Opening Reception: Saturday, May 4 from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 432 Julia Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info:504.522.1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta-Modern, a mixed media exhibition by Stephen Paul Day. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia Street, from May 4 – May 25, 2013. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist in attendance, Saturday, May 4 from 6–8 pm.
A Theory of Everything, 2013. Epoxy and glass, 25 x 22 x 11 inches.
Stephen Paul Day has chosen to be both creator and curator for Blame It On Vegas – Collecting Meta-Modern, his seventh exhibition with the gallery. Sculpture, neon and paintings make up this collection of new, engaging works that oscillate between humor and horror, history and the present and also between the artist’s vocabulary – color, form, and significance of materials – and his viewpoint – how one engages the viewer to make sense of the vision he is presenting. Grouped together as they would be in a museum, there is an intentional ambiguity as to who made each work. Day describes himself as a “Disney kind of collector, putting together a ‘wunderkammer’ of excellent art, artifacts, and story.”
The title of the exhibition refers to the first postmodernist “bible”, Learning from Las Vegas. Despite being labeled as a postmodernist, Day regards himself instead as a Metamodernist – a reactionary offshoot working between a certain Modernism vocabulary and Postmodernism technique. It is defined as, “a new romanticism with a purpose, stressing engagement, affect and storytelling.”
Stephen Paul Day lives in New Orleans and works part-time in Berlin. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Louisiana State University in 1977 and then attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris where he received a Diplôme Technique in lithography, intaglio and stained glass in 1980. In 1984 Day received a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and glass at LSU where he also studied video. Day has traveled all over the world making glass and teaching. His paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally. His work is in many collections including the Corning Museum of Glass, New York; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Quebec; the Kunokube Glass Museum, Nagahama, Japan; and the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Day has received many prestigious awards including a Krasner Pollack grant, a Medaille de Bronze for the salon de Paris and a career grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation for an installation exhibited during the 2008 Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans.