The Rhonda Schaller Studio is pleased to present Mix It Up a show featuring works in mixed media. Featured artists are Cullen Washington Jr., Rich Del Rosso, Rina Peleg, Julian Lesser, Priscilla Proudwoman Stadler, Catherine Henke, Hidemi Shimura, and Hye Yeon Nam.

This exhibition presents an array of contemporary mixed media that comment on society’s mixed messages; works that use juxtaposition as a visual vocabulary along with video, found objects, wallpaper, thread, paper, dirt and clay. The exhibition will open on Thursday February 14th and run through Saturday March 1st, 2008. An opening reception will be held for the artists on Saturday February 16th from 3-5 pm.

Urban life and identity are explored in Cullen Washington Jr.’s No Place Like Home, which uses personal and allusive images eloquently drawn and painted on torn wallpaper. Rich Del Rosso’s startling assembled paintings Jesus on my Cell Phone and Big Baby, create pictorial fragmentations and temporal simultaneity, while celebrating the notion that reality is in the eye of the beholder. Hye Yeon Nam’s Suffocation a grid composed of forty-eight plaster heads with a video projected onto glass in the center, explores identity and the two cultural spaces that the artist inhabits: having grown up as a girl in Confucian Korean society and now living as a foreigner in America.

Hidemi Shimura’s intricate Silent Invader looks at culture from another angle, using repetition of paper Bar Code symbols, with colorful embroidery thread and acrylic board, to ask whether bar codes are a CIA plot or aliens intent on taking over the world. Julian Lesser’s vocabulary is similar in shape and line, but his use of acrylic, ink, resin, felt and paper mache in Afternoon Garden, Onlooker, and Progress invoke another world entirely, one of lost beauty and abstracted sensuality.

Catherine Henke’s Spirit of the Trees #3 from recycled paper, clay, pigment & dried plants, and Rina Peleg’s Paleo-Tools made with white earthenware, hammers and broomsticks remind one of prehistoric artifacts, tools, and weapons found in an archeological dig. Priscilla Proudwoman Stadler’s The Case and The Scroll have an unearthed quality as well, using an old steel box filled with string and paper, and wrapped remnants of died paper and cheesecloth leaving the viewer to decide if what we contain lives on in spirit, or decays.