Wilkes Current Exhibitions

Sordoni Art Gallery, March 30- May 18, 2008, 12:00pm-4:30pm daily.

The Sordoni Art Gallery opens the exhibition “Sweetheart Like You:” Roller Derby Portraits on Sunday, March 30, with a reception for the artist, Michael Poster, from 2-4 p.m.

Montrose, PA photographer Michael Poster, began making pictures of the local Wilkes-Barre women’s roller derby team, the Coal City Rollers, in early 2006. It was at this time that the sport, wildly popular in America in the 1940s and 1950s, was being reinvented by a group of young women athletes who had never even seen the game played during its heyday. These remarkable women, all skilled and dedicated athletes playing a demanding sport, have burst onto the public scene, not only in this region but all across the country, successfully promoting themselves to a public more familiar with typically male-dominated sporting events. The sly jab at traditional gender roles is referenced by the title of this exhibition, taken from the Bob Dylan song “Sweetheart Like You” from Dylan’s 1983 album Infidels.

Of the genesis of this unique series of images, the artist explains: “I quickly realized that the game of roller derby, as interesting as it was, was not going to be the subject of my pictures. The women and their relationships were more interesting to me and I chose to turn my attention away from the action on the roller rink and toward the equally intense interactions along the sidelines at the edges of play.”

It is these “edges” that Poster’s work captures most vividly, isolating specific personal moments from the normal flow of activity on the roller rink floor, capturing what would otherwise go unnoticed. “The pictures are loose,” Poster says, “random puzzle pieces” reassembled here into coherent narratives about a remarkable group of young women and their intense personal interactions.