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Between Us Is a Namelessness
The three artists in Between Us is a Namelessness work around the poetics of observation. Through invented tools and observational practices, each artist proposes methods to record and quantify the intangible. What does measuring the space between oneself and a memory or an idea mean? Through cyclical and repetitive processes, all three artists engage with nonlinear time and complex relationships to space.
Rick Salafia offers a series of ‘Instruments’ ruled to measure absence, longing, and subjective distances rather than inches or centimeters. Megan Biddle’s sculptures measure the volume of hollow spaces, imbuing absence with surface tension, gravity, and weight. Julianna Foster engages family archival photos of scientific glacier observatories in Greenland, offering landscapes which speak also to the inner worlds of ‘objective’ observers. Throughout, shifts in scale offer disorientation from the familiar, posing challenges to the concept of detached (neutral/objective) observation in favor of rich relationships to emptiness, and a suggestion of a negative space which is always/already full.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Megan Biddle is an interdisciplinary artist whose work orbits between sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking. Rooted in glass, she produces experiment and process-driven work with an emphasis on materials and their distinct characteristics. As an observer of nature, she responds to the elusive and subtle, reflecting on variations of time, cycles of growth and erosion.
Biddle has exhibited internationally at such venues as XO Projects INC., Brooklyn, NY; the Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Galerie VSUP, Czech Republic; and the 700IS Experimental Film Festival, Iceland. Her work was acquired into the American Embassy’s permanent collection in Riga, Latvia. She has taught at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, and Oxbow School of Art. She currently teaches in the Glass Program at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is a Co-Director and a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia, PA where she lives and works.
Julianna Foster is an associate professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She earned a BFA in Design from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NJ, and an MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking from the University of the Arts, PA. Foster has exhibited her work internationally, had her work included in private collections nationally, and had her photographs, essays, and interviews included in numerous publications. Her award-winning project, Geographical Lore, is a selection of photographic works considering how the natural world can be represented. Combining photographic images of the natural world and hand-made, assembled environments, a blend of the fabricated and the “real” image plays with ideas of memory and representation. Foster has collaborated with various artists on projects, including creating artist multiples, artist books, and a series of photographs and videos as well as self-published two photo/text books, lone hunter (2018) and to lean on the bend (2022).
Rick Salafia received his BFA from the University of Rhode Island, Providence, RI, and his MFA from Rutgers, Newark, NJ. His work has been exhibited nationally and is held in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, CA. He has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. Salafia currently teaches Foundation Design, Digital Media, and Graduate Studio classes at Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA. He has formerly taught at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA; Carleton College, Northfield, MN; and Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA.
