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Smith Faculty Art on Exhibit
NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- Sixteen faculty members
of the Smith College Department of Art are exhibiting their work through
September 29 at the Janotta Gallery on the first floor of Hillyer Hall,
Brown Fine Arts Center. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public,
is open Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Saturday and
Sunday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. For more information, call (413) 585-3100
or e-mail bdavis@email.smith.edu.
On exhibit will be a remarkably diverse
group of two-dimensional, three-dimensional and time-based media artworks.
Sophisticated viewers and art newcomers alike will find something in
which to delight in this accomplished collection of artworks by Smith
College's own faculty.
Below, in reverse alphabetical order, are
brief descriptions of the 16 artists who make up the exhibition.
Lynn Yamamoto, the newest
member of the art faculty, contributes paradoxically lyrical visual elements
from her installation tableaus, the subjects of which obliquely address
the human consequences of war and colonization.
Katherine Schneider, a
painter of considerable gifts, offers intimately scaled alla-prima still
lifes that afford an expansive sense of horizon -- creating an atmosphere
typically associated with that of landscape painting.
In "Making Time Visible," Gretchen
Schneider, who heads up Smith's architecture program, photo-documents
the Boston City Hall Project, a temporary public art piece she created
in 2002 in which a team of chalk artists outlined the old Scollay Square
to scale on the existing Boston City Hall Plaza.
Using the Iris printing process whereby
an image is captured on camera and manipulated digitally, the photographer Meridel
Rubenstein produces large-format prints on mica-coated tree
bark paper. Appropriately enough, Rubenstein's subjects are culturally
and historically significant tree specimens she photographed during her
global travels.
Dwight Pogue, a widely
respected master printer, renders technically brilliant and optically
arresting polychrome prints of flowering cacti in all of their otherworldly
flamboyance.
Elliot Offner, the art
department's senior sculptor, creates pedestal bronzes drawing upon the
natural world for his stylized forms.
Gary Niswonger revels in
the lubricious slur of oil paint as he transcribes the wild and domesticated
pattern, hue and chimeral visual play of his gardens in Florence, Mass.
The internationally acclaimed Barry
Moser displays real graphic genius in a sample leaf extracted
from his celebrated Hebrew Bible project.
Chester Michalik's surreal-looking,
large-format photographs of Japan and Las Vegas are made all the more
preternatural by Michalik's discerning eye for uncanny detail and composition.
The simple fact that his photo-tableaus are not the product of a feverish
imagination but an unblinking record of man-made hyper-reality makes
them all the more haunting.
Elizabeth Meyersohn's atmospheric
panorama sensitively subordinates landscape beneath a voluminous billowing
sky made palpable by skillfully manipulated oil washes.
Barbara Lattanzi's "Original
software applied to 5 videos" is a video-projected work
(located in the downstairs Oresman Gallery) that employs software for algorithmic
improvisation. The result is the stuttering visual equivalent of hip-hop's "scratching" iteration.
Oil painter Susan Heidemann's frequent
travels to the teeming undersea worlds of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia
have supplied visual raw material for her series of incandescent biomorphic
abstract paintings on canvas that deftly reference art historical luminaries
as well.
Susan Greenspan slyly interjects
with a miniature set of photographic digital prints that enigmatically
highlight a Lilliputian figure bobbing forlornly in a homemade cardboard
bathtub.
Carl Caivano extends the
investigation of painting into three dimensions. His sweeping expressionist
brushstrokes and linear notation launch aggressively outward from the
exhibition wall's white plane and well into the space of the viewer.
A. Lee Burns' small but
powerful caged stones -- one a real river rock, the other a cast bronze
duplicate -- rely on weight, density and compositional concentration
to do the job. The work's understated humor reveals itself upon extended
viewing.
Roger Boyce's technically
intriguing works on linen -- which leave much of the surface unpainted
-- are obliquely derived from lineage charts encountered in the monasteries
of Ladakh and Bhutan, an area researched by Boyce on an extended trip
to the Himalayan Plateau.
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Office of College
Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063 |
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Marti
Hobbes
News Assistant
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
mhobbes@email.smith.edu
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