Parallel: Six Artists

Jozef Bajus is an award-winning mixed media artist. Originally from Slovakia, Bajus received his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, (AFAD), Bratislava, Slovakia (1985). During 1990 - 2001 he was Head of Fibers Program at AFAD and since 1990 he has held positions of visiting scholar, instructor, and coordinator at various colleges and programs in the United States and abroad Currently, Bajus is an Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York and serves as the Coordinator of the Fibers/Design Program. His career has earned him numerous prestigious awards and recognition. In 2016 he was recipient of the Langley H. Kenzie Award, BPAC, Buffalo. Bajus' work has exhibited in one person exhibitions (Bratislava City Gallery– Slovakia 2013, Hallwalls 2014/15, Indigo Art Gallery 2016, Burchfield Penney Art Center 2016, Meibohm Fine Art 2017, 2021, Buffalo Art Studio 2006, 2018) and numerous group’s exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Bajus' work is in the collection of many museums, art galleries. His artwork is also included in private collections in Europe, North America, Japan, and China.

The two compositions are the result of my experimenting in 1986. I remember that year very well - it was an exciting time, I just graduated with my MFA from The Academy of Fine Arts & Design in Bratislava and I was ready to start a new journey as a fiber artist. An investigation of a new material and experimenting with non traditional techniques lead to a new conceptual framework for my wall hanging projects. Those two compositions were studies for my larger artworks created a year later.

4. Assemblages With Thrift Store Treasures

Kathy Gaye Shiroki

mixed media

Early 1980’s

Kathy Gaye Shiroki is an artist, museum educator, and lecturer. She has worked at the Burchfield Penney Art Center since 2007, teaches in the Art and Design Department at SUNY Buffalo State, and creates innovative programs that enhance learning within a museum setting. She moved to Buffalo, New York in 1994 to work in the education department at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Shiroki earned her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego, her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Temple University, Tyler School of Art, and her Associate Degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, School of American Craftsmen.  Shiroki’s awards include Western States Arts Federation Fellowship in sculpture, Wyoming Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, Art Walk, The City of San Diego, and Research Grants from the University of California, San Diego. She has had solo exhibitions in New York, California, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and in addition group exhibitions in Virginia, Tennessee, North Dakota, Minnesota, Arizona, Washington, and Utah. 

It’s the early 1980s–Miles City, Montana; I’m enchanted to be creating in the studio manipulating objects and images, reassembling, repurposing their meaning. My studio overlooked the big blue sky, barren landscape, the shelves filled with pretty boxes, cookie tins, and small purse containers holding Joseph Cornell-like objects. I’m ordered in my rearranging, making sense, creating sentences out of found thrift treasures. I worked in Miles City as an artist-in-residence in a converted silo art center. On days when a one room schoolhouse requested an artist, I traveled in a pickup with directions that were visually accurate, take a left at the rusted blue truck along the side of the road, and when the school was spotted from a distance, I pulled over, relieved, and took a picture. 

The population of the town was 3,000 farmers who were losing their land. Most young people recognized me when food shopping in the cereal aisle. I spotted Richard Avedon and one of his out of place New York City assistants at a bucking horse sale. They were pacing at the bottom of the bleachers, gazing up looking for their next inspiration. Parades would come through the town on horseback, mare’s giving birth to their colts on their travels. The old-time fiddlers were popular. A guest artist who was influenced by Blue Velvet crafted ears by the river in the early morning hours. 

Driving was an adventure in Montana. If you didn’t have an open beer in your hand while caught speeding, your ticket was only $5 and you could pay it in cash right there. I tried to get a ticket several times and when I was finally stopped, it was only a warning for a headlight out. Across the state, dinosaur bones were seen, blue Art Linkletter sneakers were found, and old cards depicting the beautiful old west were collected. No one cries in postcards. 

This was all before the second half of the 1980’s, before attending graduate school, at the University of California, San Diego. This is before I was introduced to Susan Sontag, Marguerite Duras, Karen Finley, Martha Rosler, and abundant male theories.

The early 1980’s was a time for curiosity with pure intuition as my influences were being formed. When at the river fishing, I would devour art magazines, but later in my travels experiencing the artwork on the walls of museums and galleries, everything changed. The images became transformed, real, no longer in my imagination. The artworks were not in my lap by the water’s edge. They were bigger, textured, but never as full of life as my time pondering my own thoughts on art, in the landscape with baby skunks being born.

Gerald Mead’s small scale, photographic and found material collages and assemblages are in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, George Eastman Museum, Brooklyn Art Library, Burchfield Penney Art Center, Castellani Art Museum, Sprint Foundation, and the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction in Santa Fe, NM. They have also been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Poland, Russia, and China, and are published in six collegiate textbooks. Mead has lectured on his work at Cambridge University and Chautauqua Institution and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He earned his MFA in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo where he was a Deans Scholar and he is a Lecturer Emeritus of Art & Design at SUNY Buffalo State. In 2020, Mead received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Niagara University.

These works were created when I was 26 years old, not long after I completed my BS in Design with a concentration in Fiber Design at SUNY Buffalo State. They represent a significant period of my artistic development as I transitioned from producing work as part of my studies to creating work independently and exhibiting that work in solo and group exhibitions in WNY and beyond. They also marked my exploration of new artmaking methodologies as I no longer had access to weaving and textile printing equipment and facilities. In these works, I made fragments of my hand-woven fabrics into sculptural elements to juxtapose them with (hand tinted) vintage photographs that I had been collecting for several years. My affinity for “detail views” of woven fabric combined with the reality of working on a small drafting table in my apartment result in diminutive works that were a hybrid of collage and assemblage - a leitmotif for my work that has become increasingly complex and multilayered over the years. 

7. Fractured Realities

Candace Masters

oil on canvas

1989