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Our Goals
We are a curatorial group who want to contribute to our city’s vibrant artistic community through generating exhibitions, dialogue, writing, and public outreach. Our goal is to form a space that is part of an alternative conversation that emphasizes exhibiting work of emerging artists and those who wish to show experimental work. We need your help to open our doors this spring.
You are funding more than a one-time project. We hope to have many exhibitions and events in this space! Your contribution goes towards building a foundation for an ongoing, artistic endeavor. We are actively raising funds to open our gallery in March, 2015. We realize the limited options for emerging artists to exhibit significant work in Philadelphia without gallery representation. We see this as a valuable opportunity to contribute our perspectives and skills. As a collective, we aim to exhibit new and exciting work, continue producing our zine, lead community projects, arrange panel discussions, invite guest curators, and engage with public schools.
The building at 319 N. 11th Street is where we would love to find our home. To accomplish this, we will need your help. The start-up costs for our first exhibition will be at least $6,000. This is only a percentage of the total cost involved in opening the space, but with your help we can have our first show by this spring. Below, there is a budget outlining the expenses that will be covered with your help. The listed items are to help us prepare the space for our first exhibition, like, painting walls, a new projector, a wall-hanging system to display paintings, pedestals, furniture for the gallery, and money for marketing and promotional materials.
We need your support to open a space and contribute to Philadelphia's art scene. Many of our members will be graduating from PAFA this semester and are eager to take on new challenges while continuing to engage with the wider Philadelphia, artistic community. Please help fund our campaign, like us on Facebook and share our cause by spreading the word to friends, family, and fellow artists. Some of our perks are handcrafted and designed by our collective members. There are even original works and limited edition prints available! With your help, we can open a space for emerging artists in Philadelphia!
Meet Bob!
Mission Statement
AUTOMAT is a collective of young, Philadelphia-based artists who engage in cross-disciplinary conversations to nurture personal exchanges and share ideas. We dispense artistic sustenance through exhibitions, writing, dialogue and community programming. Together, we process, package, and display for your convenience.
Meet the Collective
We are a non-hierarchical organization and each member pays monthly dues and rotates responsibilities. Our members are all working artists and many will be graduating from the MFA program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts this spring.
Morgan Hobbs
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Morgan Hobbs graduated in 2010 with a BFA in painting and a minor in anthropology from the University of Central Missouri. Her education has informed an interest in figurative painting and relating social science concepts to her work in the studio. She is specifically interested in how painting relies on visual memory. She has attended a residency at Vermont Studio Center, participated in a Drawing Marathon at New York Studio School, presented at the National Conference of Undergraduate Research at Weber State University, and exhibited her work in shows both regionally and nationally. She has work currently on display at Blue Mountain Gallery in New York. Morgan is earning her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
Jillian Schley
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Jillian Schley earned a BS degree in psychology from Florida State University in 2003. She later studied ceramics and sculpture while living in Chapel Hill, NC and went on to earn a BFA in drawing from Arizona State University in 2012. Informed by her studies in psychology, anthropology, and religion, Jillian works in painting, sculpture, and installation. In her work, she addresses issues of materiality and immateriality, accumulation, possible states of being, and potentiality of form. She currently lives in Philadelphia, PA, and is pursuing her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Rebecca Sedehi
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Rebecca Sedehi earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a concentration in painting. She spent her senior year studying in Rome, Italy as part of R.I.S.D’s European Honors Program. After graduating she continued to travel- living for a period in Madrid and Taormina, Sicily. Throughout the years these experiences have continued to inform her work, particularly her interest in creating paintings embedded with a sense of time and history. From 2003-2007 she worked as a designer at Izquierdo Studio in New York. Some of her projects include: fabricating wings for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, hand painting fabric for Celine Dion’s Las Vegas show and designing props for window display at Ralph Lauren in NYC. Rebecca has participated in both group exhibits and open studios in New York, New Jersey, Madrid and Philadelphia where she recently moved to pursue her M.F.A. at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Shane Allan Smith
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Shane Allan Smith graduated in 2008 with a BFA in Art from Asbury University, finishing this degree at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies. During this time, he interned with artist Kristin Baker and directly afterward, returned to his hometown of Wilmore, Kentucky. His work employs any conducive medium for a given project, and explores topics such as mental disorders, pop culture, the self, gender, and death, all shrouded in humor. He has been featured on the Brooklyn-based art site Hyperallergic and has exhibited his work throughout the country, most recently at the Giampietro gallery in New Haven, CT. Shane is earning his MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
Tiffany Tate
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Tiffany Tate is originally from Springfield, Illinois. Tate received a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Printmaking in 2010 and a Bachelor’s of Art in Art History in 2012, both from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. In 2014, she completed her Master’s of Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and shortly after exhibited her work at Mixed Greens Gallery in Chelsea in a five-person show. Tate has shown nationally in venues located in New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, among others. She is currently preparing for a three-person show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to open in July of 2015. She primarily makes photographs and writes poems in her plant filled studio in Philadelphia. Currently, she is interested in how surface and space within a photographic image can equate external and internal landscapes.
Zach Zecha
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Zach Zecha originally from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Attended Pikes Peak Community College from 2007 to 2010, and went on to receive his Bachelors of Fine Arts with honors from the University of Colorado, culminating with a thesis exhibition with Redline gallery in May 2013. Currently, he is working on his Masters of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, teaching children about the collection as an intern for the PAFA museum, helping to run and curate exhibitions with a small student run gallery, assisting with a post-baccalaureate theoretical seminar class and is anticipating graduation in May of 2015. Zach has shown nationally in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and Colorado. As well as internationally in Buenos Aries, and Istanbul. His work has been published twice in artist catalogues and featured once on Saatchi’s artist website. Zach’s Work is in painting, video, and installation as a form of artistic language.
We Can't Wait to See You at Our First Opening!
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