"Living Shrines" and "Balancing Acts"
March 25, 2015
For Immediate Release
March 25, 2015
Contact: Joy Reed Belt
405.528.6336
jreedbelt@jrbartgallery.com
EVENTS:
OPENING RECEPTION:
Friday, April 3, 2015
6:00-10:00 p.m.
“Living Shrines” and “Balancing Acts”
Internationally recognized photographer, Siegfried Halus, and Oklahoma mixed media artist, Paul Medina, will be featured in April at JRB Art at The Elms Gallery located in the historic Paseo Arts District. The exhibit opening will be held from 6:00 until 10:00 p.m. in conjunction with the Paseo First Friday Gallery Walk.
In April when most of the world celebrates Easter JRB Art at the Elms will present “Living Shrines” a collection of shrines found throughout New Mexico photographed by Siegfried Halus. He has captured these shrines in all their colorful idiosyncratic splendor; arranged in living rooms and bedrooms; mounted on dressers, mantels, and refrigerators; set in grotto structures in gardens or on roadsides. The tradition of home shrines first began in the Southwest during the colonial period, when priests often traveled to homes to perform mass, novenas, baptisms and marriages. These religious ceremonies called for makeshift altars. The practice continues today as the act of devotion expresses itself in the quest for intimacy with the sacred. Personal altars allow for devotion in daily life by creating sacred places to meditate, pray, or reflect.
No less spiritual in form and context are the series of clay sculptures entitled “Balancing Acts,” by Paul Medina. His concept began when he started contemplating the vast and extreme differences people have in their belief systems and the global turmoil that results without reconciliation. Medina poses the question “How can we find balance in the world if we cannot find balance within ourselves.” As his creative process evolved, Medina’s sculptures began to symbolize the very real problems the world faces: climate change, climbing population, world hunger and war.
Siegfried Halus, was born in Salzburg Austria and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight years old. He apprenticed with his father, a liturgical sculptor in Philadelphia, until his late teens. Halus received his undergraduate degree in sculpture from The University of Pennsylvania. After his graduate studies in sculpture at the University of Hartford, Halus began exploring photography as his primary focus. Halus has taught at numerous universities and colleges including The University of Connecticut, Tufts University, The Boston Museum School, Institute of American Indian Art, The University of California, Pont-Aven School of Art, and the Santa Fe Community College, where he taught and directed the Fine Arts Program. Publications include Living Shrines; Idea Photographic, After Modernism; Through the Lens, Creating Santa Fe; Aperture, 82 and Aperture, 93; In Search of Dominguez & Escalante; Photographing the 1776 Spanish Expedition Through the Southwest; and Connecticut Fiddler.
Oklahoma born Paul Medina is mainly of Spanish and French descent with a variety of other ethnicities thrown in as well. Although not raised in the traditional ethnic heritage of his ancestors, his work, in many ways, reflects the artistic traditions of those cultures. He has spent his life learning of these cultures that have, without doubt, marked his work in some subconscious way. In addition to galleries that have represented Medina over the years, he also exhibited at the Oklahoma Museum of Art, The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
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