StopWatch Gallery & Studio opens in Greensburg with pandemic-themed show
Artwork made during — and influenced by — the pandemic is the topic of “The Pandemic Show,” the aptly named inaugural exhibition at the StopWatch Gallery & Studio in downtown Greensburg.
Opening hours will be 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday in the new art space at 323 S. Main St.
The works were created by gallery owners and spouses, Marti Haykin and Marc Snyder of Unity. The show is the first of what they hope will be many thought-provoking exhibitions.
Haykin is a neurohospitalist with Excela Health, and Snyder is a former college art professor and now stay-at-home dad to daughters Rachel, 15, and Katie, 13.
The couple met in a printmaking workshop as undergraduates at the University of Virginia, then lived in various places across the country for both schooling and work. They moved to Unity in 2009 for Haykin’s job.
Haykin’s charcoal drawings feature 17 portraits of friends and co-workers wearing masks, along with eight still-lifes with skeletons as the focal point.
Snyder’s installation comprises collages portraying an oversized field of thistles buzzing with bees. The bases of the collages are woodcuts and linocuts overlaid with paint and charcoal.
Pandemic fears
Haykin said her portrait series began as a way of processing fears of working in a hospital in the early days of the pandemic, when so much was unknown. She drew a masked self-portrait first and then a drawing of a friend.
“Then I invited different people to come and sit for me,” she said. “I wanted to show that Greensburg is not the most diverse community, but we do have diversity. Then I thought the pandemic doesn’t care who you are, and we’re all dependent on one another.
“To me, the mask is showing, ‘I don’t want to give you this disease and you don’t want you to give it to me.’ We’re all in this together,” she said.
“The skeleton is associated with death but also is something that has no obvious gender or race, so that makes them universal,” Snyder said.
One of the skeleton pieces is a tribute to George Floyd, Haykin said: “The skeleton, to me, could be any of us. It got me wondering, what if (Floyd) were my brother, my friend?”
Close observation reveals the underlying structure of Snyder’s thistles and bees to be spark plugs, power lines, gas pumps, bullets, methane molecules and the coronavirus.
“I want this installation to have a feeling of energy and liveliness, but I also want there to be indicators pointing to the precariousness of what we’re doing to the environment,” Snyder said. “We’re at a point where we’re asking how much harm, how much damage, can we do? Nature has an amazing resiliency, amazing ability to recover, but can we push that too far, especially with bees?”
Concept gallery
Haykin and Snyder formerly had studios in the Westmoreland Cultural Trust Incubator for the Arts in Greensburg. They originally hoped to open their new gallery in April 2020 with a show of woodcuts by William Mathie, art professor at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Mathie’s exhibition has been rescheduled to follow “The Pandemic Show.”
The couple said, because its small size, they envision StopWatch as a concept gallery, where individual artists can present shows centered around a sustained idea or artistic process.
“We thought, what if we invited an artist in and said, ‘We don’t want to see your whole body of work, but present us with an idea that you’re currently working on,’ ” Snyder said. “In any given show, we might not be able to say there’s something for everyone here, but shows I really remember are shows where something has been honed and crafted as an exhibition, like these 20 things are meant to be seen together.
“The artist gets a chance to really explore what she is thinking about. That’s the kind of show I really enjoy, and that is in no way critiquing any other model, but that’s what I want to do in here.”
The gallery name is a commentary on living in a time of short attention spans, Snyder said.
“A stopwatch implies a race being timed, a short, discrete moment where everyone is doing the same thing and paying attention,” he said. “We’re hoping someone coming into the gallery can have a moment or two where we present them with something they can look at and enjoy and not be thinking about other things.
“And it’s a literal play on words — ‘stop’ and ‘watch’ — treating time as a precious thing, taking something and really engaging with it,” he said.
Following the opening, gallery hours will be 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 4:30 to 7 p.m. Fridays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays and by appointment.
For details, call 724-708-2034 or email marc@fimp.net.
Shirley McMarlin is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Shirley by email at smcmarlin@triblive.com or via Twitter .
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