About the exhibition:

Mark S. Conti, Marie Bender, and Robert Reinhardt bring together their diverse perspectives to celebrate the natural world through photography, watercolor, and oil paintings. Through realistic renderings of everyday objects in unnatural spaces, distorted landscapes, and textured photography, Embracing Nature invites us to interpret the environment through a lens of admiration, memory, and place.

Mark S. Conti’s photography exposes the relationships of form, texture and content that are hidden in plain sight in the observable world. By framing what is seen and unseen, he reveals the tension, complexity and ultimate beauty of the natural world. Conti’s images invite viewers to reexamine what is before them as if seeing it for the first time. Marie Bender’s meticulous still life paintings query the familiar and seek out the magic in the mundane. Her “magic realism” paintings reignite a sense of awe and wonder and encourage viewers to see the extraordinary beauty of ordinary things. By focusing on commonplace things that are often overlooked, Marie Bender celebrates the everyday every day. Robert Reinhardt’s watercolor paintings form new structural relationships between the land and the sky. Inspired by his travels to Scotland and Arizona, he manipulates the two different landscapes to create his own worlds. Reinhardt combines his on location visual experiences with site-specific color studies to create unreal environments that pretend to be real. 

Whether through selection, imagination or distortion; Mark S. Conti, Marie Bender, and Robert Reinhardt’s intimate displays of the natural world offer viewers a chance to recognize the beauty in things which are at risk of being overlooked.

About the Artists:

Robert Reinhardt  is an artist and art-educator with degrees from Tyler School of Art and University of the Arts. Reinhardt currently teaches at Germantown Friends and Fleisher Art Memorial. His work has been exhibited in national and local galleries and juried exhibitions, as well as public, corporate and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Temple University, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and The Royal Commission of Historical and Ancient Monuments of Scotland. His work has been included in numerous exhibits at museums and galleries throughout the United States.

Marie Bender is a still life painter, combining the animate with the inanimate. She attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, and continued to refine and share her artistic talent through advanced classes and various workshops. Marie also studied artistic anatomy for two years at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Trained to work in various mediums, including egg tempera and gouache, Marie now works predominantly in oils. She has shown her work at Rosenfeld and Newman galleries, and has won awards at various juried shows including The John James Audubon Center and the Woodmere Museum.

Mark S. Conti is a photographer and businessman who was born and raised in the Philadelphia region. After receiving degrees in Photography and English Literature from Juniata College, Conti continued his studies through photography workshops at several noted institutions. Conti went on to teach photography workshops at Juniata College and The Cape May Photographic Workshops. Mark Conti has been making fine art photographs crossing a wide range of subjects for over 30 years, exhibiting his work at DVAA, Atria, Woodmere Art Museum, Juniata College Art Museum, The Plastic Club, Pennsylvania Center for Photography, Cape May photo Workshop, West Reading Gallery and more.

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