About the Exhibition

Opening Reception: Friday, September 13, 6 - 8 pm

In her most ambitious project to date, Leaves of Grass, Philadelphia artist Astrid Bowlby will create a new site-specific installation using paper cut-out drawings applied to the walls, floor, and ceiling of the Morris Gallery.

This work disrupts the boundaries of drawing and sculpture by embracing both disciplines simultaneously through accumulation, density, and imagery that is both abstract and narrative. The viewer will be invited to explore the installation via a meandering path. The pre-cut drawings range in size from 3 x 4 feet to 1 x _ inches and highlight Bowlby's on-going presentation of work in multiple scales.

Although Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), the late black-and-white sculptures of Jean Dubuffet, and the graphic sensibility of Keith Haring reflect Bowlby's interest in storytelling, formalism, and use of line, she states that poet Walt Whitman figures most prominently in this installation. Bowlby pays homage to Whitman, whose democratic idealism, celebration of the commonplace, and spirited zeal for living are articulated in his collection of poems Leaves of Grass. Inspired by the poet's all-encompassing rumination-a kind of ode to being alive-Bowlby renders through drawing both the mundane and the elevated aspects of her daily life, where the clumsy and the elegant exist side by side.

Bowlby will also create sticker "equivalents" (screen-printed decals on vinyl) that will be installed in a yet-to-be-announced outdoor public space.

Bowlby has exhibited at the Fleisher Art Memorial, the Temple Gallery, the Levy Gallery at the Moore College of Art and Design, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Nexus, the Abington Art Center, Gallery Joe, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. She has shown in Chicago at Modest Contemporary Art Projects. Bowlby received her B.F.A. from the University of Southern Maine in 1994 and her M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy in 1996. In 2002, she was awarded a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Leeway Foundation Award for Excellence, and a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.