In her sculptures, artist Janis Purcell invites the viewer to stand for a while within the space of her dreamlife - a landscape adorned with color and texture and peopled with challenged heroes and goddesses, morphing vessels, immortalized flowers, and living music. It is work that represents the artist's "...spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form..." described by Carl Jung in his dream research; work that offers to share, play with, inspire, and entertain the viewer.

Janis' Brooklyn childhood was filled with a rich blend of family drama, Catholic ritual, urban excess, and a colorful stream of buttons, fabric, trim, and lace. Her fascination with materials of all type, and her need to touch, manipulate and create, was formed early on by her experiences in her immigrant Italian family of tailors and garment designers. Years later, that impulse was given shape and direction as she earned her BFA and MFA at Brooklyn College, studying under a stellar faculty that included renowned sculptors Sylvia Stone, Anne Arnold, and Lee Bontecou. Janis' interest in non-conventional materials and subject matter was encouraged in the heady atmosphere of NYC's 1980s art scene that embraced alternative constructs and a personal approach to art-making.

Janis cites several 20th century artists, including Henry Moore, Giacometti, Joseph Cornell, Julio Gonzalez and Eva Hesse as role models and her early attraction to the work of the Impressionists and Paul Klee is still referenced in the soft pastel hues and whimsical abstract shapes of many of Janis' figures. It is her openness to the language, pull and challenge of her medium-of-choice, however, that probably most strongly advises the creative flow of Janis' work today. Her spectacular ceramic figures and meticulously constructed "altar" works offer the yin and the yang of the largest body of her work. The ceramic figures are imposing, usually anthropomorphic presences - alternately regal, creepy, serene and whimsical (her humor cannot be overstated!) - while the altars are exquisitely composed, narrative constructs with gorgeous handmade wooden boxes at their base. More recently, in her work with concrete, Janis has been experimenting with process, pigments, elegant composition, and "included" materials to create evocative works that are by turns lyrical (Dream Dancer; Ice Age) and monumental (Sunflower; Chalice).

Janis has come to embrace the process of her art, no longer demanding that the work reveal or demonstrate some deeper meaning to her. Instead she hopes that they strike a responsive, primordial chord in the viewer. In Jung's words: "...They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth..." of this artist's rich dream life, and we are the better for it.

Tricia Fagan, 2009
Director, The Gallery at Mercer County Community College