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One Last Single Solitary Moment

Brian Collier - Project Room

May 25 – June 23, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, May 25, 2007, 6-9pm

CHICAGO, IL -- rowlandcontemporary is pleased to present One Last Single Solitary Moment, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Diana Puntar. Puntar explores notions of a post-apocalyptic future as filtered through material desires. Brian Collier joins us in the Project Room to present selections from The Highway Expedition, his examination into the collision between nature and man.

One Last Single Solitary Moment
With a penchant for highly stylized objects, Diana Puntar creates sculptures that allude to a seemingly endless need for material consumption. Nonfunctioning and vaguely organic, Puntar’s sculptures enjoy a playful interweaving of high and low culture.

With W.M.D., a work made of plywood and carved foam, the object makes its presence felt through its somewhat veiled overtones to the current political climate, as well as its capacity to glow in the dark. Suggestive of a post-apocalyptic future, the work simultaneously straddles the formality of sculptural representation, flirts with kitsch and reminds us of far more serious geopolitical concerns.

Steadfast and resolute in her pronounced use of common building and construction materials – among them wood, tile, laminate, foam, and mirror – Puntar’s ersatz objects transcend their materiality and celebrate their everyday domestic qualities through a subversive, yet seductive sheen.

Puntar received her BA from The University of Maryland, College Park, MD, and her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Puntar’s recent solo exhibitions include Small A Projects (Portland, OR) and Participant, Inc. (New York, NY). Group exhibitions include Samson Projects (Boston, MA), Jack the Pelican (Brooklyn, NY), Bellwether Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and Luhring Augustine Gallery (New York, NY). Puntar has also held residencies at Art Omi, Columbia County, NY (2004), Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2002), and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (1996).

Project Room
Bloomington, Illinois based artist Brian Collier presents selections from his series The Highway Expedition. With this series, Collier investigates human impact on nature, challenging our perceptions of purity in the natural world as it collides with areas affected by human activity.

Collier posits that "the common forms of nature we experience are ill-defined bastard cousins to the untouched spaces we idealize – in particular, human-altered landscapes and weedy abandoned lots". Through collateral created during his expedition, including books, botanical specimens, dioramas and video, Collier attempts to broaden the understanding of our effects on and relationship to the natural world.

Brian Collier received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his BFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Upcoming exhibitions include the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), and Sabatini Gallery (Topeka, KS). He recently participated in group exhibitions at Neues Museum Weserburg Bremen (Bremen, Germany), and The College of St. Catherine (St. Paul, MN).