ARTIST STATEMENT

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 Born to a military family in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Albertus Gorman made Louisville, Kentucky, his home for over thirty-five years. In addition to being a working artist, Gorman has been a unique contributor to the arts and cultural scene in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and surrounding regions.

 

Gorman received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Murray State University in 1984 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati in 1989 with a full graduate scholarship and teaching assistantship. 

 

Professionally, Gorman has an extensive record working in both not-for-profit organizations and commercial art spaces. During the 1990s, he was the Curator and Exhibitions Coordinator for the Louisville Visual Art Association at the historic Water Tower.  Among the nearly one hundred exhibitions Gorman has worked on, he highlights the organization of the 1997 retrospective for the 20th-century sculptor Barney Bright. This was accompanied by an award-winning catalog also written by Gorman. In 2005, Gorman went on to curate the retrospective of Louisville-artist, Mark Anthony Mulligan, for the Kentucky Folk Art Center in Morehead, Kentucky. Over the years, Gorman has written and published a number of articles on Kentucky artists for Kentucky Homes and Garden Magazine and Arts Across Kentucky Magazine, as well as a number of private writing commissions. 

 

Gorman has led efforts to promote the creativity of artists inflicted with disabilities. In 2000, Gorman was the Director of the New Vision Gallery in Louisville, which served as a national venue for artists who were blind or had other visual impairments. More recently, in 2015, he was the Artistic Director and Manager of the StudioWorks art program for the not-for-profit Louisville organization Zoom Group, which specializes in vocational opportunities for individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities. 

 

Gorman recently retired as the Coordinator of Programs and Public Engagement for the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. As a branch of the Floyd County Library, Gorman was active in creating public programs for all ages and is now at work on a commissioned book for the Floyd County Library on 19th-century Indiana artist, George W. Morrison. In 2021, Gorman curated the most extensive exhibition on Morrison’s paintings for the Carnegie Center for Art and History.

ARTIST BIO

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For twenty-five years, Albertus Gorman has been the self-designated ‘Artist at Exit 0’ and the unofficial artist-in-residence at the Falls of the Ohio State Park in Clarksville, Indiana, across the river from Louisville where the artist calls his home. Though a small state park, this area holds a deep significance to life, myth, and American History, to which Gorman creates responses to in present situations. For Gorman, the Falls of the Ohio River is one of the special places in the world where the location holds perceivable palpable energy. The compression in time felt while standing on the ancient bedrock of the Ohio River and seeing the contemporary city of Lousiville on the near horizon is a dynamic experience of ever-changing environmental effects that attracts and sustains a variety of life. 

 

Gorman’s title as “Artist at Exit 0” was derived from the park’s original interstate offramp. However, it suggests a more existential and absurd space to openly wander and wonder. This area, otherwise thought of as just a tiny speck on the globe, is the artist’s inspiration, source of materials, outdoor studio, and informal public gallery for site-specific pieces crucial to the context of nature. With playfulness and optimism, Gorman interprets a contemporary sense of place and time that connects through found objects. During his time in practice, Gorman has become one of the most internationally recognized artists working with cast-off materials in a freshwater ecosystem. 

 

Being a self-titled ‘finder of lost things’, Gorman validates everything the riverbank has to offer, especially as a place to collect and ponder. His art is entirely influenced by the environmentally deleterious material choices the Ohio River provides, with all-too-common materials provided including various water-born plastics, styrofoam, coal, glass, lead, rock, brick, bone, and wood. As a form of self-control over the overall project, Gorman only uses material specifically collected and documented from the park. It is important for Gorman to respect the hard-won, weathered shapes and forms the river places in his path. This intentionally keeps some of nature’s transformative processes and energies active and open without being overworked. Gorman recognizes the waterway as an active collaborator in his artwork and process. The river chooses Gorman’s materials when it chooses what pieces to push down the banks of the river. The materials are fragments of history and tellings of the things we prioritize as a society and culture, which Gorman then uses to create visual art objects. From what the artist has theorized, people have sublimated their innate creativity to become consumers. Through simple means and poor materials, Gorman gives people permission to engage their own creative energies and imaginations.

 

The title of Gorman's exhibition, “From the Cabinet of Unnatural Curiosities”, references the elaborate collections of natural history objects that were formed particularly in the era of 18th century Europe. Royalty, academics, and intellectuals would vie for the most unusual and rare natural history specimens from around the world for their personal collections; many of which said collections that would form the basis for natural history museums. Gorman’s “Cabinet of Unnatural Curiosities” is the artist’s ongoing personal collection of favorite, and often man-made, river finds all collected along the shoreline of the Falls of the Ohio State Park. With a plastic base making up the majority of these objects, Gorman then curates these items into distinct, often ironic, stand-alone conceptual collections.  

 

Throughout Gorman’s life, his career has spanned being an artist, curator, exhibition coordinator, art installer, and a number of hats in the field of arts. All that he has done has been in the advocacy of living an aesthetic life congealed in a deep sense of engagement. 

Gorman is currently the first guest artist working with the Kentucky Waterways Alliance and their watershed advocacy work. In recognizing that the river is part of a universal subconscious, close to Gorman’s mind and heart is the state and quality of the environment, specifically the fresh waters of the Ohio River Valley. Working in the Louisville area has become an anecdotal attempt to see if Gorman could observe the local effects of climate change in a small, well-understood place over time. Twenty-five years later, he has observed many changes along the riverbank with a goal to document and share his experience walking along the riverbank through the materials he finds and uses.