ANNOUNCING A NEWLY FORMED ARTIST COLLECTIVE FOR 2022
This blog post is a temporary landing page for our working dedicated website: STEAMROLLERGROUP.com
From 1996 to 1998, a small cooperative gallery comprised of 12 not so local artists held exhibitions, auctions, poetry events and happenings at a small gallery space in the center of Frenchtown, NJ. This gallery proved to be a touchstone for many local artists along the Delaware River in Hunterdon and Upper Bucks Counties. We had a place to share ideas, exhibit our work and to heighten our visibility. The newly formed Steamroller Group pays homage to the legacy of the Steamroller Gallery with two of its founding members, Val Sivilli and Erica Steffen joining forces with Susan Mania and Kazaan Viveiros. All four of the artists in SteamRoller Group are long-time residents of both Hunterdon and Bucks County, are established artists with decades long exhibition records with varying levels of representation. Collectively they share a common thread throughout their work, a deep conviction for the natural world and community and the effects that our changing times has on them. As a new collective, Steamroller Group seeks to combine the efforts of these established artists into a larger more viable group that works with our community. Because this is Steamroller Group’s inaugural year, the 14C ART FAIR will serve to introduce Steamroller Group to the larger art world.
Below is a short introduction to each individual artist:
Val Sivilli is a Painter often using printmaking as a vehicle for expanding the image potential of a painting or narrative series. Her work tends to have a focus on the personal and a nod toward the political relying heavily on formal issues of color, composition and the visceral quality of the material.
Susan Mania’s paintings and works on paper explore observations of the landscape and its changing dynamics in soft dimensional color and a flexible re-working of organic elements. From the many natural elements that arise in her work, flora, seeds, soil patterns, fallen trees or invasive plant habitats, individual components of line and form are re-mixed, bringing a new interpretation of the landscape through layered composition and a diverse color palette.
Kazaan Vivieros paintings explore the intersection between the environment and our experience of it. She is interested in how we affect and are affected by environmental changes, endangered species, evolution, competition, sustainability. Her process is intuitive – the external world is filtered through a personal lens. Representative works reveal strong connections between creativity and the mechanisms of nature, human and animal consciousness, and mental state and environment.
Erika Steffen is both a poet and a visual artist. From years of travel in Europe, Erika had developed her interest in medieval architecture, bas relief, and religious iconography, by creating an extensive collection of photographic patterns and textures. She is interested in poetry as the honing of words in a space into essential meaning. Lines and shapes are ordered and harmonized to reveal their mythic and universal sources.
https://www.erikajoysteffen.com/
This blog post is a temporary landing page for our working dedicated website: STEAMROLLERGROUP.com
Val Sivilli 