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Reduce/Reuse/Reexamine: Artists breathe new life into
crushed beer cans, peeling billboard scraps,
used upholstery fabric, discarded dishes and more

The Rotunda Gallery, at 33 Clinton Street in Brooklyn Heights, presents Reduce/Reuse/Reexamine, an exhibition of artists who employ recycled materials to create their work, or explore conservation and our society's consumption of resources as a subject for contemporary art. The exhibition opens on Thursday, March 18, 2004 with an opening reception from 6pm to 8pm and remains on view through Saturday, May 8. Curated by Rotunda Director Janet Riker and Associate Director Meridith McNeal, the exhibit is presented in collaboration with Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill in the Bronx.

These artists build evocative, edgy and visually breath-taking works of art from materials most of us would throw away or step over in the street without a second thought. A number of the exhibited works will be newly created exclusively for Reduce/Reuse/Reexamine. A wide range of special events will coincide with Reduce/Reuse/Reexamine, including the latest in Rotunda's acclaimed series of free reading and performance evenings organized by author Nelly Reifler. On Friday, April 30, artist Murat Musulluoglu will spend an afternoon in Columbus Park outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, constructing a rainbow-hued mosaic from tiny cups of colored water; his work is part interactive performance, part temporary installation art.

Exhibiting artists include:

• Art Start in Collaboration with Leonardo Drew will create a site-specific installation for Rotunda. Working with internationally renowned sculptor Drew, children from Art Start, the arts-based development program for disadvantaged youth, will build a wall of memory boxes filled with found objects.

• Sarah Cihat begins with abandoned dishes found in thrift stores, than reinvigorates them with colorful new glazes. Her silhouetted images create a playful dialogue between old and new, projecting her affection for the well-used objects and contemporary pop imagery.

• Ralph Raphael Fleming literally brings art from the street into the gallery: the peeling remnants of billboards and sniper advertising posters are collaged, reconfiguring the images and typography into unique new forms.

• Dan Ford scavenges crushed beer and soda cans to form the canvas for meticulous oil paintings: Coors cans are overlayed with a tongue-in-cheek homage to Albert Bierstadt's epic western landscapes, and Sprite cans are transformed into Victorian faerie paintings or William Morris chintz.

• Madelon Galland presents an unlikely sight; the uprooted stump of a chopped-down birch tree, upholstered in rich green velvet--nature reconfigured as impractical furniture.

• Jonathan Herder builds miniature vistas from postage stamps; in the new piece for this exhibition, a mosaic of these tiny Government-issued etchings becomes a tranquil blue-tinged landscape.

• Ed Rath's paintings evoke the earth as garden in minute detail; colorful images of figures and landscapes that are alive, primal, and speak to the conservation theme by addressing what is really at stake.

• Naz Shahrokh creates a seemingly simple vertical column of paper, the detritus of her home and studio, that becomes a quiet meditation on nature and space.

• Colleen Rae Smiley recycles the used upholstery fabric, buttons and tassels of earlier eras to make eccentric quilts; she is creating a new work specifically for this exhibition.

• Design collective Scrapile is building a site-specific reading area from recycled lumber. Visitors will be able to sit down and read materials from numerous conservation organizations.