On View September 1 - October 27

Curated by Thomas Piché Jr.

Special Events:

Sunday, September 9, 2pm

Gallery Talk by Lane Twitchell & Thomas Piché Jr.

Sunday, September 9, 3 - 5pm

Artist's Reception

Lane Twitchell is an artist working in Brooklyn who creates large-scale, vividly-colored paintings from intricately folded and cut paper.  The artist's elaborate, repetitive designs reference religion, landscape, suburbia and modern art. The exhibition will include 15 works. An an illustrated catalog featuring an essay by the curator, Thomas Piché Jr., will accompany the exhibition.

Mr. Twitchell was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1967. After completing his BFA at the University of Utah in 1993, he moved East to pursue his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Five years later Mr. Twitchell created a method of art making that, as Mr. Piché writes, allows Twitchell to "acknowledge his Mormon upbringing and respond to contemporary art ways."

The artist himself describes paper cutting as "a material-based solution to the modernist focus on painting." He begins his laborious and sequential process with a large sheet of architectural vellum, four to six feet square, which he folds and hand-cuts in the manner of children's paper snowflakes. The resulting designs are then mounted to a Plexiglas fronted panel, under and over painted, glazed with acrylic polymers, and selectively re-cut to reveal traces of earlier surfaces.

While the viewer is immediately engaged by the color and pattern of Mr. Twitchell's work, the paintings are also filled with references to complex narratives often drawn from his Mormon upbringing and from the artistic and cultural dynamics of New York City. In his effort to reëstablish a sort of faith system in his post-Mormon life, he also searches for meaningful connections in seemingly random events. Underpinning many of his paintings are interwoven references to coincidental alignments among people, places, dates, and events.

Most recently, the artist finds significant correspondence between the close proximity of this exhibition in Auburn to nearby Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, experienced his first visions and began the epic narrative that would lead his people to settle in the Great Basin desert of North America.

Curator Thomas Piché Jr. is currently the Gallery Director of the Roland Gibson Gallery at SUNY Potsdam.  He has an MA in museum studies with an art history concentration from Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts. With over 25 years of museum experience Piché was formerly the Assistant Director and Senior Curator at the Everson Museum of Art and has recently worked as an independent curator and art critic in the Syracuse area.

This exhibition is scheduled to travel to the following venues:

University Art Museum

University at Albany

State University of New York, Albany, NY

November 2, 2007 - January 6, 2008

Roland Gibson Gallery

State University of New York

Potsdam, NY

January 25 - February 23, 2008

This exhibit is sponsored by the Nelson B. Delavan Foundation, Fred L. Emerson Foundation, D.E. French Foundation, The Stanley W. Metcalf Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.