Historic Happenings Blog

Divided States NJ EMERGING ARTISTS SERIES Stephen Barnwell • Capital Offenses Digital Prints with Mixed Media August 9 – September 8, 2019 Opening Reception: Friday, August 16th, 6:00 – 8:00 pm Gallery Talk: Wednesday, August 21st, 7:00 – 8:00 pm Two Books Signings at Opening Reception and Gallery Talk: Capital Offenses – A ten year retrospective of the political satire of Stephen Barnwell Moneyart – The only complete collection of Stephen Barnwell’ s Moneyart Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm & Sun, 12:00 – 5:00 pm. Admission $8 Artist statement: The events of 9-11 awoke within me a political consciousness, and for almost twenty years I have been creating moneyart to comment on social and political events. I feel that artists should observe the world around them and speak the truth as they see it. Money is the Prime Mover of our culture. It dictates the world of business, determines government policy, and even drives our own behavior. Money is a powerful symbol in all ...

Artist Gallery Talk and Book Signing Stephen Barnwell: Captial Offenses Wednesday, August 21, 2019 My technique for creating this body of work is digital collage. I assemble quite large collages in Photoshop from scans of original, public-domain engravings from my collection of hundreds of vintage books and periodicals from the late 19 th  century. My style of collage is one that does not look like a collage, but rather a seamless, unified image. This requires spending hours upon hours searching for each individual element in the work, which often comprises hundreds of elements, to find not just an appropriate image, but one that is compatible with the total collage. These elements are scanned at a very high resolution, cleaned, resized and manipulated, and then added to the final assemblage. They are printed on my own high-resolution color laser printer, one at a time, with unique serial numbers. I also like to add multimedia elements to the prints, such as stickers, stamps, seals...