The Bridgette Mayer Gallery is launching PhillyArtExperience. com with a group exhibition featuring more than 200 local and international artists, including LGBT contributors. The exhibition also benefits BalletX, Philadelphia’s premier contemporary-ballet company, and will run through Aug. 9.
The featured artists were tasked with creating works using 10-inch square panels.
A number of LGBT artists are featured in the exhibit, including out Spanish artist Germán Gómez, who said his contributions to the exhibition will be in line with the body imagery for which he is known.
“These four pieces, which I made in Philadelphia, are very much in line with my current artistic process, in which I explore printing with different kinds of paper and experimenting with different levels of transparency and layering,” he said. “The inspiration for these pieces came from sculptures around the world — in Rome, Venice, Paris and New York. My work is always autobiographical, and these pieces engage with my longstanding passion for art history. I thought this subject fit nicely with the exhibition’s aim to support Philadelphia’s broader art scene.”
Another out artist featured in the exhibition is PJ Linden, also known as Wonderpuss Octopus, who is excited about the range of artists contributing to the exhibition.
“It’s going to be all over the place,” Linden said. “My work is three-dimensional. There’s a lot of experimentation going on especially on the gallery’s end, being that many of the pieces were coming from artists from all over the country. There’s a lot of trust in making the pieces and sending them back to the gallery. I’m excited to see how it comes out. It’s going to be a gallery full of squares.”
Linden has taken colorful brands of tactile art and adapted them to retail fashion interests in recent years, but she said she enjoyed creating art for this exhibition.
“I’ve been selling at a store in Manhattan where I’ve been making a lot of wearable stuff,” she said. “This experience has inspired me to do larger-scale versions of these small little canvasses that I’ve been doing for a long time. It’s a really good jumping-off point for me to do these panels. I’m purely a visual artist. I work to please my own eyes and others. I like to keep it on a visceral level. I don’t have much to say. I want people to have a guttural reaction to it. That’s what I’m going for: ‘I want to touch it, I want to feel it, I want to have it.’”