Land Ho! Gallery opens new exhibit

Nowhere/Land Ho Doug Cruze’s gallery Tunnel Gallery 5515 Penn Ave. 412-867-7453 Runs… Nowhere/Land Ho Doug Cruze’s gallery Tunnel Gallery 5515 Penn Ave. 412-867-7453 Runs through Dec. 8

Pittsburgh’s new Tunnel Gallery opened at the beginning of this month and features the exhibit Nowhere/Land Ho. This show, the gallery’s inaugural exhibit, exclusively features local Pittsburgh artist, Cara Erskine.

Erskine, born in Bristol, Pa., lives and works in Pittsburgh and has had her work featured all throughout the Pittsburgh area, with exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Three Rivers Art Festival and various other local galleries and art shows.

Outside of Pittsburgh, Erskine’s work has been shown in galleries and museums in Cleveland, Philadelphia and Yale University, where she received her MFA in painting and printmaking. Erskine currently works as an art professor at Robert Morris University where she teaches Color-Theory and Printmaking and Drawing. As well as CH In addition to teaching, she also serves as the Exhibition Coordinator for Carnegie Mellon University’s Regina Gouger Miller Gallery.

Erskine’s gallery, Nowhere/Land Ho, features 12 pieces of artwork including oil-on-canvas paintings and ink-on-paper drawings, as well as an etching on aquatint. The works from these three different media line the walls of the narrow Tunnel Gallery.

The 12 pieces of art featured in the gallery include four oil-on-canvas that are of a slightly impressionistic style with blurred lines and abstract shapes. Erskine’s vivid and vibrant paintings add color to the gallery with many deep and rich colors, featuring an especially large abundance of dark blues, greens and purples. As well as bright colorful paintings, there are also seven ink drawings that are primarily black and white with small bits of neutral shades of brown and tan on several of them.

The two of the main images featured in many of the paintings and drawings in Erkskine’s gallery are coins and platforms.

There is a series of several ink drawings that all center on the image of coins. The drawings show images of coins in several ways. There are two pictures showing simple coins that look to be cast across the canvas as well as more complex and symbolic images such as a slightly disturbing picture of a woman throwing up the same coins. Both a painting and an ink drawing portray the same old, decrepit-looking platform that looks like it was built of scrap wood.

Although the two pieces of art show the same image, the drawing and painting are exceedingly different. The painting shows the platform as the foreground for a spectacularly colored sunset, whereas the drawing is a simple little black and white sketch on a plain piece of white paper. Many double images, reflections and reproductions of identical images similar to the pair of platform paintings can be found throughout Erkskine’s exhibition.

The recently opened Tunnel Gallery is located in the art district of Penn Avenue right up the street from the corner of Penn and Negley avenues. Erskine’s work will be displayed until Dec. 8. The exhibit is located only a short 71D bus ride away from campus. The new gallery space will be used to feature the work of many other contemporary artists, following the display of Erskine’s work.