South Street From the 80’s
a solo exhibition by Phoebe Murer @ dvaa
Exhibition Runs: march 2nd - March 4th, 2018
public Opening Reception:
Friday, March 2nd, 5-7pm
About the exhibition:
The way we waste resources is detrimental to our planet. Gentrification is not just detrimental to the environment but to our humanity. Instead of preserving neighborhoods, we raise the prices to unaffordable levels, leaving buildings and residents in limbo. We tear down old buildings and build “Bigger and better” buildings. But are they really bigger and better? Phoebe Murer’s exhibition, South Street in the 80’s is about preserving earlier memories of South Street and recycling.
Phoebe recalls South Street back then as a place punks and hippies hung out. Also, there were a ton of stores there, which sold things we needed. She remembers always buying her shoes at City Shoes, a shoe store for children on fifth and South. She remembers going to the TLA to rent movies and going to Skinz with her brother. Now South Street is suffering from neglect. She has reinvented South Street from the 80’s with papier meche sculptures. Using cardboard boxes, old business cards, old fabrics, receipts, bills, and other papers that would have otherwise been discarded, Phoebe creates armatures of the South Street strips. Reusing materials is her way of preserving the materiality of discarded materials as we should have done with South Street.
About the Artist:
Phoebe Murer is an artist, and writer born and raised in Philadelphia. She received her Certificate of Fine Arts at Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in Painting and bachelors in Psychology/ Pre-Art Therapy at Arcadia University. She is currently going for her MFA in English with an emphasis in creative writing. She has assisted in and led art activities at many schools and centers. Her specialty is working with people on the spectrum as she is also on the spectrum. She currently takes a variety of art classes at Fleisher, does paid and volunteer commissions, and gives tailor made art lessons. Phoebe Murer volunteers and does vendors regularly at Fleisher. Phoebe shows her art regularly at different coops, craft fairs, and cafes and has won various awards for her art including the 2012 INAP (International Naturally Autistic People) award for visual arts, 2015 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Award, the 2015 ANCA Network for Community Achievement and the 2016 INAP award for Community Achievement.
She is a mixed media artist who does 2D and small 3D mixed media pieces, photography, drawing, printmaking and oil painting on a variety of interests, whether it’s dreamlike swimming pools, pets, dark themes involving illness and social problems, political issues, or entertainment themes. She travels all over the world and takes photos of the most surreal looking pools and water parks to paint from and landscape paint at. She has had a life long love for bodies of water. She is currently making mixed medium sculptures of South Street in the 80’s and 90’s.
In addition she writes plays, skits, poetry, short stories and books. She got a book self-published, “Lab Animal Plays” in 2013. She designed her own book cover. She is currently working on a graphic novel from a manuscript about a disastrous trip to Europe. Her inspirations are David Hockney, Salvador Dali, Red Grooms, Toulouse Lautrec, and Edvard Munch for Visual Artists, and for literature, writers who are trauma survivors or have some sort of disability.