This Friday, Feb. 10th, there are 10 great reasons to visit Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. From 5:30 to 9 p.m., the Shadyside-based art center is hosting an opening reception for its latest batch of Solo Shows.

 

Ten new exhibits--including one two-person collaboration--will converge under one roof this Friday night, making PCA a hothouse for local artistic talent.

 

Featuring new work culled from Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Pittsburgh Center for the Arts' annual open call for solo and collaborative exhibitions, the diverse presentation of contemporary art reflects a wide spectrum of approaches and mediums, including painting, video, sculpture, performance, and installation. Artists were selected from approximately 80 applications based on a variety of criteria, including quality of submissions and proposals, conceptual mastery and overall body of work. Curated by Adam Welch, Ten Solo Shows is on view through April 22nd.

 

Showcasing new or recently made pieces by regionally-based artists, who all have strong professional and personal ties to Pittsburgh, the show also reflects current artistic trends, practices and conceptual underpinnings within the national and international contemporary art scene. Featured are: Stephanie Armbruster, Kenneth Batista, Chris Beauregard, Jerstin Crosby, Daniel Harvey, Christopher McGinnis, Elizabeth Seamans, Blaine Siegel, Ryan Woodring, Jessica Amarnek, and Ashley McFarland.

 

With Hungry Ghosts, Armbruster's newest batch of encaustic paintings on panel, the artist examines the "subjectivity of memory and language-less nature of transition" via both emotionally-charged and fragmented symbols, gestures and color, and skillfully applied layers of graphite, paint and charcoal.

 

Painter Kenneth Batista, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, presents work from three recent concurrent series. Included are Tree, a study of landscapes ranging from Pittsburgh's Frick Park to Komodo Island in the Indian Ocean; Monuments, a representation of natural and man-made monuments that uses digital technology to analyze color and movement; and Old Masters, a series that reconstructs and interprets iconic masterpieces.

 

Pittsburgh-born artist Blaine Siegel, who spent time living on the West Coast and in Philadelphia, has constructed 

large-scale sculptures made from the "detritus of everyday life." Informed by an obsession with the Pacific Trash Vortex, transmutation, death, and superheroes, the exhibit, Saint -----, The God of Last Things, features everything from taxidermy animal parts and plastic shopping bags, to retail jewelry exhibition cases and body bags.

 

In Dying: Tsunami YouTube Prints, Ryan Woodring presents mixed-media paintings which he created in reaction to consumer-grade videos taken during the devastating tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. Featuring a methodical layering of hundreds of mono-prints and acrylic inks, the stirring work attempts to "reintroduce stillness back into ephemeral and manic sequences of terrifying images."

 

In Chris Beauregard's Long Play in the Video Isles, museum-goers will encounter sculptures that explore fascism and war via violent and fragmented dream sequences inspired by visual sources such as fan culture, cult cinema and Italian horror films.

 

Examining the nature of "links," New York-based multimedia artist Jerstin Crosby--who lived and worked in Pittsburgh for several years--comments on the duality of associative processes such as web-surfing and online research with video, sculpture and 2-D works called, Painted Bones and Hyperlinks.

 

The installation Greenhouse 1, created by Christopher McGinnis--who teaches at Carnegie Mellon and PCA--features 78 silkscreen prints on plexiglass that depicts aspects of the region's storied industrial past and subsequent struggle for economic recovery. Inspired by albumen glass negatives, the plates symbolize new growth in the wake of collapse, and convey the ideals behind creative reuse.

 

Ten Solo Shows also features a number of compelling performative and film-based works.

 

With Whole Parts Too, Daniel Harvey interprets the fragmented experiences of watching, talking with and human relationships in locations such as Columbus, Ohio and Pittsburgh. The installation and performance piece features Tessa Flannery and Derek Reese. 

 

Pittsburgh-based writer, filmmaker, actor, and educator Elizabeth Seamans--who worked for 30 years with Fred Rogers on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood--turns her local lens to a once-thriving farm community in her new film, On Cane Creek. Described as a "visual song in three movements," the multimedia work features video and sound recordings from the Farmer's Exchange in Hickman County, Tennessee.   

 

Regional artists Jessica Amarnek and Ashley McFarland have teamed up to present Interior: Exterior:: Fragility: Strength, a collaborative two-person show that uses blown, cast, cold-worked, and lamp-worked glass to examine the concept of conversations between interior and exterior spaces.

Don't miss the chance to meet the artists and curator at Friday's opening reception, which will also feature a peformative piece directed by artist Daniel Harvey. A $5 donation is suggested for the opening; the evening is free to PF/PCA members.

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