Janine Wong: Fragments January 13 to July 24, 2004 Marsh Art Gallery, University of Richmond Museums Janine Wong: Fragments is on view in the Marsh Art Gallery through July 24 and presents four large-scale multi-panel paintings by this contemporary artist from Massachusetts. She has created Fragments as a site-specific project for the University of Richmond Museums. Janine Mei-Chiao Wong (American, born 1956) is a multi-disciplinary artist working in the various media of artist’s books, printmaking, painting, architecture, and design. Inspired by her recent artist residency at the American Academy in Rome, Wong has created this series of paintings and several books that explore relationships that emerge through layering and juxtaposing found objects and images. Fascinated by the graffiti she saw on city walls, trash from the streets, and other forms of debris she found, the artist states, “The things we throw away can tell us as much as what we keep and hold precious.” For the University of Richmond’s Fragments, Wong created a group of four paintings consisting of twelve wood panels each, made of a combination of collage, transfer, oil paint, drawing, encaustic, and digital prints on paper. Each painting began with a collage of either found fragments in the environment (photographed) or constructed ones (collage from trash and ephemera) used as an underpainting with subsequent layers of collage and paint applied to the surface. These paintings transform existing fragments into new images that Wong states, “. . . allude to the fractured nature of memory and sensory experience of the passage of time.”
Janine Wong is currently an Associate Professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She received her B.Arch. from Cornell University in 1980 and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1984. Her awards include a Visiting Artist/Scholar Residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2002-2003 and a Regional Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the NEA in 1994. Her artwork has been featured in numerous exhibitions and her work is in several public collections including the University of Richmond Museums. A registered architect, her architecture experience includes work at Bortell/Stroud Associates in Cambridge and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill Inc, in Boston.