Lisa Cooper is founder and director of Elisa Contemporary Art, and also a curator and art consultant. As part of her mission she is dedicated “to promoting the appreciation and collection of art as a way to enrich and heal our lives, our communities, and the world.” A portion of every gallery sale is donated to charities “helping underserved children heal through art.” Her gallery represents both emerging and established contemporary artists from around the world. (Read more about her below the article.) Lisa has served a a juror for Manhattan Arts International and I am honored to present her article about “Upcycle”, a current exhibition of art that transforms discarded objects into visual forms and sends a positive message. ~ Renée Phillips
“Upcycle” celebrates Artwork created from plastic bottles to metal tools, nails and commercial signage to magazines and junk mail which are reimagined into works of contemporary art and sculpture. The exhibition is being held at The Design Studio, 2393 Main Street in Bridgehampton, NY.
The featured artists include: Joseph Dermody, interdisciplinary artist; Carole Eisner, metal sculptor; Aurora Robson, mixed media artist; Adriana Rostovsky, mixed media artist; and Cheryl Wassenaar, hybrid artist. Each artist transforms elements discarded by others into new creative visions.
Sculptor Carole Eisner has worked with scrap and recycled metal for 40 years creating elegant, abstract forms welded in steel. According to Carole, she “works with the debris of our civilization,” reclaiming and reassembling disregarded fragments of buildings and bridges into art. The exhibit features three of her sculptures: Hot Dog, Mosquito and Bloom. In 2013, Carole was the recipient of the prestigious Syracuse University George Arents Alumni award for art.
Mixed media artist, Aurora Robson creates art from discarded materials, excess packaging and junk mail and often products collected from the waste stream. Aurora first started to work with plastics when she was in her studio, she noticed the out of the corner of her eye the way the light was reflecting from the garbage in the street below. The garbage was primarily comprised of plastic bottles. She noticed the shapes of the bottles were close to the diaphanous shapes within the painting she was creating and that maybe it would be more interesting to create her works from these nightmarish, polluting materials. That was the beginning of her transformative work intercepting the waste stream.
Today, her work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and public spaces including the McColl Center for Visual Art (NC), Southampton Art Center (NY), The John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art (FL), and Philadelphia Zoo (PA).
Born in Uruguay, Adriana Rostovsky was originally trained as an architect. Her art is informed and driven by a European history of conservation. This childhood penchant for collecting “unusable items” evolved into an adult passion for treasuring day to day objects and giving them new life in the form of combined media in relief. Today her artwork is created from magazines, papers and other discarded materials.
St. Louis artist, Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who explores the function of text in a hybrid practice of painting, sculpture, and design. She works primarily with found and fabricated commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting, contemporary advertising, and technology.
Interdisciplinary artist, Joseph Dermody identifies himself as a Dimensional Expressionist. His love for music, painting, sculpture and structural design have been synergistically cultivated from early childhood and continues to influence his work across disciplines. We are featuring two dimensional pieces, inspired by Yoga, and created with strips of plastic melamine.
To learn more about Lisa Cooper, gallery owner, curator and art consultant, visit the Elisa Contemporary Art gallery website: ElisaContemporaryArt.com
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