"Happy's
Nightmare" to open in Lightwell
Installation
to fill UB Art Gallery with jokey metaphore for lonliness, desolation
By
PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
"Happy's
Nightmare," a installation by Kurt Von Voetsch and Patrick Robideau,
will open April 26 in the UB Art Gallery with a reception from 7-10
p.m. featuring a performance by Von Voetsch, who will employ such elements
as fat, fiberglass pods and an elaborate costume.
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In
"Happy's Nightmare," artists Kurt Von Voetsch and Patrick
Robideau have fabricated two interior rooms of a housea living
room and basement room connected by a holewithin the three-story
Lightwell exhibition space in the UB Art Gallery. |
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The
opening of the exhibit, which is installed in the gallery's Lightwell
Gallery, will be free of charge and open to the public.
The
exhibit will close on Sept. 27 with an entirely new performance by Von
Voetsch.
The
gallery, located in the Center for the Arts, North Campus, is open from
11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For further information
and summer hours, contact Reine Hauser at 645-6912, ext. 1424
"Happy's
Nightmare" is presented in conjunction with "Big Orbit: Ten Years of
Spin," an exhibition at UB's Anderson Gallery, located on Martha Jackson
Place, Buffalo, that will run through April 28.
It
is the second of three collaborative projects by Von Voetsch and Robideau.
One,
"A Whole Lot of Chugger Behind a Whole Lot of Pat," was exhibited in
Big Orbit Gallery two years ago and featured an entire house built by
the artists within the gallery space.
"Happy's
Nightmare" continues where "Chugger" left off. Here, the artists have
fabricated two interior rooms of a housea living room and basement
room connected by a holewithin the three-story Lightwell exhibition
space.
The
structure, which one observer calls "reminiscent of a vastly overblown
diorama you might see in an antiquated science museum," will be visible
from the first and second floors of the gallery.
Robideau
and Von Voetsch say that, for each of them, the work is autobiographical
and that the empty spaces elaborated by the installation itself and
the performance of "Happy's Nightmare" represent aspects of loneliness,
desolation and emptiness.
Robideau's
installations and sculptures have been featured in the "Great Lake Erie:
Imagining an Inland Sea" and at the New York State Museum in Albany,
in Big Orbit and at other venues.
Von
Voetsch, a Niagara Falls native, is gallery manager of Niagara University's
Castellani Gallery. His mixed media work has been exhibited in the Albright-Knox
Art Gallery's "In Western New York" show, the 58th Rochester-Finger
Lake Exhibition, Big Orbit Gallery and other venues. He holds a master's
degree from UB and a master of fine arts degree from Ohio University.