Roberley Bell “Objects And Color”

Black & White Gallery / Project Space

[Image: Roberley Bell "Other landscape #17" (2014)]

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Black & White Project Space presents Objects And Color by Roberley Bell, featuring several recent sculptures that play with the boundaries between fantasy and reality and invite viewers to reevaluate their relationship to their surroundings.

Bell’s sculptural installations disassemble the traditional format of the natural landscape. They are distorted representations of nature, inventing new contexts and creating bizarre new worlds where nature and its synthetic representation comingle. By incorporating bird decoys, Astroturf, benches, flowering trees, and resin Blob sculptures in her work, Bell invites a questioning of the “natural” in our everyday environment.

Artist’s statement
Over the past decade my work has centered on the production of sculpture and site specific public projects. My work explores the natural world both in abstracting forms and in borrowing to reveal hyper-realized fantastical landscapes. My sculptures reconsider or interrogate what is real against what is not, to the point where even nature itself is uncertain. It is my intent to employ our imagination and our senses even with the artifice.

Roberley Bell (b.1955) spent her childhood in Latin America and Southeast Asia before returning to the United States to attend the University of Massachusetts and State University of New York at Alfred from where she holds an MFA. Bell is the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships including the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, a summer Fullbright to the Netherlands and a 2010 Senior Scholar Fullbright to Turkey. Bell’s Fullbright topic, The City as the Site of Intervention resulted in a series of projects in public spaces. In 2012 she received a Fellowships from the Turkish Cultural Foundation and Dave Bowen Projects. Bell has received several residency awards both nationally and internationally, including a residency to the Stadt Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, Austria and a Studio fellowship from the international Studio Program in NY. Bell’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Bell has completed public projects in Cambridge, Pittsburg, Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Kalinigrad, Russia and Istanbul, Turkey. She lives in a rural community in Upstate, NY and teaches at the School of Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Objects and Color is Roberley Bell’s third solo exhibition at Black & White Project Space.