This September, the 3rd Street Gallery is proud to present a multifaceted program that includes a month-long sculptural installation in the Annex Gallery and an evening of poetry and film that will offer visitors a time to reflect upon the inner strength and courage it takes to be migrant and an immigrant.
The presentation includes Left Behind, a month-long exhibition of the work of gallery member, Carol Wisker, a multimedia and installation artist, Complexion Dark, a 6 minute video by gallery member, Francesca Costanzo, a video artist and political activist, coupled with poetry readings by three award-winning poets including Cynthia, Arrieu-King, Emari Di Giorgio, and Jade Fleming, about the challenges of having personally emigrated to the US or about being a descendant of immigrants
The condition of human diaspora has existed from the time we were migrating nomads. Modern day migrations, caused by fear, disease, hunger and war are now rampant throughout our world. Today, none of us are totally secure from becoming part of the diaspora of our time. Question: if you had to flee…what would you leave behind? Children? Parents? Home? Possessions? Culture? Language?
Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, August 31- Sunday, October 1
First Friday September 1, 5-9 pm
Film and Poetry Event: Wednesday, September 13, 7pm - 8:30 pm
Film running time is 6 min
Regular Gallery Hours: noon-5, Wednesday-Sunday.
Left Behind
Artist Carol Wisker remembers a time when she was traveling at sea on a small boat and became embroiled in a fifteen-hour storm that could have easily capsized the boat. During those hours the fear she experienced made her aware of her inner strength, which she did not know existed. She has repeatedly drawn upon this strength in a variety of life situations. She can imagine how people faced with fear, for themselves or the lives of those they love, experience a similar all encompassing psychological “fight or flight” response. It is at this point all possessions and security becomes meaningless.
Carol Wisker’s fiber and found object sculptures she calls Accumulators, are based on beach findings that come from the ocean picking up shells, fishing lines, seaweed and shards of life as they roll through the ocean as directed by the tides. They are metaphors for the wave or tide of people and the objects they leave behind. The largest Accumulator is eight-feet long containing a myriad of domestic items including broken door “hinges” and broken keys. A lone fiber and ceramic figure, still standing tall but ravaged by war, surveys her torn-apart body and surrounding landscape.
Carol Wisker is a multimedia and installation artist born in Brooklyn, NY and now residing in Philadelphia. She has BA's in textile arts and psychology from Mansfield University and and MA in education from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Her artistic practice includes teaching in maximum security prisons for fifteen years. Carol has been the curator and juror for many exhibitions Her work is in corporate collections and has been shown in museum exhibitions.
Complexion Dark
Francesca Constanzo’s film Complexion Dark, examines immigration through the lens of her grandfather who migrated to America from Italy in 1920. Her video piece shows a startling comparison that being a refugee in 2017 is not much different than being one in 1920. The film's ultimate message is that we are all descendants of immigrants. Costanzo's film was accepted into the Woodmere Museum's 76th Annual Juried Exhibition.
Francesca Costanzo is a video artist living and working in Philadelphia. After studying graphic design and advertising at the Philadelphia College of Art(University of the Arts), she remained devoted to her craft for over 30 years. In that time, Costanzo developed and designed successful cutting-edge advertising campaigns for Fortune 500 clients. Now, she devotes her time to producing films that speak to her audience on a more personal level with themes that include the current political climate.
Poets
Cynthia Arrieu-King was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. A former Kundiman Fellow, Arrieu-King is the author of the poetry chapbook The Small Anything City (2006) and the full-length poetry collections People Are Tiny in Paintings of China (2010) and Manifest (2013). With Sophia Kartsonis, she co-authored the chapbook By Some Miracle a Year Lousy with Meteors (2013). She also co-wrote the collection Unlikely Conditions (1913 Press, 2016) with the late Hillary Gravendyk
Arrieu-King is an assistant professor at Stockton University and has been a featured poet at the Dodge Poetry Festival.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/cynthia-arrieu-kingJ
Emari DiGiorgio's debut collection The Things a Body Might Become is forthcoming from Five Oaks Press in September/October 2017. She is the recipient of the 2016 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring Jake Adam York and has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Rivendell Writers’ Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ. https://www.emaridigiorgio.com/
Jade Fleming has a BA in Literature and a concentration in Creative Writing from Stockton University. She is a first generation American whose family is from Grenada in the West Indies. Jade is a current Fulbright recipient and will be spending a year in Malaysia. She is working on her first chapbook, an exploration of her dueling identities as a first generation American of West Indian descent.
