(BRANCHBURG, NJ) -- Raritan Valley Community College’s Arts & Design department will present Landscapes, an exhibition showcasing the work of New Jersey artists Katrina Bello, Jason Bereswill, and Sean Mount, September 27-October 22, in the Art Gallery at the College’s Branchburg campus. The show is being curated by RVCC Associate Professor and Art Gallery Director Darren McManus.
The exhibition will unite the perspectives of three artists who use the landscape, in its broadest definition, to explore various processes and techniques within their chosen media. Each artist also relies on the natural world as a conceptual framework to explore one’s relationship to and experience within the landscape.
The opening reception will be held Friday, October 1 from 5:00pm-7:00pm. As a precautionary measure against COVID-19, the reception will not include an artists’ talk or refreshments. The event is free of charge and open to the public. Face masks are required in the Art Gallery and in all College buildings.
Katrina Bello is a Filipino-American visual artist who works in drawing and video. Her works are informed by experiences with natural environments encountered during migration. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and the Philippines, and has been awarded residencies in the United States. She recently had solo exhibitions at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit and MO Space in Metro Manila in the Philippines. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts through a fellowship awarded by the Mid-Atlantic Foundation for the Arts. Bello is the founder of North Willow, an informal artist-run space that is dedicated to site-specific installation projects. She lives and works in Montclair.
Artist Jason Bereswill extends the tradition of travel-painting within the ease of contemporary correspondence, its flattening of distance, and accessibility of the remote. His process prioritizes the leadenness of paint over the immediateness of pictures. Bereswill received a BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where he was a postgraduate Painting Fellow. His work is held in important private and public collections internationally, such as the Jumex Museum, Hall Foundation, and Brant Foundation, and is currently on view at the National Gallery of Bermuda. Bereswill was awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2016.
Sean Mount is a self-taught painter who works in oil and watercolor to create realistic representations of his subjects, a favorite of which is the natural world. Composing his pictures through color, form, light, and with a contextual cultural awareness and emotional weight, Mount prefers to paint native versus invasive species of flora, while never losing sight of the woods as a whole. To him, the woods are so familiar and evocative in their specific forms once one turns away from screens and roads. To this point, Mount views creating complicated wilderness pictures to be an act of conviction, especially in 2021. For him, painting the landscape is not about chronicling or decorating – it’s about picking up an old thread and using it to comment upon our ultramodern life. Mount was awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 2019.
Gallery hours for the exhibition are Mondays, 3:00pm-8:00pm; Tuesdays, 10:00am-3:00pm; Wednesdays, 3:00pm-8:00pm; Thursdays, 10:00am-6:00pm; and Fridays, 1:00pm-4:00pm. Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) is located at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg, New Jersey.
IMAGES: (TOP) “Grand Fond” by Jason Bereswill; oil on canvas; 48" x 84"; 2021 (MIDDLE) “Hawak/Hold (Kai)” by Katrina Bello; video animation; duration: 20 seconds; 2019 (BOTTOM) “Epochal Violence 9” by Sean Mount; oil on linen; 47" x 63"; 2021
