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Past Show • November 1 - December 1, 2018

NEW WORK
Keith Hollingworth and GK Khalsa

OPENING / Amherst Arts Night Plus: Thursday, November 1, 5-8 pm
​ART FORUM / All Welcome: Thursday, November 29, 7:30 pm

Free and open to the public,
the Art Forum is supported in part by a grant from the Amherst Cultural Council,
a local agency, supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
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We Are One Family, detail by Keith Hollingworth

Hubcap Rosette by Guru Karam Khalsa

​Keith Hollingworth will exhibit two large-scale works. We are One Family consists of a grid of over 100 canvases, each 10 by 10 inches, with an image that Hollingworth selected each day and collaged onto the canvas panels. 40 Black Writers is a collection of 40 collages on paper, each 11 by 14 inches, unframed, and arranged in a grid.
 
Hollingworth notes that his initial inspiration for We are One Family came from the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art — a sprawling collection of over 500 photographs depicting common themes of human existence and celebrating humanity across cultures around the world. But sixty years later, a very different series of images from around the world confronted Hollingworth. “In 2015, there was a huge crisis in the Mediterranean,” he explains. “I still have on my desk that photo of that little boy who was three, who washed up on the shore of Greece. It was a horrible situation and pointed to the wide variety of human suffering that continues to go on in the world.” It also coincided, he recalls, with the rise of Donald Trump, and his bigotry and racist statements and actions. 
 
In response, Hollingworth proceeded to set the parameters for a pastiche, in effect, The Family of Man reinterpreted for these times. Choosing a ten-by-ten-inch format and limiting his source material to the New York Times, each day he scanned the newspaper for photographs of people around the world. He collaged those images on the canvases, and the accumulated images, installed in a grid, span eight by nine feet. As he notes, “I thought it was a good time to bring back The Family of Man, because of man's inhumanity to man at this time.”

GK Khalsa will show wall-mounted sculptures made from wood and paintings in varying shades of primary color. Always experimenting, for this show he turned to recycled materials from his wood shop, such as bendable wood strips, and incorporated one found object, a hubcap. “I was drawn to bent wood as a new material because of its capacity to portray movement,” he explains. In contrast, the geometric designs brought out in the piece called Hubcap Rosette were inspired by stained glass church windows. As Khalsa notes, the scale of his new work relates to the dimensions of the walls in the gallery. “I want the work to be physically and visually accessible to the viewer,” he says.