Current Projects

I invite you to catch my second exhibit of paintings now showing in University of Michigan's Power Center lobby on days of performances in the theater. The show will be up through the summer, but your best chance to see it is during the next three months. Viewing hours are limited! The lobby is only open to the general public (no ticket purchase necessary) an hour before and during each scheduled performance:

3/14-15 Fr./Sa., 7 pm doors open

3/21-22 Fr./Sa., 7 pm doors open

3/23 Su 1 doors open

3/28-29 Fr./Sa. 6:30 pm doors open

4/17 Th. 6:30 pm doors open

4/18 Fr. 7 pm doors open

4/19 Sa. 7 pm doors open

4/20 Su. 1 pm door open

Others TBA.

Power Center for the Performing Arts 121 Fletcher St. Ann Arbor, MI

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Information/sales: petespar@umich.edu

 

Artist’s Statement:

A theater’s lobby invites conversations, people-watching and anticipation of (or debriefing after) the performance. It proposes a scale of bodies to the architectural space and an overture or preparation for entering the “sacred” zone of the inner theater: one of engagement, confrontation, immersion and/or pleasure. My pictures are both a response to the spaces and surfaces of the lobby and a performance of sorts in themselves. “Scale is everything”, I often tell my students and dancers, whether working within the frame of the stage proscenium, the rectangle of the screen or the shape of the canvas. I respond to the expanses of concrete surfaces and glass of the Power Center by painting on long rolls of lightweight, reflective mylar. They can be treated horizontally, like unscrolled landscapes or panoramas, or vertically, like hanging banners. They act as a carrier for color, texture and motion, a receptive surface for the action of the stroke of the brush… while also bouncing light and traces of the viewer’s own image. The large format acts like a mirror in the dance studio upon which I impress full-bodied images of my danced motion. I also pay tribute to the Parsons Center for Arts & Sciences in Northern Michigan for providing me the studio space large enough to stretch 52 feet of mylar across its walls! As a dancer, I seek a corresponding medium that captures the sensations and kinetic shapes I carry deeply in my muscle memory and in my mind’s trove of pictures. These paintings are full of the body’s movement and of the movement of nature, growth, and geological time. I marvel at the frescoes uncovered in Pompeii, or ancient images painted on cave walls. To quote William Goyen from his novel, “The House of Breath”: “Who knows what possible frescoes are inside the skull?”