Multi-media group art exhibition ‘Color and Light’ to open Feb. 7 at WestConn Gallery

DANBURY, Connecticut —  The Gallery at The Visual & Performing Arts Center at Western Connecticut State University, 43 Lake Ave. Extension in Danbury, will present the exhibit “Color and Light” on view Feb. 7 through March 2, 2025, featuring the work of artists Fritz Horstman, Anne Lindberg, Greg Lock, Pete Mauney, Colleen McGuire, and Julia Rooney.

This exhibition’s focus is as simple as the title suggests: six artists explore the interaction of color and the phenomenon of light, considerations that have captivated and challenged visual artists throughout history, even as the tools and techniques of creating art have expanded. This multi-media exhibition includes works in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, cyanotype, animation, virtual environments and video.

The gallery’s exhibition shares its title with a song performed in Act I of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, “Sunday in the Park with George,” which imagines the creation of Post-Impressionist painter George Seurat’s 1884 masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grand Jatte.” The musical will be presented by WestConn’s Department of Theatre Arts Feb. 21 – March 2. Seurat’s preoccupation with understanding optics and perception via the artistic process holds just as true for visual artists today.

On Thursday, Feb. 27, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., participating artist Fritz Horstman, whose book, “Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Alber’s Color Experiments” was published by Yale University Press in 2024, will discuss the book and conduct a workshop using the Albers color experiments highlighted in it. The event is open to the public and materials are provided. (Note: the gallery will open at 6 p.m. prior to the talk and workshop for participants). A closing reception for “Color and Light” is scheduled for noon on Sunday, March 2, 2025, at The Gallery at the Visual & Performing Arts Center, WCSU, 43 Lake Ave. Extension in Danbury. Regular gallery hours are Tuesday through Thursday noon to 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 1 to 4 p.m. Admission to the reception and exhibition is free and open to the public; donations to support the programs of the Department of Art will be accepted.  Reservations to attend the opening reception or workshop should be made online at www.wcsuvpac.eventbrite.com.

 

Artist biographical notes

Fritz Horstman is an artist, curator, and educator based in Bethany. Recent exhibitions of his drawings, prints, sculptures, and installations have been shown across Europe and the U.S. He currently has a solo exhibition at the New Britain Museum of American Art, with another to open at Planthouse Gallery in New York in April. Recent residencies include Bauhaus Dessau, The Arctic Circle Residency, and Shiro Oni in Onishi, Japan. He has curated exhibitions in Italy, Ireland, Croatia, Norway, and the United States, including “Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper,” which opened at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, in 2024. Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, he has lectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l’École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Lebanese American University in Beirut, The Royal Academy of Art in London, and many other institutions. He is the author of “Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments” published by Yale University Press in 2024. He received his B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is represented by Municipal Bonds in San Francisco and Planthouse Gallery in New York.

 

 

 

Anne Lindberg is a multi-disciplinary artist who works within expanded definitions of drawing, sculpture, and textile in two and three dimensions. Currently, Lindberg is preparing for exhibitions at Haw Contemporary (2025), Academy Art Museum (2025), Hudson River Museum (2026) and a collaborative exhibition with a poet at T Space in Rhinebeck, NY (2027). Her site-specific work, “passage,” is currently on view at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts through 2026. Recent exhibitions include: Secrist Beach, The Textile Museum at George Washington University Museums, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Hangar Y (Paris) and SEPTEMBER. Fourteen of Lindberg’s drawings were recently purchased by the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A five-story mirrored glass wall drawing was commissioned for NYU Langone Health’s new women’s health center at the Citicorp Building (New York). Lindberg is currently working on a large-scale public commission for the Des Moines International Airport (2026). Her work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Akron Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rachofsky Collection, Collection of Christy and Bill Gautreaux, NYSE Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company, among others. The first monograph of her work was released in late 2022 by Durer Editions (Dublin, Ireland) and she is recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, Art Omi International Artists Residency, American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Lindberg holds a B.F.A. from Miami University and an M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her studio is in Ancramdale, New York.

 

Greg Lock was raised in a farming community in the Fens of East Anglia, England, and is now based in the Hudson Valley region of New York. With technological specialties in 3D computer graphics, photogrammetry, digital photography, and sculpture, Lock’s experimental practice examines perceptual anomalies in virtual environments. He has shown his work internationally, including in museums such as Today Art Museum, Beijing, China and The Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, England, as well as numerous educational galleries and independent experimental venues. Recently, Lock participated in the Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago near the North Pole; February 2025 he will attend Gibraltar Point Arts Centre Residency in Toronto, Canada. Lock received a B.A. (Hons) in Fine Art from Bretton Hall College, West Yorkshire, England, before completing his M.F.A. in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design, New York. He then received an M.A. in Creative Technology at the University of Salford, England. Currently a Ph.D. candidate with the TransArt Institute for Creative Research affiliated with Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, England, Lock has been the director of the Photography, Film and Related Media program at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville since 2011.

 

Pete Mauney is a Tivoli, New York-based photographer who works almost exclusively at night – along roadsides, in rural fields and meadows, or the undefined urban sites adjacent to airports and their flightpaths. Setting up several cameras at a time to take photographs, he utilizes long exposures to capture the luminous light effects, both natural and artificial, that we often only register peripherally, if at all. Mauney’s light-and-color-scapes lend bleak and desultory urban scenes a dazzling sheen and allow viewers a window to the frenzy of luminosity fireflies exhibit in the summertime, even while their existence is threatened by light pollution and other environmental factors. Mauney maintains an active Instagram account where he catalogues his work and has most recently exhibited his work in “Here Now: Contemporary Photographers of the Hudson Valley” at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, New York. He recently published “While We Slept” (Goff, 2024), a book of firefly images he has created over the last decade.

 

 

 

 

 

Colleen McGuire works from direct observation, often en plein air. Her subject matter is her immediate environment, including within her home in Sharon, places in her hometown, and the rolling Litchfield County landscape. She sees her paintings as a visual record of routine encounters in daily life, with the intention of capturing sensations of light and space. Drawn to architecture and nature, varying times of day, and the seasons, finding motifs in familiar surroundings allows McGuire the opportunity for deep visual examination through the materiality of paint. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Colleen McGuire: Night and Day” (Standard Space, Sharon Connecticut) and “Understory” (Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, New York). McGuire received her B.F.A. in Painting from SUNY Purchase and her M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Western Connecticut State University, where she now works as an adjunct professor in the Department of Art.

 

 

Julia Rooney is sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, and creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Rooney’s paintings reference specific technological structures that have come to condition how and what we see, including framing devices, webs, windows, pixilation, algorithms and QR codes. Working at radically different scales, she mimics the way online spaces often juxtapose the micro with the macro, distorting one’s sense of reality. Some of Rooney’s recent solo and two-person shows include “In the weather of it” (2024, Below Grand, NYC), “Blueprint” (2023, Band of Vices, Los Angeles, California), “Album” (2023, Freight+Volume, NYC), and “Screen Shot” (2022, Jennifer Terzian, Litchfield, Connecticut). Rooney has been awarded fellowships and residencies through The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She received her B.A. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her M.F.A. in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art.

For more information, contact the Department of Art at robeaul@wcsu.edu or Communications and Marketing at pr@wcsu.edu.

 

 

 

 

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