Struts Gallery is pleased to welcome Newfoundland artist Jerry Ropson as the latest participant in the Open Studio Programming. For the month of September, Ropson will take over a space of the Gallery to further explore his obsession with lost and found objects in the shape of his work, “Under Everything Walked Over”.

Currently residing in Montreal, Ropson graduated from Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in 2001 and has been exhibited extensively throughout Newfoundland as well as being active in Bangkok, Thailand, during an international internship in 2002.
Throughout his several years of traveling Newfoundland, Montreal, London and Bangkok, Ropson has been collecting assorted fragments of other peoples’ lives as he comes across them, lost or discarded, on sidewalk streets. Ropson’s collection includes assortments of personal items, such as personal photographs, drawings, assortments of inanimate objects, which once lost we rarely consider again, apart from our keys, of which Ropson has accumulated several. But it is these found objects which inspire the artist to create a narrative which he structures around the inanimate, giving them a life outside of their existence as an object. Moreover, he combines these objects to create a narrative element in his collection of “tiny histories” and connects them through tales including characters and settings as well as his own drawings, guided by the found texts and personal references.

Ropson’s project is constantly growing and evolving as he continues to collect various objects during his travels, and will continue to do so while in Sackville, working to create a new body of work comprised of his latest finds both from Sackville and Montreal. Ropson will then construct tiny sculptural pieces from his found objects by both sewing and drawing on paper. The artist has also developed a slide show of found slides as well as a performance/talk which revolves around his own childhood interwoven with the fictitious events based on the drawings, notes and slides.

While at the Gallery, Ropson will be available for the public to interact with to discuss his work and share the concepts surrounding his ideas.