Curatorial Fellowship for Big Orbit

CEPA Gallery is excited to announce a new initiative giving a Western New York artist the freedom to engage the community with a two year curatorial fellowship at CEPA’s Big Orbit Project Space. The inaugural curatorial fellow, Buffalo-based artist Megan Metté, will use her first year to mount two exhibitions that foreground and question our perception of the world around us.

First, Big Orbit will host an exhibition of site-specific installations by artist Amber Heaton, whose works often draw upon natural phenomena to consider the artist’s place within the world’s vast systems, creating colorful, abstract works that invite shifts in perspective. Next, performance artist Hanae Utamura will offer a meditation on Niagara Falls. Drawing on the site’s long history—as an object to be conquered by daredevils, a source of hydroelectric power, and a dumping ground for toxic waste—the performance will examine the constant renegotiation between humans and the environment, incorporating text, live music, dance, video, and audience participation, to blur the boundaries between past, present, and future.

Through these exhibitions, Metté will showcase artists who are underrepresented in Western New York. Entering her second year, Metté will conduct studio visits and open calls for work to find artists who continue to emphasize time-based media, performances, and pieces that move off the gallery walls and beyond the traditional frame, offering a curatorial vision of works that encourage viewer interactivity, thoughtful analysis, and direct engagement with the arts.

Megan Metté is a lens-based artist interested in examining what it takes to feel comfortable in contemporary society. Megan’s work can be found both in print and online in publications such as Don’t Take Pictures, Afterimage, and Of the Afternoon. She has received numerous honors and exhibitions, sharing work coast to coast, including a first place award from Jennifer Blessing, photographic curator at the Guggenheim; a solo exhibition award from CEPA Gallery; and a prize for Creative Photographic Concept in the Vision Art Awards at the 464 Gallery in Buffalo. Her work was featured in the exhibition A “Womanhouse” or a Roaming House? “A Room of One’s Own” Today at A.I.R Gallery in Brooklyn, and again in Portland, Oregon, for the exhibition Color Space: Contemporary Photography at Black Box Gallery. She is often drawn to interdisciplinary collaborations, working with musicians, dancers, and other visual artists on special events such as Delayed, Echolalia, and [un] sound spaces. She holds an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and a BFA in Photography from the University of Louisville.

Visit Megan Metté’s website at meganmette.com.