Starlight Artist Alison Matione and Buffalo artist Marc Tomko exhibit their artwork and collections.

 

This exhibit is part of our "Side By Each" series in which Starlight artists are exhibited alongside artists from this region and beyond. Curated by Kyle Butler with the help of Starlight staff.

 

Kyle writes:

"Upcoming at Starlight, we will be exhibiting the work of two artists who each collect for reasons both habitual and creative. Alison Mantione collects from the world around her seemingly indiscriminately: broken jewelry, discarded packaging, pins, bottle caps, a damaged license plate, broken bike parts, and more, all from the proverbial discard bin of gutters, yards and sidewalks. The found objects are organized by date-discovered, placed in bags or other containers, and labeled in Mantione's idiosyncratic handwriting that is as much flourish as it is text. Marc Tomko's collecting practice is more introspective: keeping whatever objects, tools, and ephemera that have played a role in his life and occupy a space in his psyche. Tomko has a similarly low threshold as Mantione for what constitutes a worthwhile object: cheap toys, weird housewares, impulsive sculptures, remnants of previous creative projects, and so on. But his collecting has more to do with archiving the strange paper trail (object trail?) of his past and analyzing aesthetic and psychological tendencies through the objects. A small series of these objects will be exhibited along a line of rotating platforms. Tomko's inquisitiveness toward his own psyche also compels him to make impulsive drawings and paintings where the resultant scrawl is regarded more as a record of a particular moment than it is a static artwork. Tomko will exhibit some of these 2D works, but as videos shot from his own vantage point as he rummages through them and picks out strange details. "