Kadoya Gallery is pleased to present Familiar Convergence featuring the photography of Bob Benvenuto and Kevin Malella. This powerful collaboration by Benvenuto and Malella is the first exhibition in the Gallery's 2016 schedule which promises to be an exciting year filled with experiential installations and shows that offer heightened viewer engagement. Benvenuto and Malella, through their respective works, are both attempting to visually articulate a conversation between our world and their audience. They pay close attention to the subtle details around us that need voice in a fragile tipping point of our culture and relations to the world, be it social or environmental. These works attempt, not in vain, but with hope, to reconcile the disquiet and calmness of our current times.According to the artists, the vast world around us is full of beauty, harmony, distinctness, dissonance, chaos, creation, destruction, and contradiction. These qualities cannot exist all at the same time in any given place, but many do. It is one of many ways our world remains diverse and can evoke emotions or states of happiness, sorrow, surprise, awe, anger, indifference, and sometimes the sublime. With Human's widespread utilization of the Earth's surface and core, the relationships between natural and unnatural components are becoming more and more complex. Human interspecies interaction has become more electronic and less personal, but also more universal, and our ability to unify across the globe is commonplace; yet one cannot help but feel a level of isolation in this techno-sociological shift. Bob Benvenuto and Kevin Malella are committed to visualizing the odd, yet entirely familiar, relationships and juxtapositions of converging elements; noting conversations that occur when people, places, the natural, and artificial meet in time. Benvenuto's constructed images are surreal depictions of our world of appearances, seen through a veil of perceptive conjecture and contrivance. By placing environments, objects, and people in an orchestrated context, Benvenuto evokes a personal and reflective narrative. His images are peculiar and often artificial, but they are not illusions. Similarly, yet distinct, Malella's photographs examine the harmony or dissonance of Our relationship to the land. He is interested in the marks we make, physically and psychologically, onto our planet and how those alterations shift geological, ecological, and sociological patterns during our tenure. Malella is not only visualizing the effects of human occupancy of Earth, but also succession of nature, despite the destruction we afflict on the landscape through our careless sense of ownership. He finds solace in nature's ability to adapt and reclaim its boundaries, but warns of the time it may take to do so; it is certainly on a geologic scale, rather than a human one.
About the Author: KEVIN MALELLA Kevin Malella is a Colorado-based photographer and educator. He received his BFA in Photography at Central Washington University and MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Malella is a recipient of multiple grants, residencies, fellowships, and national awards for Photography. The JDC Fine Art Gallery, in San Diego, and Schneider Gallery Chicago, represent his work. His photography and aesthetics are diverse in nature, but always addressing socio/political and/or environmental concerns. Website: kevinmalella.com BOB BENVENUTO Bob Benvenuto was born in New York City in 1955. Benvenuto works predominantly in the medium of digital photography, but has a history that includes large scale paintings and hand printed textiles. Benvenuto attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and completed a Masters Degree in Expressive Therapies from Lesley College in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1980. He has been in group exhibits in Boston and Santa Fe, and solo shows at Colorado State University and Kadoya Gallery in Pueblo, Colorado. He has also been selected twice to exhibit in the annual Representing The West exhibit at The Sangre De Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, as well as a featured artist on zealous.com, artistaday.com and risunoc.com. Benvenuto's work is in the permanent collections of Colorado State University and The Crawford Hotel in Denver. Website: bobbenvenuto.com GREGORY HOWELL Storyteller, curator and business consultant, Gregory made his way to Pueblo via Tokyo to join a team of innovative physicians in the launch of a network of medical clinics in Colorado and Texas. Gregory is the owner of Kadoya Gallery on Central Plaza in Downtown Pueblo and since his arrival in Southern Colorado has launched The Shoe Factory, the ARTery and the Underground in the Historic Federal Building. As a branding and marketing specialist in the arts, Gregory is about to launch his new methodology called the Tray of Life to help creatives amplify the narrative of their story. In 2018 Gregory will be releasing his first major storytelling effort Jackie & the Taj which shares the powerful and compelling story of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's historic trip to India in 1962.