Dreaming of Bees
Brian Hallas and Stephanie Sommerlad Bello
Dreaming of Bees is a collaborative exhibit featuring original works and interactive elements by Brian Hallas and Stephanie Sommerlad Bello. Exploring the meaning of mutual benefit in our world, both personally and universally, Hallas and Bello scrutinize the delicate and necessary partnership between flowers and bees. Through an emphasis on the sensory and sensual experience of pollination, they use photography, painting, sound, and projections to examine how critical this relationship is to our very survival.
As abstract artists, Hallas, a photographer, and Bello, a painter, approach their respective work with a kindred vision and a complimentary passion. They each value form, palette, shape, and texture in their own imagery, and collaborate here to present a varied exhibition of symbiotic images and sounds. Dreaming of Bees is their first collaboration.
About the Artists:
Brian Hallas is a photographer from Shrewsbury Township, New Jersey, whose latest works of abstract imaginative realism focus on the flora that adorns his daily life by creating hallucinatory blooms of the imagination. His artwork has been shown in museums and galleries in New York City, California, Dallas, Kiev, Western Australia, and throughout New Jersey, hangs in several private collections in the US, and has been featured in a number of online magazines. He has been working in theater since the third grade, and as a sound designer and performer, he’s been an associate of National Medal of the Arts recipient Ping Chong since 1983. Brian many years ago adopted photography as a serious medium for exploration and expression upon becoming a school teacher, where economy of effort to achieve maximum effect is one of the keys to survival. His daily rituals of taking, processing and posting his photographs make for an oasis of peace and creativity in a very troubled era. Among the multitudes of perks afforded by a life in the Arts, Brian has especially been fortunate to very contentedly feast in many parts of the world where he otherwise would never have dined.
For more information on Brian visit his website here or follow him on Instagram.
Stephanie Sommerlad Bello is a self-taught abstract poly-media artist. Having explored diverse media, she is using and refining an analog collage technique, which consists of up-cycled paper. Her expressive style and bold choice of color palette have drawn her to also employ alcohol ink and acrylic paint. She readily welcomes commissions for one-of-a-kind handcrafted original pieces. Stephanie loves working with her hands and is passionate about curating a creative, joyful and healthy life for herself and for others. In her professional sphere she is a licensed massage therapist, yoga instructor, and reiki practitioner. She provides mindful, holistic, and therapeutic support to others via hands-on healing modalities. Stephanie lives in New Jersey with her beloved and creates out of her home-based workshop, S2B Studios.
For more information on Stephanie visit her website here or follow him on Instagram.
