From kinked spines to the Twisted System: For the past year, First Fridays have seen the Jemison Chiropractic office at 148 N. Prince St. transformed into a small gallery showing some very diverse works. I recently checked in with Evan Kitson of Twisted System to find out a little about the gallery.
Kitson, a Pennsylvania College of Art & Design student, and a group of his friends (mostly fellow PCA&D students) had been going to First Fridays and realized they hadn’t been seeing enough fresh people with new art, and that they were getting to the point where they were good enough for a show. Dr. David Jemison, Kitson’s landlord, offered his front-office space to the effort. The friends got their works together, put a sign out on the sidewalk and opened with little publicity. “I just stood outside and screamed ‘Come in, Come in!” Kitson said. But with a good location (in the middle of the Gallery Row block between CityFolk and the Living Light Gallery) and persistence, word has been getting out.
Kitson’s own work ranges from large-format realistic drawings to darker, more abstract digital photography. Another artist, Matt Doyle, creates realistic wildlife drawings, while other artists show varying degrees of pop art and graphic art influence and a constant willingness to experiment. (You can see a sampling of some of the various artists’ work on the group’s Web site.) “What’s good about our art is we’re constantly changing,” Kitson commented. “When people come in they’re surprised every time.”
For this First Friday (March 7), “a lot of people are trying out a lot of new things … this is the month to experiment a bit and see what happens,” Kitson said. The gallery opens between 5:30 and 6 on First Fridays, and stays open “until there are no more people on the street.”
