The exhibit will also feature an installation of 6 X 9-inch artworks donated by community artists that will be sold for $25 to benefit the Gloria Gemma Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The public is invited to a free reception for all the artists on Saturday, February 4 from 5 – 8 p.m. at the gallery located at 36 Market Street in Warren.
Dondero is presenting an installation of 31 overlapping pastel paintings which she calls, “Lush Terrain.” A founding member of IFA, professor of art at Bridgewater State University and exhibiting artist with a robust studio practice, Dondero says, “All my artwork is an urgent expression of how I experience the world. Through the use of non-objective imagery, the purpose is to evoke ideas about suspended and fleeting moments. These pastel paintings are the material results of how I understand the collision of the physical and the ephemeral.”
A jeweler, Poirier’s work is heavily influenced by the natural world and tends to focus on her obsessions with insects and gemstones as she pairs abstracted hollow beetle forms with gemstones to create a talisman of nature.
Robinson is a traveler, teacher, storyteller, documenter, and adventurer who studied under the tutelage of Dondero while an undergraduate at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, MA. She graduated in 2009.
Currently, she travels around the United States as a national technical representative, and around the world with her photography as she passes along her knowledge and experiences in seminars and workshops and through the images she makes. In this exhibit, she is presenting selections from her “Under the Pencil” project. The project chronicles her journey and the journey of other women as they wrestle with the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.
“What is time? What is consciousness? What is reality?” These are questions that philosophers ponder with words and logic and that Shambroom, a philosophy major as a college student, pursues with color, form, shape, and light in three collage paintings that play off each other. Nearby, three short videos play continuously on two Chromebooks intertwining the paintings with movement and narrative.
The subjects of these works are people the artist knows and cherishes: his daughter, a close friend, a neighbor’s child. Shambroom spent more than five years making paintings, cutting them apart, and reassembling them into collages. At the same time, he scoured the internet, grabbing bits and pieces of video from daily newsfeeds, and thinking about the relationship between painted surfaces and pixilated ones.  As Shambroom notes in his artist statement, “There’s no heavy lifting required to appreciate the rich colors, the sensuous forms, or the light that plays across the flat surfaces of these works. But a closer look reveals that stillness is an illusion. Everything moves. And all of us live in a version of this place.”
In addition to Dondero, other IFA exhibiting artists who will be participating include Sally Barker, Eileen Siobhan Collins, Stephen Fisher, Philip Gruppuso, Carl Keitner, Eileen Mayhew, Linda Megathlin, Mercedes Nuñez, Anne Marie Rossi, Lenny Rumpler, Howard Windham and Meredith Wolf.
Regular gallery hours are Thursdays, 12 – 3 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m.
IFA encourages IFA artists and guest artists to explore their creativity by providing a supportive community and exhibition space. IFA also focuses on art programming for the public and collaborative projects with other local and regional organizations to promote the arts.
Its mission is to inspire creativity and promote art-making that enriches the community.