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Castleton University's Christine Price 
& Bank Galleries

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ABOUT

The Christine Price Gallery, located in the lobby of the Castleton Fine Arts Center, and the Castleton University Bank Gallery, located in the heart of Rutland's historic downtown, showcase local and regional artists throughout the year.

Castleton University Bank Gallery
TEMPORARILY CLOSED
104 Merchants Row
Rutland, VT
Thursday - Saturday 12 pm - 6 pm 

Christine Price Gallery
Fine Arts Center, Castleton University
45 Alumni Drive
Castleton, VT
Monday - Friday 8 am - 4:30 pm 

From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Portal #5 - Morgan Rose Free @morganrosefree⁠ ⁠ Morgan Rose Free is a Canadian artist predominantly working in sculptural assemblage and installation. Her conceptual interests lie in human engagement with the outside world; often grappling with ideas around our current climate crisis, engagement with public spaces, and how the digital age has affected these relationships. Currently based in Columbus OH, she has exhibited across North America including Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Baltimore, Columbus, Pittsburgh and Spokane. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, Terrain Exhibitions at Enos Park, and ACRE Projects. In 2019 she received a Research and Creation Grant from The Canada Council for the Arts. She received her MFA in Sculpture/Dimensional Studies at Alfred University in 2017 and her BFA in Fibre from the Alberta College of Art and Design with honors in 2012.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ My mixed media works are a reimagining of my consciousness and surroundings, oscillating between assemblage of preexisting objects and a thoroughly handmade aesthetic. I am constantly pursuing curiosities and fascinations with new materials, yet my unshakable affinity for the tactility of fiber allows textiles and embroidery to enter my work more often than not. Broadly, my conceptual interests lie in human engagement with the outside world, often grappling with ideas around our current climate crisis, engagement with public spaces (both natural and human made), and how the digital age has affected these relationships. Through a desire to continuously review and confront our world in all its beauty and imperfections, my new and ongoing series of wall works explore tensions between idyllic landscapes and the real lived experience one has. These portals serve up a false optimism, offering idealized but inaccessible versions of place compromised by contemporary anxieties that creep in. Functioning as a transitional point between one place and another, each piece operates as an entrance and an exit simultaneously. ⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Hearts and Bone - Madeleine Bazil @mads_baz⁠ ⁠ Madeleine Bazil (b. 1995 USA) is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller working across still and moving image. ⁠ ⁠ She is interested in memory, intimacy, and the ways in which we navigate worlds — real and imagined. Her research and practice seek to hold space for collective and individual memory of trauma, both cultural and personal. ⁠ ⁠ She lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is a master’s candidate of Documentary Arts in UCT’s Centre for Film and Media Studies. She is currently directing her first film.⁠ ⁠ To See If Something Comes Next is an ongoing personal series I have been pursuing at the beginning of the pandemic, when I left my built home in South Africa and returned to my family home in the United States, struggling - like many of us - with feelings of fracture, displacement, and vulnerability. The name comes from the eponymous poem, by American poet Jack Gilbert, which is a meditation on the action buried within stillness. ⁠ ⁠ I'm interested in investigating notions of intimacy - what it means or looks like during this era of isolation, how we cultivate it, how our definitions of it are altered by solitude, loss, fear, and also by community. Through dual exploration of the physical form and the natural world I have been seeking to articulate my emotional state as both I and the seasons continue onward - even whilst the world at large is in tenuous standstill. ⁠ ⁠ What does intimacy mean in a time when to be fortunate means to be relatively alone, when our means of connection and validation are upended? I've found myself noticing minutiae amid this time of silence: the contours of the self, the contours of nature. But how much, if at all, does this external knowability translate to the mapping of internal geographies, emotional landscapes? ⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Untitled - Conner Gordon @conner.gordon⁠ ⁠ Conner Gordon (b. 1994) is an Indiana-based photographer exploring notions of home. His work has been included in exhibitions in the United States and United Kingdom, and on platforms including Humble Arts Foundation and Fotoroom. He was the recipient of a 2019 Fulbright Research Grant to Serbia. He is also the founding editor of Epistem, a digital platform exploring photography, ethics, and social change. ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ As a nascent Yugoslavia emerged from the Second World War, Belgrade’s city planners found themselves tasked with translating the optimism of the era into concrete and stone. Inspired by the urban planning principles of modernism and the Yugoslav ideals of brotherhood and unity, they envisioned a city of Brutalist structures “awash in a sea of greenery” that would honor the country’s founding ideals and mark its ascendance as a modern state. Rather than modify Belgrade’s existing urban design, a centuries-old web of alleyways and competing architectural styles, the planners looked to the city’s western marshes as the perfect place to start anew–to design an entire city, and the community it would contain, from the ground up. ⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ I Can't Take it In - Shereene Fogenay @Shereene55⁠ ⁠ I am an artist and docent based in Las Vegas Nevada. I work in Gallery management and enjoy teaching the community about art history. Understanding Art history and history as a whole has continued to strengthen me as an artist.⁠ The mediums I work with include acrylic, ink, and water soluble pencils.I am inspired my essence of what it means to be a” person of color” in this world. My work focuses on my Guyanese heritage and expressions of people of color. I enjoy the idea of showing the Black community conveying dynamic expressions. I believe that in our society, black expression is not always received well or even accepted. I allow my work to express my identity and the hopes I have of open expression for all people of color.
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ After - Frances Bukovsky @frances_bukovsky⁠ ⁠ Frances Bukovsky is a lens based artist and photographer who was born in rural Upstate NY and currently lives in Port Salerno, FL. She earned a BFA with Honors in Photography and Imaging from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2018. Identity, family, place, and memory are intrinsically linked to the experience of chronic illness in Bukovsky’s work where she pries apart daily routine and intimate spaces to explore her relationship to physical and mental health.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Covid-19 has re-contextualized image making for me. In looking through my images made in the past in places outside of my own immediate space, I see a new perspective beginning to emerge. Travel has a different, surreal slant, and my mind craves new images and new experiences. Ideas of a future utopia has become entangled in an imperfect nostalgia for me.⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Desert Oasis - Becca Schwartz @________george ⁠ Becca Schwartz is an artist living in Las Vegas, NV. Her work focuses on the human perception of reality, challenging conventional wisdom and the legitimacy behind social norms. She’s been recognized for her photography by the Kennedy Center and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and has exhibited nationally and internationally.⁠ ⁠ Through bright and unrealistic lighting and editing, I strive to lure my audience into a false reality, unable to differentiate what is true and what is not. Our perceptions of authenticity are continuously partial, as facts become twisted and re-told throughout their existence. The idea of falseness is so important, sweeping facts and realism under the carpet, only to become involved with bright colors and immediate satisfactions. To fool the audience with beauty is to distract and convince ourselves of a new, shiny and untouchable reality, while ignoring the destruction that surrounds us. Relating to the medium of photography itself, I attempt to make viewers question the realism of what they observe, realizing that photography will inherently always lie.⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Invisable Dog - Nanc Hart @nancyannehart⁠ ⁠ MFA fr AIB/LUCAD. A N.J. born, Boston based studio artist + educator.⁠ ⁠ A Painter taken to infusing installations with object matter.⁠ ⁠
From our current exhibition: UTOPIA⁠ Interchange - Shanghai, China - Ryan Koopmans @ryan.koopmans⁠ ⁠ Ryan Koopmans (BA, MFA) is a Dutch Canadian photographer interested in the built environment and the societies that are shaped by those environments.⁠ ⁠ Born in Amsterdam (1986) he was raised on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, completed his undergraduate education at UBC in Vancouver, and in 2012 received a Masters of Fine Art in Photography, Video & Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.⁠ ⁠ His undergraduate degree in the interdisciplinary practices of geography, art history, and psychology formed the basis for his interest in architecture and the communities living in that architecture.⁠ ⁠ Koopmans is primarily drawn to photographing surreal structures in our world’s megacities and urban landscapes. Formal qualities in their geometry, repetition, and saturation help him illustrate what he terms ‘the poetry of form in interesting locations.’⁠ ⁠ -⁠ Paradise Now explores how urban fantasies and construction function as expressions of nationalistic ambition, blurring the line between the natural and artificial within the hypermodern city.⁠ ⁠ My work focuses on the influence of urban planning and architecture and how they function to express a country’s desire to construct a utopia.⁠ ⁠ I am fascinated by the use of cultural motif and the manipulation of nature that modern architecture and urban planning affords.⁠ ⁠ For example, geometric walkways of a modern plaza in Kazakhstan are appropriated from colourful nomadic weaving designs. In Singapore, enormous artificial tree-like structures were built to emulate the function of the native rainforest.⁠ ⁠ I believe that the built environment is one of the best arenas to investigate how countries construct identities, often through the building of ‘utopian’ landscapes.