Figures and Abstractions
The Burns Art Atrium exhibit features two alumni sculptors Jack Howard-Potter '97 “Figures” and Chet Urban “Abstractions” will be on display from Sept. 12 – Oct. 12, 2005. The artists' reception will be Thursday, Oct. 6 from 4-6 p.m.
Though primarily sculptors, Howard-Potter and Urban both consider drawing an important tool in their working process.
These two artists work in very different styles. Howard-Potter creates over life-size figures in steel rod and sheet. His brightly colored sculptures are caught in dynamic, active poses – pulling a rope, straining on point – and frequently incorporate movement, as figures delicately balanced on steel pivots sway and turn with the motion of passers-by. His drawings echo this interest in radical movement and balanced action.
Urban's sculptures, in contrast, have a kind of meditative stillness about them. They're made of wood, composed of simple forms, carefully crafted but not at all showy. His pieces evoke contemplation rather than action. Some of Urban's drawings reflect this contemplative sensibility, while others are more aggressive in their exploration of jagged forms and sharp delineations between positive and negative space.
Howard-Potter, a native of New York City, graduated from Union in 1997 with a combined degree in studio art and art history. His senior show at Union College included fifteen life-size figurative steel sculptures – setting a course for future work, though the pieces were not nearly as complex or resolved as they later became. After graduation he moved to Colorado and worked for a year and a half with a blacksmith making furniture, gaining necessary knowledge about the material and the commercial practices of metalworking. He returned to New York and had a one-person show of sculpture at the Wally Findlay Gallery in Easthampton. But dissatisfied with his command of the figure, he enrolled in anatomy and drawing classes at the famed Arts Student League in New York City, where he eventually became assistant to instructor Anthony Palumbo. Subsequently Howard-Potter returned to the Albany area, where he continues to create new work. He has exhibited at The Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, Vermont; the Big Rock Garden Park in Bellingham, Washington; and with the City of Coral Springs in Coral Springs, Florida, which recently purchased a sculpture for their public collection. He's currently working on a monumental thirty-foot high figure for a public commission in Florida.
After graduating from Union with a history major and studio art minor, Chet Urban, a native of Stillwater, NY, enrolled “on a whim almost” in a dual program at the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx where he pursued a MSc. in Transportation Management and a Third Mate's license in the Merchant Marine. He hoped that he'd be able to spend a concentrated period of time at sea and then return home to pursue his art. During his studies he lived in the East Village and though he had no studio and found scant time to work, he was able to see a lot of art and think about it in depth. As part of his studies at the Maritime College, Urban traveled a great deal, visiting ports in Puerto Rico, Dublin, Copenhagen, Athens, and Tenerife.
In his second year he shipped on a commercial liquid natural gas tanker between Indonesia and Japan, seeing Acheh in Sumatra and East Kalimantan (Borneo) in Indonesia. After graduation from the Academy he worked on small vessels supplying the offshore oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico, and later delivered a boat from Louisiana to Nigeria, where he stayed on as a resident alien. Later Urban joined the Mobil Oil Company and working out of London sailed on a new 300,000-ton ship, The Raven, in the Arabian Gulf, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
In 2001 he took six months off from the sea and enrolled in painting and drawing classes at Skidmore. That fall he moved to Brooklyn and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, studying drawing, metal sculpture, and wood working techniques with traditional hand tools. After returning from sea again in 2002, he pursued further work at SVA, and moved into his current live/work space in Brooklyn. Urban, whose last posting at sea was as Chief Officer on an LNG tanker, received his Master Mariner's license and now teaches at the Maritime Academy. As he puts it “this was to begin the cycle of what I had planned when I started out; it just took a lot longer than I thought.”
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