Brooklyn-based fine art photographer Julia Forrest creates pictorial illusions with women who appear gentle and fragile, yet possess a strong power. Using mirrors to help them blend into their surroundings, the mirrors create an illusion, showing off their power by changing the landscape. Forrest is currently a teaching artist at the Brooklyn Museum, the Newark Museum, Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA.
Christine Heller’s early interest in dance has led to a life-long focus on the human figure as alter ego, guide, symbol, and source of energy at intersections of the personal, political, and social. Drawing everything from hip hop dancers to soccer players, Heller’s paintings interpret how body language conveys despair, elation, and anger. Heller’s career has included installations, paintings, and large murals. In recent years, she has completed murals in Key West, Fla.; Denver, Col.; Roanoke College in Salem, Va., Munson Williams Proctor in Utica and at SUNY Oneonta.
Since 2012, she has been a scholar-in-residence at Roanoke College. Working exclusively with landscape imagery from subjects near her home in the Hudson Valley, Amy Talluto’s paintings fuse memory of discovered places along stretches of highway with observed realism, and transform natural forms into something highly personified and alive.
Faces, orifices, and multiple arms and legs appear in everything from trees to rock quarries to hillsides. A brooding melancholy and solitude pervade. Strange spirits seem to live among us, yet remain never fully known. Talluto’s work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago and Wyoming.
A reception for the artists will be held Saturday, May 7, from noon to 3 p.m. The exhibits run through July 9. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 3 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free, and the Galleries are wheelchair-accessible with a ramp and a lift. For more information, call 315.691.3550 or visit www.earlvilleoperahouse.com. The Earlville Galleries are located at 18 E. Main St., Earlville.