September 08, 2007 — December 16, 2007
Jon Rappleye: Strange World
Rappleye attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a 2005 recipient of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission Grant and his work has been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Vox Populi in Philadelphia. He has completed residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California and the Cooper Union Summer Residency in New York. He is represented by the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City.
The paintings of Jon Rappleye evoke ideas of homespun fairy tales, combining investigations of cultural folklore with his own personal mythology. Within fantastic worlds abounding with flora, fauna, and hybrid creatures, the Jersey City artist explores the impacts of technology on ecology. Animals inhabit unfamiliar terrains, tree trunks assume strange anthropomorphic shapes, and skies range in color from verdant green to industrial yellow. Through his paintings Rappleye utilizes nature as a vehicle to explore the boundaries of reality and artifice, leaving mankind’s impact on the environment blurred and open to question.
Rappleye’s exhibition at the Salina Art Center is comprised of new and recent work including the debut of an installation created during his Kohler residency this past spring. He is the first artist to participate in the Salina Art Center’s Artist Initiative Residency Program and will be working and living in Salina during October and November of 2007.
Organized by the Salina Art Center. Special thanks to the Artist and Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York, for making this exhibition possible.
Salina Art Center programs, exhibitions and films are presented in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency which believes that a great nation deerves great art.