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Raritan Valley Community College’s Arts & Design department will present Inner Hues, an exhibition showcasing the work of two, female, NJ-based artists, Jane LaFarge Hamill and Christina Sorace MacKinnon, October 4-25, in the Art Gallery at the College’s Branchburg campus.

The show is being coordinated by Arts & Design Co-Chair, Associate Professor and Art Gallery Director Darren McManus. The reception and artists’ talk will be held Friday, October 4, from 5-7 p.m. The event is free of charge and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

For the exhibition, Hamill and MacKinnon will display new work in a variety of sizes. Both artists adeptly use the language of abstraction to create paintings that are distinguished by sophisticated mark-making and bold, vivid use of color.

Jane Lafarge Hamill, a painter and digital artist, earned her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in figurative painting. Hamill’s current work is abstract, displaying exuberant gestures of color in an array of scale. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions in New York City and internationally, and her work is featured in private and public collections. Hamill is represented in NYC by FMLY Gallery and SPACE SBH Gallery. This year, Hamill exhibited a solo show of paintings at SPACE SBH Gallery in NYC. Her work was the subject of a peer-reviewed paper published by Leonardo, MIT Press in 2022: “Beyond Representation in Virtual Reality: The Abstract Art of Jane Hamill and Kevin Mack,” and her paintings were exhibited alongside works by the late Helen Frankenthaler in the exhibition “Abstract” at Room 57 Gallery in New York. In 2020, she was a resident member at the New Museum’s art and technology incubator program, NewINC. Hamill is also the founding director of MarthaMOCA, an artist residency at her farm in Lambertville.

Christina Sorace MacKinnon is a painter who has been captivated by making art since childhood, being drawn to its liberating nature, free from demands and expectations. In 1998, her creative passion led her to serious study within the Arts & Design department at Raritan Valley Community College, where her professors encouraged her to pursue her dream of becoming a fulltime artist. Although her role as a mother of three temporarily put her artistic ambitions on hold, MacKinnon returned to art-making with renewed vigor and focus in 2013. MacKinnon’s art has been exhibited in galleries across the U.S. and Canada, and featured in various publications, including The Trenton Times, Create Magazine, and All She Makes. In 2022, she was honored with an Individual Fellowship Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, cementing her place as a respected figure in the contemporary art scene. MacKinnon lives with her family in Flemington and works in her studio in Lambertville.

Gallery hours for the exhibition are Mondays, 3-8 p.m.; Tuesdays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Wednesdays, 3-8 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Fridays, 1-4 p.m. On Friday, October 4, the Art Gallery will not open until 5 p.m. For further information, contact the  Arts & Design department, 908-218-8876.

RVCC is located at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg, NJ. For additional information, visit https://www.raritanval.edu/arts or www.raritanval.edu and follow the RVCC Art Gallery Instagram feed at https://www.instagram.com/rvcc_art_gallery/

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 30, 2024

PR #17