News

It's been almost a year since Jill Larson moved to Pittsburgh from Atlanta. An artist and independent curator, Larson was enjoying a successful career in the southern city until her husband found a new job in Western Pennsylvania, necessitating a move north.

"It was kind of a detour for me personally and career-wise," Larson says of the move. "I was teaching, and I had a nice lifestyle in Atlanta."

Within three months of moving to Squirrel Hill with her family, she started to notice how vibrant the area's visual arts scene is. "Here people seem to be much more interested in buying art and having art be part of their lives than in Atlanta," Larson says.

That got her excited, and her curiosity - which comes naturally with being a curator - was piqued. That's when she decided to put together an exhibition that combined works by artists she had known in Atlanta with works by Pittsburgh artists she was quickly discovering.

"The idea was to share what's happening between the two cities, and I'm kind of the bridge that can do that," Larson says.

"Detour" debuted in May at Atlanta's ArtSpot, an alternative, nonprofit gallery there. Now the show is on display at Fe Gallery - pronounced "effie" - in Lawrenceville, a new gallery that Larson opened because "I could not find a gallery here that was interested in the show."

But that shouldn't stop one from making a detour to see the show, because the 20-plus works by the nine artists in this exhibition are surprisingly well executed and just as engaging.

Ironically, the title Larson gave the exhibition seems to relate to the detour in Larson's life, but, says the curator, it actually relates to the works in the show, which were all created by nontraditional media.

"They're what I consider a detour from traditional means of working," Larson says. "A lot of this work is from everyday materials - nail polish, masking tape, leaves, ladders."

For example, among the local artists included in the show, Cheryl Capezzuti's sculpture made from dryer lint is a real departure. A life-size, wall-mounted figure of a pregnant woman, it is made entirely of small square patches of dryer lint. The lint was collected as part of Capezzuti's "National Lint Project," in which the artist invites people from all over the country to collect and send her lint from their clothes dryers.

Other works by Pittsburgh artists that make use of unusual materials are three sublime abstract collages made of masking tape and silver leaf by Kevin O'Toole, four tribal-like figural sculptures made of translucent rubber and found objects by Adrienne Heinrich, and a tower of stepstools by architect Paul Rosenblatt that resembles one of Constantin Brancusi's endless columns. Additionally, Judith Schumacher takes the notion of detour even further with her display of 145 white traffic cones that fill the floor in the back of the gallery in an arrangement that forces an unusual route to a rear exit door.

Of the Atlanta artists, Lilly Cannon's snow-globes are a detour from reality. Souvenirs from fantasyland - the ethereal one, not the Disney version - they feature images and icons from places such as Eden, Shangri-La and Never-Never Land.

As for the others, Scott Ingram's drips of different colored nail polish on paper take literal detours, while Gregor Turk maps out the continental United States for visitors in 48 leaves, each cut into the shape of a state. Lastly, Leslie Kneisel's embroidered pillows of her drawings that deal with relationships and gender issues are for anything but the love seat.

For now, Larson's Fe Gallery exists only as a place to display this one exhibition. As for the future of Fe Gallery, Larson says, "It's up in the air."

She is applying for a grant from The Sprout Fund to help keep the gallery going. About which, she says, "I don't know if we'll get the funding. If we do, the gallery will continue. If we don't, it probably won't."

Larson says if she can keep the gallery going she would like to continue featuring works by locals alongside those by artists from other cities.

"I think that by doing that, just that, it places Pittsburgh artists into a larger context still in their hometown so that they don't have to go outside of Pittsburgh to exhibit with artists from other areas," Larson says. "I think that's really vital to an artist's career, for their work to be placed with other artwork of a high caliber or quality."

With that focus as its mission, Larson says, the gallery would fill a gap in the local visual arts scene. "I see a need for a gallery like this because I haven't seen that too much here in Pittsburgh," she says.

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News