FIRE …. October 30 – December 5, 2009

Blane De St. Croix works in sculpture, drawing and installation. His work articulates humankind’s desire to take command over the earth -- alluding to conflicts with ecology, politics and ourselves. The work also reveals conflicts with nature, while asking us to reflect on our precarious relationship with our surroundings.  De St. Croix’s work draws from painting and sculpture’s historical use of the landscape as subject, entering it into the contemporary consciousness of the conflicted landscape; certainly paying homage to land artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer and the painter Anselm Kiefer.

This exhibit will consist of both sculpture and drawings.  Included will be works created in the past few years exploring the forest fire as subject and new work created especially for the gallery reflecting upon the subliminal landscape imagery of the Florida Everglades and how it ties into encroachment, conservation and restoration.

Blane De St. Croix was born in Boston, Massachusetts and educated at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (M.F.A. - Sculpture) and Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts (B.F.A. - Sculpture with distinction). Previously De St. Croix was a visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College, Whittier, California. Currently he is an Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida. He lives and works in both South Florida and Brooklyn, New York.

Thomas Lyon Mills …. January 8 – February 13, 2010

In Rome over the years,Thomas Lyon Mills has obtained permission to pass countless hours in places that are not always accessible to the public: Early Christian catacombs long under lock and key; a large ancient Mithraeum adjoining tunnels under the Baths of Caracalla; passageways beneath the Colosseum; the 5th-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua on the Roman Forum. In his native New York State, he retreats to a hidden spot in the Adirondacks, a natural sanctuary where, as in Rome, he absorbs the spiritual energies of the locale. For Mills, these sites invite contemplation, coalescing time, memory and other intangibles. He records in copious notes his impressions of these places and of the pre-16th-century art that deeply moves him, along with transcriptions each morning of his dreams. All find their way into his dense, middling- to large-scale mixed-medium drawings, which reveal their multilayered secrets slowly and incompletely to the beholder. The drawings may be worked on for a period of years. Shapes materialize as if through a process of geological accretion and erosion, with old marks erased to make room for new ones on what become heavily abraded surfaces. The images are generally dark dream spaces with forms dissolving into amorphous browns and blacks. Occasionally, mists of acrid hues waft by or bright light shines in through a chink. In his damp and silent places, weird fauna and flora appear, of unusual shapes and colors. Some seem to glow in the dark.      – From Art in America, by Michael Amy

Thomas Lyon Mills received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Bloomfield Hills Michigan.  He has exhibited his work since the early 80’s and has been a guest lecturer/visiting artist at Harvard, the Bauhaus in Germany, Parsons School of Design in NYC, Tyler School of Art, Auburn University and Cranbrook Academy of Art to list a few.   

Annual Student Art Show ... April 22 - 30, 2010

This exhibition features the work from Edison State College art students and includes painting, drawing, design, ceramics and photography.

"Great Movie Music and Broadway Hits"

Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 1:00 P.M.
Bob Rauschenberg Gallery - Edison State College - Fort Myers Campus

Joan Stewart, Janie Spangler Violinists
Vivian Aiello, Viola and Diane Coffman, Cello