FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TOXITROPES

by Gary Richman

Corridor Gallery, Fine Arts Center Galleries, University of Rhode Island

April 4-May 18, 2008

Kingston, RI—--“The theme of the show, flowering plants that live on toxins rather than water or sunlight, is motivated by environmental concerns,” proffers Gary Richman, as he tries to throw us off course concerning the content of his upcoming exhibition.

Using the blossoming flower as a tongue-in-cheek metaphor, Gary Richman is a self-reflective artist as he plays with renewed originality on the traditional theme of birth/bloom/decay. As a senior Art professor at the University of Rhode Island Richman opposes the short-lived, uniformity/conformity type beauty of “pretty cut flowers.” He opts instead for what he calls TOXITROPES -- resilient perennial species that are idiosyncratic and can withstand abusive environments. “Here on the grounds of the horticultural college, heirloom varieties endure unperturbed by the exigencies and exegeses of the cut flower market,” he writes in his loaded Artist’s Statement. To push the metaphor, Richman is determined to embrace uncertain growth and its dark side, rather than the apparent buoyancy of a short-lived spring bouquet. In these ways, Richman cleverly connects the theme of his show to his own body of work and attitudes toward his career.

Gary Richman is a devoted artist and long-term professor. He has spawned many talented students during his tenure who have graduated to become working artists. His own artmaking is derived from accumulated process, including striking processings of the natural world. Accordingly, it is the provisional medium of collage that he favors, and his collage is combined with expertly painted elements.

Richman cherishes the endlessly inventive process of making as his final artistic products, the large-scale collage-paintings to be shown in the Corridor Gallery, will make clear. Patterns in his work result from sprays, paints and resist techniques, and new methods always are tested through trial and error. With an intensive background in Printmaking (an MFA from Indiana University), Richman knits together a pictorial surface that is bright and self-referential. While non-narrative, it is sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant. Richman’s space is abstract, and hence resists representation, but he privileges nature in the kind of encounter with the work he would like to have happen—transient effects, accidental markings and motions that connote a sense of passage.

In his latest works or better, “specimens,” Richman makes art that argues for uniqueness and originality. These are considerations that sustain him as a hybrid working and teaching artist, an individual himself demonstrating the resiliency and tenacity of some fantastic “toxitrope.”