Pop-Up Exhibition Gianna Paniagua & Jack Puglisi

Gianna Paniagua was born in New York City. At the age of 14 months, she was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and became the recipient of a heart transplant at Babies & Children’s Hospital of New York.  Much of her time growing up was split between Manhattan and Miami. She has taken painting classes at both Carnegie Mellon University and The New School: Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic and received her BA from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2013. In her senior exhibition, she received The Dean’s Award as well as an award allowing her to loan The Hillman Library her piece titled Flesh and Bone.

Paniagua’s papercutting sculptures have been displayed at Wood Street Gallery, The Inn, and in a self-curated pop-up exhibition for the Unblurred Gallery Crawl in Pittsburgh, PA.  She recently exhibited in a group show at the Warehouse Project in Wynwood, FL during Art Basel Miami as well as Scope New York 2014. This summer, she made her West Coast debut with a solo exhibition at Hat Rac Gallery in Oakland, CA which featured work made during a one month residency at the Brush Creek Center for the Arts in Saratoga, WY.

Paniagua has collaborated with public health researcher and Fractracker coordinator, Kyle Ferrar, on a series depicting the health effects of hydraulic fracturing. She continues to work from Pittsburgh, PA as well as Oakland, CA.

Jack Puglisi was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area and attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Point Park University. He has exhibited artwork for the past two decades and is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, The Pittsburgh Society of Artists, among other local art organizations.

“My work is about compelling images and interesting techniques,” Puglisi says. “The subject matter is almost exclusively portraits or figurative work. I draw my ideas from spontaneous inspiration—either people whom I have known for a period of time and suddenly see in some new light, or the stranger that I encounter in an original setting. Sometimes the concept comes before the subject, and I search for the right face or form to adapt to the idea.”

Pen and ink is Puglisi’s primary medium. Pointillism and crosshatching techniques are the two expressions that he favors most. Pointillism is the method of composing pictures from thousands of hand-placed dots of ink, creating colors and shades by the juxtaposition of the dots. Crosshatching using of overlapping lines, drawn in multiple directions, builds shade and texture. A large picture can take over four months and an undetermined number of hours to produce.