Bonnie Collura

Sculpture
Associate Professor of Art
Office: 103 Visual Arts
Telephone: 814.865.9471
Email: bsc13@psu.edu

BONNIE COLLURA
Associate Professor of Art

Ms. Collura received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994 and her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 1996. She is the recipient of a 1997 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, a 2005 John F. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a 2010 MacDowell Colony Fellowship and was a nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and Rolex Protégé Award. Her work, which has been exhibited in the United States, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and India has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, BOMB magazine, Beautiful Decay, Time Out New York, and several other publications. www.bonniecollurastudio.com

As a DJ combines copasetic and differing references to create a string of sounds that are at once familiar and foreign, I try to impart this muti-tiered logic in three-dimensional form.  Greek mythology, renaissance sculpture, biblical stories, fairy tales and pop culture icons are some of the references that launch the framework for a non-linear narrative that can only be completed by the viewers movement through the sculptural space I direct.  Fascinated in how film can distort, pervert, and alter one’s memory through its cyclically and unfolding structure, I make three-dimensional figurative and non-figurative forms operate on this visual manipulative level. Every degree of my sculptures strive to challenge a viewers circulation, encouraging them to move around the sculpture not because that is what they may understand to do cognitively in relation to art viewing, but because that is what they are propelled to do emotionally to become more connected to the gesture and narrative of the sculpture in front of them. While making, what guides a dubious subjective/objective balance is a dance between my head and hands. What results is a space where I freely coalesces multiple points of reference while rearranging them into a new logic. My hope is that each angle of my work poses questions that a viewer can only answer by physically moving in the space that surrounds the sculpture, thus turning the viewer into a collaborator and coconspirator of meaning.

My current project, entitled The Prince Project, which I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to begin, is comprised of four sections entitled Dust, Wicked, Seven, and White Light. Together, they interweave sculptures, animations, audio, installations, and drawings representing the journey of a fictitious three-dimensional fused form through physical, fantastical, and spiritual states.