Richard Fedorchak
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Richard Fedorchak STATEMENT As a collage/assemblage artist, I tend to work in an intuitive fashion starting with a single image or background that has sparked my imagination. As further elements are gradually added, they often find there own place in the final composition over time through trial and error. Thus, I often don’t know when I first start a new piece where it will end up. The final image and it’s “meaning”, if there is one, gradually unfolds in the process. In thinking about my particular aesthetic recently, I realized that I tend to create gently surreal mystical utopian worlds that present an alternative to the sometimes harsh realities of life in the 21st century. I think that my work may act as an antidote to the daily news of human and animal suffering, violence, racism, and global environmental disaster. Perhaps by creating worlds of wonder instead of endless wars, I can achieve some sort of self-healing. As the visionary artist Alex Gray so eloquently wrote in his book The Mission of Art, “The artist of the twenty first century will have to look deeply into themselves and ask hard questions about the mission of art. Is art merely the fashionable expression of artists’ egos and a reflection of the world they live in, or can art become a healing path that reveals the beauty and holiness of our selves and our world, projecting an ideal of what we and our wounded world may become.” BIO I am basically a self-taught artist with little formal training, although I have attended classes/workshops at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the Woodstock School of Art in Woodstock, New York, and AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. My involvement in the visual arts began in the mid-1970s when I started making films under the influence of American avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. A chance encounter in 1974 with the work of the late American artist Joseph Cornell was pivotal to my artistic development. His art exposed me to the magical and transformative power of collage and the found object. Venues where my work has been exhibited include 80 Washington Square East Galleries (New York City), Limner Gallery (Hudson, New York), New Hope Art Center (New Hope, Pennsylvania), and Lake of Dreams, a no longer extant cooperative artist’s gallery in Flemington, New Jersey, of which I was a founding member. In January 2014, I had a solo exhibit of my collage, assemblage, and film work at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. I presented programs of my experimental films at the Haverhill Experimental Film Festival (Haverhill, Massachusetts) in 2014, at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston in 2017, and at the 8Fest in Toronto in 2018. ARTIST CONTACT (802) 785-4118 IMAGES
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