The Hicks Art Center Gallery at Bucks County Community College is pleased to announce the opening of the summer exhibition, Astronomical: Gazing Inward and Beyond on view from June 5– September 8, 2023. The Gallery is located in the Hicks Art Center building on the campus of Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

The artists in Astronomical: Gazing Inward and Beyond look to celestial bodies of constellations and galaxies that have sparked curiosity, amazement, narrative folklores, the metaphysical and scientific discoveries since Mesopotamian times as source material for their artworks. From paintings depicting deep space, appropriated imaginings of life on other planets, the Astronomy Picture of the Day stream to abstract renderings and graphic collages of cosmos’ powerful divine influence over astrology, the works in the exhibition demonstrate the broad range of artistic explorations, interpretations and experimentations found in the vast and awesome material realm of outer space and the Earth.

Participating artists include Charles Bennett, Alicia Fredericks, Katelyn Garcia, Christine McHugh, Erica Ryan Stallones, LeRoy Stevens and Andrea B. Wallace.

As a retired aerospace engineer, Bucks County resident Charles Bennett had a remarkable career designing power systems for many NASA and Government satellite programs, including GPS, EOS (Earth Observing System), and Apollo, while specializing in advanced battery and solar array designs. Combining his engineering background with woodworking, Charles is exhibiting a wood tablet with planetary inlays depicting their relationships to scale. Also on view are Bennett’s collection of commemorative vintage posters from satellite missions NASA—GSFC LANDSAT-7 and satellite images of aerial land documentation.

Alicia Fredericks contribution to the exhibition of her multi-color print of a rocket and planets was created in BCCC Arts and Communication faculty Caren Friedman’s spring 2022 Silkscreen course. Friedman has grouped printmaking assignments into themes and the rocket print is from the Astronomy portfolio of student projects.

Based in Philadelphia, artist Katelyn Garcia’s two ceramic sculptures are meticulously crafted to represent the innumerable craters and surface variations of the moon. As a child Garcia was obsessed with the moon and the night sky. Her interest in constellations and “space” is one of the reasons she switched from animation and film to science and engineering early on in her studies. Inspired by the breathtaking variations, irregularities and “imperfections” of the moon’s surface, Garcia has blended her visual and scientific research of the physical moon into her “Women in Greek Mythology” series with the moon goddess Celine a central figure. Garcia’s series further exposes the duality of science and myth narratives tied to our fascination with visualizing celestial objects as vessels of our belonging to a storytelling lineage. Firing ceramics at high temperatures is inherently unpredictable with bumps and dents inevitable outcomes. Garcia sees this process as a direct correlation to the moon’s beautifully imperfect nature made visible in her moon sculptures.

With technological advances in deep space satellite photography, Upper Bucks local artist Christine McHugh has embarked on a series of high chroma oil on linen works that gloriously depict the galaxy Andromeda, Jupiter, Saturn, and other fascinating outer space phenomena. Some scenes in the twelve paintings on view in the exhibition which include cultural landmarks posit time traveler conundrums like, “What would the builders of Stonehenge think about the recent color saturated images of solar systems and planets unseen to the naked eye?”

For the Los Angeles based artist Erica Ryan Stallones, “the ten paintings exhibited here are visualizations of the sky above us/space around us at a given moment in time. The impetus for each piece was the station of the moon (largely "full" or "new") and the geometric relationships it formed with other planets, stars, and constellations at that time. Embedded in the visual narrative are the subjective feelings concurrently observed from my own life. My work is simultaneously research-based and intuitive. While a language of shapes, colors and symbols is present, it is not proscriptive or restrictive - the work tells the story and I listen as much as I create.”

LeRoy Stevens’ drawing, video and printed works in the exhibition offer conceptually, media centered approaches to address how we absorb and process information about space and the beyond. His video “Cosmos” for example is comprised of edited commercials that ran during the television broadcast of COSMOS the series with its soundtrack played simultaneously. When the series aired, Stevens and his wife listened to the soundtrack on vinyl with headphones in the comfort of their Echo Park home during commercial breaks. In the gallery space, viewers now witness an intimate, looped moment in time capturing COSMOS’ musical crescendos often humorously synced with key narrative moments in the commercials.

With her backgrounds in graphic design, painting and astrology, Stockton based artist Andrea B. Wallace has cultivated her talents since majoring in fine art at Connecticut College. While building a marketing and communications company, A.B. Wallace Inc., in 1986, Andrea studied with the world- renowned astrologer Joan Negus. To this day, Andrea shares her knowledge of astrology with her clients and through her graphic arts. The Saturn Pluto conjunction of 2020 and lunar eclipse the same week inspired her digital work shown in the exhibition, combining her passion for art and astrology with her graphic design skill.

Hosted by the Bucks County Community College, Arts and Communication Department at Hicks Art Center Gallery.

Summer gallery hours are Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

For additional information please visit hicksgallery.bucks.edu or call 215-968-8425.

About the Hicks Gallery

Hicks Art Center Gallery at Bucks County Community College provides a varied series of curated art exhibitions and related programming in support of the Arts & Communication Department and as an important educational and cultural resource for the community. The Gallery is located at 275 Swamp Road, Newtown, PA 18940 in the Hicks Art Center on the Newtown campus of Bucks County Community College.