'Recent Works: Fred Holland' Opens at Amelie A. Wallace Gallery

ransforming discarded materials into meditations on fragility, impermanence and regeneration is the basis of the latest exhibit at the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at SUNY College at Old Westbury.

In the self-titled "Recent Works: Fred Holland," the artist employs a variety of elements, including discarded canes, crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs often found during his nocturnal solitary walks in his neighborhood. He either copies these objects by carving and gluing blue Styrofoam or converts the things themselves into a cluster of conceptual components or kinetic sculptures (e.g., a motor rotates the wheels of a wheelchair suspended from the wall). Using fragile materials to replicate these discarded objects once used by the elderly and disabled, Holland endows the new, easily breakable, prop-like elements with a ghostly presence, turning them into symbols of the marginalized members of society.

Holland simulates objects not only in industrial materials but also in organic materials, a choice that poses the issue of preservation.

The exhibition opened on January 28 and runs until February 28, 2008. There will be an opening reception and artist's gallery talk held from 4-7 p.m. on February 5. 2008. Admission for the gallery is free and the exhibit will be open from Monday-Thursday from 1-5 p.m. and by appointment.

A diversely accomplished artist, Fred Holland first studied painting at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio, then moved to Philadelphia, where he involved himself in improvisational dance and theatre, working with dancers, poets and actors. In the early 1980s, Holland joined Tanzfabrik, a dance company in West Berlin, where he worked extensively with the singer, composer, and choreographer Meredith Monk, whose interdisciplinary performances made a great impact on the artist. Upon returning to the U.S., Holland choreographed and performed narrative dances at The Kitchen, The Ohio Theater, and Dance Theater Workshop's Bessie Schonberg Theater, using visually charged stage sets that he designed himself. Holland returned to painting and sculpture in the 1990s. His earlier theater experience led him to emphasize the sensory quality of materials he chose. His artwork became, in effect, a theatre of all the senses.

The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery is located in the Campus Center of SUNY College at Old Westbury and is managed under the direction of the faculty of the College's Visual Arts Department. Through courses of study that lead to B.A. and B.S. degrees in Visual Arts, the College prepares its students for careers in the art, publishing, graphic and web design worlds. The program features faculty members of international acclaim, including Guggenheim Fellows and National Endowment for the Arts award winners whose work is represented in the collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.