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In A Shenere Velt Gallery Pamela Calore: A Road Trip: Personal
to Public Rhode Island-born artist Pamela Calore asks probing questions about the intrinsic nature of capitalist society via an unusual route. The current international crisis of the banking and financial industry owing to right-wing, anti-New Deal demands for deregulation, had earlier echoes that Calore explores in the world of American trucking.
“Having grown up within that culture,” says Calore, “my work has a strong documentary dimension and strives to highlight the importance of the working class in society today. My current focus is an investigation into the transportation industry along the NAFTA trade route. By using the media of collage, painting, video and installation, I hope to reflect social and cultural attitudes characteristic of a capitalist society.” Calore’s exhibition specifically
focuses on the movement of freight following “I have come to the conclusion that we as a society far too often remove ourselves from responsibility. My goal as an artist is to show our own participation in keeping the demand going. There is nothing we need more then clean air and water, yet we continue to consume items that pollute the environment by industrial overproduction and transport.” Pamela Calore earned her MFA from Vermont College, has taught art and has exhibited widely. Commissions include private collectors in Indonesia and Germany. From 1989 she has had numerous solo exhibitions. She came to our attention through her participation in our 2005 Workers of the World juried exhibition in A Shenere Velt Gallery. We express our profound gratitude to Red Truck Wine for sponsoring Pamela Calore’s show.
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The focus of her documentary work,
which includes painting, interviews, photography, video,
installation, and archival research, is her father Joseph Calore’s
trucking company, the Calore Freight System, in the Northeast. Her
project covers its beginnings, growth and ultimate demise from
opposing factors, which include deregulation in the early ’70s to
disputes with the Teamsters over pension funds, from the mid 1970s to
the early 1980s. To her research Calore melds her childhood memories
of growing up in the environment of trucks, and of the workers of her
father’s company who were union drivers.
the trade route from
Laredo, TX to Kansas City, MO, and then beyond into Canada. Her video
work places the audience on the road with cheap commodities
manufactured by multinational companies using superexploited labor.
Placing the spectator in a truck on the trade route may possibly
inform us all about what we are doing when we buy at places such as
Wal-Mart and Target. By shedding light on the NAFTA highway Calore
aims to expose the loss of American jobs to outsourcing. Part of the
package includes such environmental consequences as alterations of
the land by building bigger ports and wider highways and increasingly
poor air quality from truck and freight train traffic.