Now on view @ the Patchogue Village Garden
PAC’s 9th Annual Sculpture Garden exhibition featuring works by: Byeongdoo Moon • Michael Hennessy • Loretta Oberheim • Jessica Torres
This annual project is a Patchogue Arts Council, Village of Patchogue & Patchogue Garden Club collaboration.
The Patchogue Garden Club was founded in a vacant lot in 1996 to develop and maintain a public garden. The club seeks to educate the community in matters of design, gardening, and garden maintenance. The members have since assisted in planting and beautification projects throughout the village. The garden has hosted sculpture exhibits since 2014.
There are a number of perspectives for which you can organize the works in this year’s sculpture garden. They can be considered by artists, materials or content. The exhibition includes two artists with long careers in public art and two making their debut. Mike Hennessey has been a longtime fixture on the Long Island art scene and his work has been included in outdoor exhibitions throughout the Northeast. Byeong-Doo Moon began his career in Korea, moved to Colorado in 2016 where he showed extensively. He came to Long Island in 2021 from where he launched his work into sculpture gardens throughout the Northeast. Loretta Oberheim began her career as a two dimensional designer but lost her ability to work graphically in 2013 after suffering neurological impairment. In 2018 she developed a new way of working which grew from relief to fully dimensional sculpture. Jessica Torres is currently an art student at Stony Brook University.
From a materials point of view, three sculptors with four pieces work in metal while Oberheim works with materials found in nature, mixed materials and Tyvek, a synthetic paper. The metal in Torres’ sculpture is recycled and offers its history of use and natural decay through oxidation. Hennessey works with clean metal stock which is coated with paint. Stainless steel, the material in Moon’s sculptures needs no finish remaining and maintains its original brightness.
Content is derived from subject, form and material. In Finding Lost Color, 2023 Oberheim alters drab sheets of Tyvek by a process of coloration and ‘burning into colorful organic forms reminiscent of flowers or coral. Suspended within the twist and turns of branches and vines the forms seems to struggle upward recalling the process of heliotropism (moving toward the sun) exhibited in vegetal life. With its colorful flourishes and upward movement, the piece offers an insight into its creator’s journey.
Upside Down Tree, 2023 presents a conundrum. A geometric prism (box) floats in the upper reaches of the sculpture, or the lower reaches (roots) of an upturned tree. Could Torres be referring to basic materials from which all life is formed? A final thought, the process of rusting or oxidation is very much related to the biology of energy formation, hence the red of rust and of blood.
The relationship between the organic and geometric takes a formal turn in Crucifixion, 1982/2023 as Hennessey contemplates the evolution of form into symbol, much as did the painter Piet Mondrian. The sculpture, with its multiple horizontal and vertical elements, stands between the form of a tree with its spreading roots and branches reaching both upward and downward, a form bounding in symbolic connation and its ultimate simplification into a cross, an iconic form which has become one of the world’s most potent symbols.
Moon offers us two works which are in diametric opposition. Still Life, 2016 offers another example of heliotropism. Recalling a sprout or seedling, its stainless steel rods are tightly wound into dense packets of energy reaching upward. Different Layer of Time, 2023 responds to the uncertain direction of Upside Down Tree and the upward momentum of the other pieces with a full on downward dive. Its rhythmic overlay of linear stainless steel rods creates both fluidity and buoyancy, the essence of undersea life.
The sculpture garden exhibit will remain on view through October in Patchogue’s Community Garden. PAC/MoCA LI would like to offer gratitude to the Patchogue Garden Club for sharing its beautiful space with us.
Annual Thematic Mural collaboration with Patchogue – Medford Library
Now through May 2024
Processing: Your Brain in Motion, 2023, Tiny Collective
The Patchogue Arts Council (PAC) and Patchogue-Medford Library (PMLIB) have been collaborating since 2018 on an annual project called the Themescape Mural Project. The two organizations partner often to bring the arts to the community and are a prime example when it comes to the art of collaboration.
A new mural is commissioned every spring and is painted on the south side of the Patchogue Medford Library! The mural wall is one of the largest in the Village of Patchogue and faces Terry Street, officially zoned as Long Island’s newest Arts District.
An artist is chosen from an international call for proposals with a theme inspired by the Patchogue Arts Council’s festival season. The artist chosen is provided with a stipend and support to create the centerpiece of the arts festival season. Artists also give talks and workshops based on their mural theme and the community at large is encouraged to visit and watch the entire process unfold during the month of June.
ABOUT | Processing: Your Brain in Motion, 2023, Tiny Collective
The middle-ground colored shapes reference the brain and its Rubik’s cube-like ability to help us achieve a near limitless number of possible interpretations of input. The flower with its accompanying dendrites is piecing together more blocks in the puzzle of human perception; the eye represents our own unique perspective, weaving in and out of our consciousness, creating who we are; and who we are informs our further experiences…and round and round it goes. In response to PAC P.OV.’s call for work the mural explores “Boundless horizons, formed from infinite centers”…our brain is the center of all interpretations.
This project is made possible with support from: Patchogue Arts Council • Museum of Contemporary Art L.I., Patchogue – Medford Library, Friends of the Library, Brinkmann’s Hardware of Blue Point, Suffolk County, and NYSCA.
The annual sculpture garden and mural project are part of PAC P.O.V. Festival Season;
PAC P.O.V. | Boundless horizons formed from infinite centers.
Every person has a unique set of life experiences affecting the way they look at the world. Some take their experiences and turn them into unique expressions that we call art. Art, then, is a unique expression from a distinct point of view. These works of art are given to a world of individual viewers whose interpretations are based on their unique experiences. A myriad of artworks and an infinite number of interpretations. For 2023 PAC-MoCA L.I. will explore through events, open calls, and curated exhibitions the infinite possibilities of what art can be.
Please help us continue to provide free programming and artist resources like the above!