Utica, N.Y. — Munson will host the exhibition titled “Are You Experienced,” opening Friday, Oct. 9, and on view through Dec. 13 in the Pratt Munson Gallery in Fountain Elms, with an opening reception from 3 to 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 9. The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.
Through painting, sculpture, sound, and installation, Patrick Brennan, Stephanie McMahon, and Linda Sormin create three interconnected environments that unfold sequentially throughout the gallery, centering on ideas of exploration, discovery, and lived experience. While each installation retains its own distinct language, the works remain in constant conversation, linked through material, space, sound, and sightlines that connect one room to the next.
According to their exhibition statement, “Are You Experienced” is less about arriving at a destination than about the experience of searching itself. As viewers move forward, the exhibition gradually opens toward a horizon, a destination that is never fully fixed but continually discovered through the act of looking.
Brennan, an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the space between painting, sculpture, installation, and moving image. Through immersive environments and materially driven works, he investigates perception, memory, and the ways physical space shapes experience. Brennan has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.
McMahon is a professor of painting at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University and co-founder of the Alfred/Düsseldorf MFA in painting and residency program. Her paintings extract and distill her observations and perceptions of a particular environment while presenting the possibilities of abstraction. Weaving in and out of referential forms, color, and elemental shapes, her work balances intuitive, spontaneous gesture with deliberate structure. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally.
Based in New York City, Sormin is a professor of studio art at New York University. Her current work brings experimentation in ceramics, sculpture, and installation together with video, sound, hand-cut watercolor paintings, and digital fabrication in a multi-sensory environment. Her work is included in private and public collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Boston, Mass.), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), Gardiner Museum (Toronto), CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art (Middelfart, Denmark), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, N.Y.), and Victoria & Albert Museum (London).
The Pratt Munson Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit munson.art/are-you-
