"Bits & Pieces" Opening Soon At The Frank Pembroke Pines: Running February 18 – April 30, 2021

Bits & Pieces: February 18 – April 30, 2021

The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery presents Bits & Pieces, an exhibition that presents layered ideas, lamination of contrasting styles, and paintings within paintings. Bits & Pieces analyzes the practice of collage –as both technique and conceptual framework- in the unexpected context of a virtual space. With a focus on artists who utilize cropped and fragmented imagery in their artistic production, this collaborative project disassembles and recombines existing works of art to create a new conversation about authorship, representation and subjectivity. Featured artists include Jason Aponte, Diego Gutierrez, Jefreid Lotti, Jackie Tileston, Jonathan Ryan Harvey, and Third Space solo artist, Twyla Gettert.

At once familiar and experimental, a collage is embedded with an implied transitional history. Whether pieced together by a young child in art class or inspired by the gritty socio-political provocations of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, a collage is a tactile object that one might handle and hold; an ephemeral collection of cut-outs and found elements visually stitched together over a passage of time. From frayed fibers along a torn paper’s edge, to the deliberate overlapping of seemingly disparate imagery and symbols, the medium and methodology of collage is inherently associated with the body and haptic experience regardless of its mode of delivery.

In Bits & Pieces, featured artists examine how these relationships function in a virtual exhibition - a multi-dimensional space in which the definitions and boundaries of texture, materiality, meaning and originality are transformed through technological intervention.

Painting atop thick layers of torn paper, board, plywood and curling corrugated cardboard, artist Diego Gutierrez combines loose figurative painting with abstract patches of color and childlike sketches. Jason Aponte merges different scenes from popular films and recognizable television shows, revealed in patches and strips of oscillating visibility. Via sumptuous impasto application, Jefried Lotti creates a mashup of memories and everyday objects referencing his experience of life as an immigrant. Jackie Tileston’s works incorporate pattern, delicate line work and imposing negative space so as to represent the contemporary sublime and syntheses of varying thought processes. Using street art and graphic design sensibilities, Jonathan Ryan Harvey blurs the lines between painting and digital collage to an indistinguishable degree. In the Third Space, Twyla Gettert’s abstract paintings are broken down into their principal formal elements and rebuilt as three dimensional models.