Something Big, Something Small

Something Big, Something Small

On view from October 31 to December 30, 2023

Artist Panel: Friday, November 3rd, 4 – 5:30 pm

Artist Reception & Happy Hour: Friday, November 3rd, 5:00 – 7:30 pm

Bridgette Mayer Gallery is excited to present Something Big, Something Small, a new group exhibition featuring 10 contemporary artists. Something Big, Something Small will be on view from Tuesday, October 31 to Saturday, December 30, 2023. There will be a special panel with the artists of Something Big, Something Small on Friday, November 3rd from 4 to 5:30pm at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Rhoden Auditorium. Immediately following from 5:30 to 7:30pm, there will be an opening reception and happy hour at Bridgette Mayer Gallery.

Have you ever experienced the feeling of scale with artwork?

Gallery Director Bridgette Mayer shares,

“I will never forget standing in front of Michelangelo’s statue of David at the Accademia Gallery of Florence in 1995. This seventeen-foot-tall masterpiece, made out of marble, was created by the Italian Renaissance master between 1501-1504. It was the first time I experienced feeling small – very small – in front of a work of art. As I continued to have this experience in Italy and also within many architectural structures in the US and beyond, I became interested in how artists use scale to affect how the viewer may feel standing in front of their art. I have also had the opposite feeling of feeling large and expansive (whether physically, emotionally, or even intellectually) while viewing contemporary art. This exhibition explores scale in its various forms.”

In art, the principle of scale refers to the relative size of one object compared to another. Usually this is the size of the artwork compared to the viewer’s body. Scale can also refer to the different size relationships of different visuals within a singular piece of art.

For the exhibition Something Big, Something Small , 10 contemporary artists (five represented artists from the gallery program, and five invited artists) were asked to consider scale and shifting scale in their work and create or illustrate the concept of a shift in scale – whether large or small, conceptual, literal or ambiguous and create works around this concept.