See Rochester's newest art gallery | subsector | FREE

You are invited to an art event. You'll get access to a new gallery, see an art exhibit and learn about some cool art services! • Rochester Art Collectors invites you to visit Rochester's newest commercial art gallery, subsector, and meet its gallerist. • You will be immersed in GRAYSCALE, a group art exhibition that includes dozens of art works created by fourteen artists. • Learn about RedDOTVirtual™, the pairing of new technologies with an array of services designed by a local entrepreneur to help art collectors safely document and share their collections. Attendees of the event will be offered FREE trial access to RedDOTVirtual™. Event Schedule & Program Description 2:00 pm until 2:30 pm - Social Mixer Take the first 30 mintues to walk through GRAYSCALE and chat with other attendees. 2:30 pm - Welcome & Introduction Rome Celli , founder of Rochester Art Collectors will welcome attendees and introduce subsector's gallerist, Matthew Tully Dugan. Tully will talk briefly about why he openned subsector and offer insights about a selction of works found in GRAYSCALE. 2:45 pm - Protecting, Preserving and Sharing Your Art Collection with RedDOTVirtual™. Rome will then introduce Michael Molaire. Michael will provide a brief overview of the services and technology that power RedDOTVirtual™. ========== The event is FREE and open to the public but attendees must register in advance here on Eventbrite. Parking is FREE, convenient and plentiful. PARKING MAP LINK. (This parking map link will be shared with registered attendees again in an email 48 hours before the event.) You do not have to be a member of Rochester Art Collectors to attend. Artists exhibiting in GRAYSCALE: • Gianpaolo Alexander • Annalisa Barron • Jaylen Cooper • Matthew Tully Dugan • Cody Goebl • Naim Johnson • Gary Katiya • Nandi Loaf • Bobby Morebed • Mr. Liz Hopkins • Luke O'Halloran • Stephanie Perez • Michael St. John • Sonja "Sonny" Rosario • Nick Sethi • Theadora Sutherland • Valentina Vaccarella • Banks Violette About GRAYSCALE GRAYSCALE includes works by 18 artists, all presented in desaturated mediums ranging from painting and drawing to digital media, collage and sculpture. Despite their material differences the works all speak to the insistence of the artist to reproduce images. Be it for study or thesis, the inclination persists through an artist's career to re-articulate what the world around them sounds like in their voice, describing experience through their personal language of art making. This desire to share in the documentation of our individual realities was something Eastman Kodak saw early on - the first portable camera was designed and produced by Kodak in Rochester in 1888 leading to the development of roll film and the $1 "Brownie" camera in 1900 which made it possible for the everyday person to photograph their own "Kodak Moments" . This democratization of photography was perhaps the primary source of the undercurrent that's led us to our current state of image obsession, further reinforced by Kodak's invention of the first self-contained digital camera in 1975 which undoubtedly led us to a revolution of self-serve image production. These pioneering developments led to a shift in American culture, creating new actors out of what was once an audience, bringing entertainment media into the home allowing us the ability to capture our own lives on film like Hollywood producers. In 1959 another elemental component of DIY art production would also arise from the post industrial city of Rochester, the Xerox copier. Armed with these tools the artist was now able to self-publish and distribute written text as well as images. The Fluxus artists of the 60s and 70s adopted the xerox machine as a primary tool in the creation of their anti-establishment manifestos, similarly deconstructing boundaries of art production which aimed to dismantle the institutional hierarchy of the art world and its reliance on commercially commodifiable objects. The authorship and valuation of artworks themselves soon became the topic of discourse with the Pictures Generation, artists like Sherrie Levine, Sarah Charlesworth and Richard Prince began to interrogate the significance of the "original" establishing philosophies which gave greater significance to the interpretation of ideas in contrast to the Modernist ideals which had laid their stake in the importance of the artist's ability to create a totally new idea. But historically the re-production has always reigned supreme in an artist's oeuvre - Renaissance painters like Raphael Sanzio trained by learning to render the works in the style of their mentors. By the end of their time together it was said the hand of Pietro Perugino and his apprentice Raphael could not be distinguished from one another. This was true for many of the Old Masters that came to succeed their predecessors by way of stylistic appropriation, the nuance of which came from each artists' reinterpretation of that system of painting into their own gesture. Prior to photographic tools the artist had to rely on their optical accuity, training the hand to depict the range of value that we collect with our vision. Charcoal studies establish value in a sketch that articulates the source of light in a composition which allows the artist to render a scene before them in real time. This charcoal sketch acts as the "plate" of a painting and gets developed through a system of layers that distinguishes light and dark in what is known as a Grisaille; the grayscale underpainting that creates the value beneath a color glazing. Although these means of capturing an image seem vastly unrelated the nature of each relies on the perception of light. In digital space light is merely a simulation. This is also true of the imagination. In order to imbue a sense of realness to these production methods the light is inferred through memory and reference. The light is developed by what the artist has come to understand about their perception of light in the real world to make an approximate photocopy of the mind's eye. Sometimes that light is a reference to a beloved artwork that captures a moment that resonates with the artist. A new wave of photographic reproduction has inundated the post-internet generations. Memetic redistribution of images has become a universal means of discourse online. While once considered disingenuous, constructed or aestheticized sameness has become accepted as part of our contemporary vernacular and memes are the currency through which people establish identity by a reification of that image's subtext exclaiming, "This is so me". Context and POV are presented through the use of images and their underlying implications creating a social impetus to "know the reference" without necessarily insisting that comprehension is derived from the original but moreso from the ability to understand the reinterpretation of that reference. Art making has in turn begun to discuss the importance of the original in an age that is so digitally advanced that the once science fiction parameters of artificially created intelligence is now a daily recalibration of perception. Ai imaging acts like our imagination in that it is composed of an endless bank of references all being prioritized to meet our expected outcome through precise prompts developed by the user.