February 28th - April 25th 2025
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Ephemeral World, an exhibition of artworks by Julie Zahn and Riley Fargione. Both artists compose their work from fleeting moments using printmaking and collage, employing gestures and materials that imply ephemerality and a larger hidden universe. Julie works with material she has created through painting and printmaking to capture the quality of color and light in complex compositions that evoke a particular place and time. Riley uses found materials that give a sense of a greater movement, that what we’re seeing is a fragment of something unseen.
Julie Zahn says of her work, “I have been working to create a natural oasis on my urban property for many years. My surroundings permeate my work and I am constantly inspired by what I see or imagine might be there. The power of nature is and always has been my inspiration. As the challenges our planet faces mount, my dedication to creating a slice of nurtured nature in an urban environment continues to fuel my creative process. Leveraging a modern take on ancient techniques, my art is an ode to nature.
Several years ago, my dedicated work involving birds began. With their interesting poses, energy and antics, birds provided everything I want in my work: drama, design, beauty. Once I created my first piece centered around birds, I was hooked on a new muse, examining the complex nature of birds rather than landscapes more broadly. I aspire to deepen the joy, serenity, and magic experienced as people view my art, walking away with renewed hope for a world that places nature first.”
Riley Fargione’s work is intuitive and experimental and encompasses assemblage, collage, multi-media paintings and wood sculptures. She is drawn to found objects and old paper, and keeps an extensive collection in her studio, enjoying both the unexpected and deliberate meetings of these objects in order to spark conversation and meaning.
Through her work she explores themes of beauty, whimsy, medical hilarity, systemic failures, incurable diseases, identity, hiding in plain sight, the unseen and shifting reality.
Based in Philadelphia, multimedia artist Julie Zahn spent her formative years as an artist in a countryside town in Japan painting landscapes and still-lifes. After deepening her artistic expertise through the four year Certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she returned to Japan to work with an antique screen restorer, where she discovered katazome, or Japanese stencil dyeing, which is a paste-resist technique traditionally used for textiles. Taking a modern spin on this ancient technique, Julie collages katazome, woodcut, and painting with a mix of acrylics and homemade pigments to create distinctive work.
More about Zahn’s’ work can be found at https://juliezahn.net/home.html.
Riley Fargione is a multi-media artist and designer living in Philadelphia. Her work focuses on searching for answers, solving riddles, becoming comfortable in the unknown and exploring the often maddening issues of having a disability in America.
Riley completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and received her BFA from Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa. Her work has been included in many solo and group shows, and resides in many private collections internationally and across the United States.
More about Fargione’s work can be found at https://www.rileyfargione.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
