatched dumb stuff and Steve Pauley‘s gravestone-like carvings of vending machines, anthrax letters and homeland security advisory guides…deep.