Photo by Yoo Lee Jun/Special to The Leader
VERONICA PENOYER
Layout Editor
“Ultimately, personal integrity is an ultimate value and perseverance,” advised artist Albert Paley.
The Visiting Artist Program will host Rochester-based artist Albert Paley to offer advice and understanding on his creative process with the arrival of his 16-ton sculpture.
Paley’s “Progression,” a nine-and-a-half foot tall and 48-foot-long steel sculpture, is on a three-year loan on campus. It will be featured outside of Fenton Hall beginning Sept. 9.
Paley had a major exhibition on Manhattan’s 2013 Sculpture on Park Avenue program. “Progression” was one of 13 monumental sculptures in the program. The sculpture appears frozen in space in its physicality.
When asked on his inspiration of his work he said, “my work is grounded more in emotional sensibilities.”
Photo by Yoo Lee Jun/Special to The Leader
Paley uses a planar format and densely-woven organic shapes to create a sense of movement in “Progression.” He is recognized for the ability to transform steel into sculptures that express movement and in his words, “humanizing the materials via the emotional content.”
“In many ways, what you experience as an observer walking on a horizontal plane, the sculpture does the same thing. It exists in space just as you exist in space,” Paley says of “Progression.” Due to Paley’s thoughts and feelings regarding the world, art enveloped him.
Inspired by three-dimensional work at the Tyler School of Art located in Philadelphia, Albert Paley majored and minored in sculpture and metal. After his undergrad was complete, he focused his master’s degree on metals.
“With all of my training in school, we did painting and printmaking and various things, [and] for whatever reason, I gravitated towards three-dimensional work,” said Paley. “There’s a physicality and the relationship of space that graphic work does not have.”
“Albert Paley: Humanizing the Material” opens Sept. 1 and runs through Oct.18 at the Cathy and Jesse Marion Art Gallery. Paley will speak Thursday, Sept. 10 at 7 p.m in McEwen Hall.