Portraits and Tributes: Drawings and Photography by Kalie Boyne and Justin Case

City of Providence Mayor Jorge O. Elorza and the Department of Art, Culture + Tourism invite you to visit the Gallery at City Hall for its newest installation Portraits and Tributes: Drawings and Photography by Kalie Boyne and Justin Case. This exhibition features macramé and illustration as well as archival elements that speak to process.  It is on view in the Gallery at Providence City Hall May 17, 2018 – August 13, 2018.  Opening Reception is August 16 from 4:30pm – 6:30pm.

Kalie Boyne and Justin “Case” make work that shows love. Boyne’s finely-tuned pencil, ink, and mixed media drawings are full of the subtle details she observes in her subjects. She often meets new and old friends for unstructured interviews and deep hangs before painstakingly committing their visages to paper in ways that showcase their inner beauty, power, and joy. Case’s works similarly showcase the best features of his subject: the City of Providence. He portrays the downtown’s skyline, neighborhood parks, and the City’s super-saturated sunsets (punctured by the Manchester Street Power Station smoke stacks) in hyper-real tones. These images become glowing tributes to the place where the artist was raised and continues to work today as a commercial photographer.

About the Artists:

Kalie Boyne is a multimedia artist based in Providence. Her work is centered around the complexities of representation and the role of art in actively identifying and unlearning media stereotypes. Through a combination of portraiture and oral history, Kalie seeks to challenge the pervasiveness of one-dimensional tropes in the media by creating a body of work that highlights and celebrates human depth. She also co-produces the zine Ripple Effect with KLynn Johnson and is currently working on Consumption, a visual book that focuses on the social repression of rage, grief, and disquiet experienced by women and femmes. Boyne works as a teacher and in various food service jobs, which provide her with free food and even more insight into the enigmas of human interaction.

Justin Holland (aka Justin Case) was born in Brooklyn, New York but was raised primarily on the Southside of Providence. He grew up exposed to all kinds of talented people who were into music and art, but it was a DJ named Curty Kutt who helped him make the leap to finding his own artistic voice. Case hung out at Kutt’s Broad Street vinyl emporium by day and practiced DJing in his bedroom by night before landing a number of club gigs around the City. In 2013, while working for The Avenue Concept, Case got a taste for using a sophisticated digital SLR camera. It wasn’t long before he was taking pictures for friends at their club nights around the City. Today he shoots everything from birthdays and weddings, to site-specific landscapes and portraits.

About the Gallery at City Hall: Offering space to artists and organizations that might not have a permanent gallery, the Gallery at City Hall exhibits an eclectic array of work that highlights the artistic and cultural diversity found in the Providence community. The Gallery is open to the public during City Hall business hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30pm and is located at 25 Dorrance Street | 2nd Floor | Providence, RI 02903. For more information go to http://artculturetourism.com/main-gallery