Archived Gallery Exhibit and Events

URI Feinstein Providence Campus presents

TWOSOMES/URBAN EXTENSIONS
by Mark Chester & Ofill Echevarria

April 2-27 2012
with a Gallery Night Reception April 19, 5-9pm.

The exhibit creates a bilingual - multicultural conversation between the works of two remarkable artists in different media from different cultural worlds.

Mark Chester presents an exhibit of the photography from a lifetime of travel across the globe captivatingly presented in pairs of seemingly unrelated images which bare remarkable relationships, they engage in a dialogue on the wall. His traveling exhibit TWOSOMES is also available in book form. Chester says, “Photography is the medium that best expresses my observations and travel experiences…they are pictures of people, places and things that have touched me in some emotional, intellectual and whimsical way. The creative process for making photographs is the same, whether I am on the street in Boston, documenting daily life in Cuba or an airplane factory in Shanghai. I observe the human condition as it unfolds before me, attempting to capture that telling moment of people interacting or the juxtaposition of people in their environment. The process is a combination of thinking, intuition and anticipation of the subject…it seems to all come together in a nanosecond…for me a “finished piece” can be a single image or a series of photographs that best sums up the story that evokes a reaction.

Ofill Echevarria, Cuban-American painter and multimedia artist captures realistic images from urban life that explore the world beneath and beyond the surface in a dynamic dialogue with the soul. Echevarria suggests, “My painting talks about a Renaissance, where man once again becomes the center of all reflection and metaphor. By capturing the ephemeral images in our high-definition era, my work transports us to an environment that is purely human yet is governed by technology.” URI Professor Thomas Morin describes the work of the Cuban American artist Ofill Echevarria, as having a “…fundamental preoccupation with the underlying world of either conscious or subconscious reflective, or existential, images that determine the way in which each and every one of us views the world in which we live on a daily basis. While the reflective images of his art float between the internal responses to life that each of us have vis-à-vis the world we all see and the sensations that result from these experiences, Ofill proceeds to intensify his view of the indeterminate quality of human experience, especially within the construct of the urban environment, as experiences that are refractory in their very essence…in the work of Echevarria, the human condition is such that the roles of visual and emotional refraction bend the refracted visual and emotional surfaces of the images that we experience on a daily basis. In this way, reality in the work…is in a constant state of transformation and redefinition…the human soul is restive and the eye deceptive…the idea that political and social dogma of any stripe cannot counterbalance the inevitability of transformation and refraction.”