SEASON X: Celebrating a Decade September 10 – October 25, 2015
When OSilas Gallery opened its doors in September 2006 both the campus and local community were introduced to a non-stop rotation of world-class exhibitions right in their backyard. The mission of the gallery was and still is simple: To integrate the visual arts into the cultural and educational life of the campus and community by providing quality exhibitions and programs that are diverse in style, content, and media; memorable, thought-provoking, and spiritually enriching; and of artistic originality, integrity, and excellence. I may be biased, but Season X: Celebrating a Decade highlights just how we have achieved that mission over the years. Each piece in this exhibition is from an artist or collection that represents one of our past exhibitions – and the diversity of style, content and media is quite evident. Our memorable, thought-provoking, and spiritually enriching exhibitions are a testament to the immensely talented curators, directors, board members and staff who have served at OSilas making all that you have seen possible. The artistic originality, integrity, and excellence we’ve been able to exhibit is thanks to the talent, genius and passion of the artists and collectors who have been willing to share their gifts with us. Season X: Celebrating a Decade is not just any exhibition – it is a reunion. To create this catalogue, I asked each artist and collector in the exhibition to provide a statement on how their work or collection has evolved over the years and each statement has a personal twist to this request. It is amazing to see the continuity between the work these artists and collectors first showed in the gallery and what they have given us now. Some of their stories are simply new discoveries, and others are completely new endeavors. Season X: Celebrating a Decade shows you what your favorites have been up to. Just as the gallery morphed these last few years, so too have they. I hope that this exhibition is a trip down memory lane for the audience who has supported us all these years. For those new to OSilas, this exhibition is a chance to see all you’ve been missing! This exhibition has been a decade in the making, and I hope you enjoy it. Sincerely,
Shanley Hanlon OSilas Gallery Concordia College–NewYork
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SEASON X:
DEWITT CLINTON BOUTELLE The Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Davies
Collecting Stories: The Davies Collection (2009) Artists in Depth: 19 Retrospectives from the Davies Family Collection (2014) I felt this would be a significant contribution. It is not only an exceptional work by this fairly early Hudson River School artist, but it is also of the iconic New York Harbor, Hudson River with a unique view of the watercraft of the day. In the foreground is a dredger at work, behind it is a tug boat, beyond that is a highly detailed ferry boat with figures. To the far right side is a sailing vessel and off in the left distance appears to be a large mixed steam and sail ship with the landmark Castle Garden visible on the far left. This work is artistically complex, aesthetically pleasing in the sunsets glow and historically accurate and important. It’s the whole package. New York Harbor at Sunset by Dewitt Clinton Boutelle
Celebrating a Decade
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JOEL CARREIRO Spellbound (2007) In the seven years since “Spellbound”, I have expanded the range of imagery sources for my collages to include medieval manuscript marginalia, European decorative objects, and 18th-century nature illustrations. Where the works exhibited in the “Spellbound” exhibition were visually dense and richly colorful, constructed largely from Renaissance and Baroque painting imagery, the newer work is more spare, aerated and overtly ornamental. The matte milk paint base is foregrounded and the surface created as the heat transfer imagery is applied into it has become a vital element.
4Z6K4 by Joel Carreiro
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SEASON X:
XAVIER CORTADA Nurturing Nature: Artists Engage the Environment (2011) Xavier Cortada’s art-science practice is oriented toward social engagement and the environment. He has created art installations at the earth’s poles to generate awareness of global climate change: In 2007, while a fellow of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artist and Writer’s Program, he created a site-specific installation at the South Pole that uses its moving ice sheet an instrument to mark time; the art piece will be completed in 150,000 years. In 2008, he planted a green flag at the North Pole to reclaim it for nature and launch an urban reforestation initiative. Cortada often collaborates with scientists in his art-making: • At CERN, he worked with a physicist to develop an art installation that captures the five search strategies scientists used to find The Higgs Boson particle, confirming the standard model of physics. Five giant banners hang at the Compact Muon Solenoid, a facility where the particle was discovered. • Cortada worked with a population geneticist on a project that explores our ancestral journeys out of Africa 60,000 years ago. • The artist collaborated with a molecular biologist to synthesize an actual DNA strand made from a sequence randomly generated by participants visiting his museum exhibit. The work was published in Science. • Working with biologists, Cortada developed eco-art projects to reforest mangroves, regrow native trees canopies and restore wildflower populations. • During May 2015, Cortada participated as an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL to work with scientists and artists in addressing sea level rise concerns. • Cortada is working with researchers the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER to help our community understand diatoms and the role they play in helping us study water ecology and sea level rise. • Cortada is currently working with scientists at Hubbard Brook LTER on a water cycle visualization project driven by real-time data collected at a watershed in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. He worked with same scientists in 2012 to perform “Wind Words: Water,” the work is being presented at the 2015 National Weather Center Biennale in Norman, OK. • Cortada served as Artist-in-Residence at Florida International University‘s (FIU) College of Architecture + The Arts (CARTA) from 2011 through 2015.
Florida Diatom by Xavier Cortada
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ANN BRAINERD CRANE The Bronxville Historical Conservancy Collection
Bronxville Artists and Friends: Legacies Past and Future (2008) Ann Brainerd Crane was educated in Paris and continued her painting studies with American Impressionist John Twachtman in New York. In 1904, she married celebrated landscape architect Bruce Crane, who was twenty-four years her senior and her stepfather from an earlier marriage. This union caused quite a sensation in the New York press. By 1910, the Cranes were living in Bronxville, and Ann lived at Studio Arcade from 1914 until her death in 1948. Ann was known in New York art circles and exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, the MacDowell Club, and the Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, as well as galleries such as E & A Milch. She also showed her work at the Philadelphia Academy of Art and in Old Lyme, CT, where she and Bruce were affiliated with the summer art colony. Ann and Bruce Crane exhibited together on several occasions. Ann Crane organized small exhibitions of Bronxville artists and their American colleagues at the Women’s Club and at her own gallery, The Crane, in The Towers on Pondfield Road, well into the 1930s. The Bronxville Historical Conservancy was founded in 2008 at the close of the village’s Centennial Celebration. Central to the vision of this new organization was a commitment to preserving and strengthening the artistic, architectural and cultural heritage of the village. Aware of the community’s rich history of resident artists, the board members, like many villagers, lamented the fact that very few artworks by earlier area artists were known to be in the village. Motivated to “bring back to Bronxville” the art of former local artists, the Conservancy established a committee to research, locate, and catalogue the works of these individuals in the hope that some might eventually become part of both public and private collections in Bronxville. In the sixteen years since the Conservancy was founded, the art collection has grown to include more than twenty outstanding examples of work by Bronxville artists from the original art colony that flourished in Lawrence Park at the turn of the 20th century and beyond. The Conservancy is fortunate to have works by both Ann and Bruce Crane in the collection, along with many of their notable Bronxville contemporaries. The collection is on permanent display in the public rooms of Village Hall. The Conservancy exhibited works from their permanent collection along with work by historical and contemporary local artists in Bronxville Artists & Friends at the OSilas Gallery in 2008, in commemoration of the organization’s tenth anniversary.
The Willows by Ann Brainerd Crane
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SEASON X:
SUSAN ELSE Sew New: Contemporary Art Quilts (2010) Since 2006, when I created the lighthearted piece Your Move (exhibited at OSilas in 2010), my work has deepened and taken off in an unexpected direction. Your Move is an oversized chess set made of quilted cloth. Learning that French chess sets use jesters instead of bishops, I populated the board with a series of circus figures, cats, dogs, pigs, and ordinary people. The set is playable and intended to be used, so I was delighted to give permission for the student docents at OSilas to stage a match with the piece. Although quilted cloth sculpture is still my medium, much of new work takes the kinetic aspect of Your Move a step further: is motorized, lit-up, and accompanied by sound. The circus is still a recurring theme, but I am now much more obviously interested in life’s duality: its constant blend of the ordinary with evil, love with tragedy, pathos with compassion. Dog Years, exhibited here, is part of a series of skeleton pieces that I started in 2007. These works conflate the benign routines of everyday life with the ever-present possibility of mortality and sudden changes in fortune. Made of quilted cloth collages sewn over reconfigured commercial plastic skeletons, these pieces merge tender everyday moments with an awareness of life’s fragility, and explosive surface beauty with morbid skeletal forms. Dogs have a full-out commitment to the present moment, but this is always coupled with our knowledge that we will likely outlive them. In Dog Years, I try to merge the explosive intensity of their present-focused lives with our awareness of their short run on the planet. Like most of my work, it’s a personal piece: we lost our beloved hound last year, and have since adopted a joyful but problematic new mutt. So I would say the playfulness and whimsy of my earlier work continues, but it’s coupled with an acknowledgement of the dark side of existence.
Dog Years by Susan Else
Celebrating a Decade
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KIT FITZGERALD Figures in an Imaginary Landscape: Digital Painting by Kit Fitzgerald (2009) My current work involves urban portraiture: shooting in the streets of midtown Manhattan, capturing the motion and rhythm of anonymous individual pedestrians. As I shoot, my subjects transcend into timelessness. They might be from the past, the 1970’s or the 1990’s, or from the present. As they enter the frame, they become ageless bodies in motion. I shoot to capture the rhythm of individuals, an expression of the collective humanity of the city. As I edit, I select the most vital moments, to crystallize the human essence. By setting these urban portraits within a three-channel installation, natural rhythms are expanded and the multiple humanities achieve a formal quality. The video has a duration of 8 hours, as the continuous rhythm of individuals in the city unfolds. In my 2009 OSilas show, Figures in an Imaginary Landscape, I similarly investigated continuous movement with video. In Soundview, waves crashed onshore. This natural ongoing rhythm was expanded further in a new work, Beachcombing, and was a part of a show at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in London, with composer Peter Gordon and the British band Factory Floor.
Video Still from “Investigation into the Movement of the Individual”, A three-channel video installation by Kit Fitzgerald
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SEASON X:
ELLEN FRANK ILLUMINATION ARTS Participating artist-interns: Jurij Puc, Masa Zmitek, Adja Mladenovic, Clara Nguyen, David Huettner, Patricia Johnston, Natasha Camhi, Hilary Broder, Rachael Fowler, Rebecca White,, Jazmine Catasus, Derek Elmore, Eugene Yeap, Laura Byrne, Emily Deutchman
Cities of Peace: Transforming Aguish into Beauty (2007) The Book of Judith continues the major focus and purpose of my work since our Cities of Peace exhibition at Concordia College. The Cities of Peace paintings take as their inspiration illuminated manuscripts, transforming traditional manuscript scale into monumental paintings on linen. The Book of Judith paintings return to the actual scale of illuminated manuscripts and utilize manuscript materials as well: Classic English vellum (calf-skin), egg tempera, varieties of gold leaf, gesso sotile, and more. The work tells the story of Judith, a pious widow who singlehandedly defeats the mighty Assyrian army and saves her town and townspeople from annihilation. Great artists in history have painted and sculpted Judith, like Botticelli, Caravaggio, Klimt. Our Judith is unique: continuing our Cities of Peace commitment to beauty as doorway to global peace and understanding, we eschew all representations of violence. Instead, we celebrate Judith as one who slays ignorance in its manifestation as military aggression–not a man as is customary in Judith art. Working Photo Caption: The Book of Judith by Ellen Frank with renowned Hebrew scholar Everett Fox, we Illumination Arts Foundation, Inc. and Supporting Interns go even further: instead of depicting humans, like Plato we use birds to represent the human soul. The work celebrates the theme to which all my work is dedicated, for Judith’s triumph is our goal: the triumph of peace over war, wisdom over ignorance, the freedom to worship according to our own dreams, our own beliefs, our own vision. Through my non-profit organization Ellen Frank Illumination Arts, dedicated to the transformative power of art to build a culture of understanding, I have trained young artist-interns from more than 20 countries. It with their full participation that we have created Cities of Peace and these new illuminated pages.
Celebrating a Decade
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RANDY FROST Bronxville Artists and Friends: Legacies Past and Future (2008) Sew New: Contemporary Art Quilts (2010) Journey of Faith (2012) Worth The Detour is part of my quilt series about journeys. There are many forms that a journey take, be they large or small, distant or nearby, or just fleeting experiences. Each has its own character, time and place, with predictability and surprises. Sometimes the traveler is advised to deviate from the plan, be adventuresome, and learn to expect the unexpected. Often it is the most memorable experience along the way. The guidebooks categorize these unplanned excursions as “worth the detour.�
Worth the Detour by Randy Frost
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SEASON X:
LOU HICKS Courtesy of Miranda Arts Project Space
Lou Hicks: Contemporary Landscapes (2011) Artists are in the business of discerning what holds their interest and interpreting that in such a manner that it intellectually or visually challenges and moves them. The subject matter is really the surface manipulations of paint colors and layers. My paintings are of ephemeral, disparate shapes that often represent places that are important to me, places that give me particular feelings such as awe, peace, and calm. The places are excuses to create canvases that invite the viewer to wander through the often dark, rich layers of pigment. My goal is to paint paintings that are almost spiritual in essence, with a profound sense of stillness, reflection, and a deep sense of place, be it Maine water or the view out of my studio in Port Chester, New York.
Reds #1 by Lou Hicks
Celebrating a Decade
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JOHN ISAAC The Vale of Kashmir: Photographs by John Isaac (2009) Since his show on the Vale of Kashmir at the OSilas Gallery in 2009, John Isaac has taken many trips to his native India to document tigers in the wild. With more tigers in captivity worldwide than in the wild, John wants to show them in the beauty of their natural habitat, to show how tragic it would be if the only place we can see a tiger is in a zoo. John has also turned his attention to photographing abstracts in everyday things around us, zeroing in and finding amazing colors and patterns in trees, slate, crumbling walls, etc. The photo seen here was taken in a Maine boatyard. This is part of the bottom of the boat that is being scrubbed for repainting.
Imagine 2 by John Isaac
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SEASON X:
KATHERINE JACKSON Contextual: Transforming Text into Image (2007) Since the Contextual show at Concordia in 2007, I have been up to my ears in new projects as well as experimenting with new LED technology. I’ve produced both large public installations and smaller gallery works during these years. I’ve created two six-month long, large scale, multi piece public exhibitions: in the windows of the Tenement Museum; and in the Mid-Manhattan Library (in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the New York Public Library). Another multi-piece installation was created in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Manhattan Bridge. Much, in some cases all, the work in these exhibitions was composed of glass-and LED pieces placed in windows along the streets of Manhattan. It gave me great pleasure to celebrate these hallmark New York structures and institutions, ones that have been, since my early childhood, an indelible part of my experience as a New York native. I loved as well having the opportunity to light up New York’s streets, some dark, some busy, with art. Throughout these past seven years, I’ve also produced much gallery art, which has been shown in art venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Westchester, Berlin and elsewhere. Perhaps most exciting, because of my interest in light, was a show of artists who work with light at the now (sadly) closed OK Harris Gallery, and also a show, at the Westchester Arts Center, of artists who use technology (from which my piece gravitated to the lobby of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals). In response to these and many other opportunities, I’ve been exploring my interest in LEDs with programmable color. My piece in Season X uses state of the art programmable LEDs, in which one can dial a color onsite in response to ambient light conditions (always an issue with reflective glass). Also, this summer I’ve installed a 10’ x 30” glass wall sculpture, commissioned by Interface, a social space for technology innovators in midtown Manhattan. This piece is back-lit, necessitating a totally different LED system with its own possibilities and challenges. But despite all this hi tech art, my first love is drawing. My work is always rooted in drawing. To me, drawing is a mode of thinking, and discovering. Whatever form a particular drawing takes, be it etched onto glass, or composed of oak gall ink and handmade paper, or simply pencil in a sketchbook, its primary reality for me is that it has taken me somewhere unexpected -- as surely as walking a new route in a vast, vibrant city.
Suspension of Disbelief by Katherine Jackson
Celebrating a Decade
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KIKUJI KAWADA The BNY Mellon Collection
The Business of Art: Selections from the Collection of BNY Mellon (2015) BNY Mellon has an amazingly rich cultural heritage, from its 1784 founding by Alexander Hamilton as the oldest bank in the United States, and T. Mellon and Son’s Bank opening in Pittsburgh in 1869 as the Mellon Family’s business and predecessor to several hallmark companies. This history is reflected in the company’s corporate art collection. Spanning four centuries, our collection includes documents and objects relating to the beginnings of banking in this country, fine British watercolors and drawings, 19th century American paintings and contemporary works on paper by artists from diverse backgrounds with a current focus on photography. An active lending program with museums and universities around the world provides valuable opportunities for us to share the collection with the public, create positive visibility for our brand and connect in meaningful ways with our clients. In recent years, works from the collection have been exhibited at notable public institutions, including The Carnegie Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Yale Center for British Art, among others.
A Crescent, Poplars and Moon Trailing, Tokyo by Kikuji Kawada
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SEASON X:
JOHANN KÖNIG The Arnold and Sena Davis Collection
Method & Metaphor: Selected Works from the Seena & Arnold Davis Old Masters Collection (2006) Sharing the Sword: Mary and the Cross in Renaissance Art (2009/2010) This piece, Danaë and the Shower of Gold, was shown in the first OSilas Gallery exhibition Method & Metaphor. Since then new information has been unearthed about the piece. Back in 2006 the painting was believed to be French by the Fontainebleau School made in the early 17th Century. Additional research has been done and the piece is now believed to be German, by the artist Johann König (1586-1642). See if you can spot the JK initials in the painting!
Danaë and the Shower of Gold by Johann König
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MARTIN KRUCK Habitorium: New Work by Martin Kruck (2015) My work continues to be focused on the aesthetics of the sublime and the strange feedback loop between it and the idea of self-domestication. The Habitorium series makes a study of constructed spaces -- those interior and exterior areas designed to satisfy both the emotional and bodily needs of its occupants. The series combines photographic elements from human and animal environments to create a post-naturalistic landscape that tends to reveal how extremely studied life is. I am interested in the drive to envision an improved environment, both natural and artificial, and how that may create cultural or biological adaptation, transformation, and/or evolution through a process of self-selection.
Habitorium: Knoll by Martin Kruck
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SEASON X:
FLLADI KULLA Body & Soul: From Exploration to Expression (2007) Around the time when I participated in the Body and Soul exhibition in 2007, my work was mainly focused on the human figure. Since then, I’ve shifted my focus heavily to portraiture, the most fascinating and challenging element of the human figure that, to me, best reveals one’s unique character and spirit. In the past few years, it has been a great source of pleasure and pride to have been commissioned for many portrait works throughout the community. See more at www.flladikulla.com. Now a father, I face many new challenges, but none greater than my struggles to capture the essence of my daughter’s personality. Sara, a happy and bubbly little “creature”, she too has been tortured by her Daddy through posing, smiling, and, worst of all, being asked to remain still. Even at age 4, I find her winning most of these father-daughter battles. However, with this piece displayed in the Season X exhibition, I may have come closer than ever to portraying her thoughts and feelings as seen through my eyes.
Sara, My Tortured Little Model by Flladi Kulla
Celebrating a Decade
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LAWRENCE LEE Legacies, Landmarks & Achievements Celebrating 350 Years: Eastchester, Tuckahoe, Bronxville (2014)
Earlier this year I began work on a long-postponed project of sorting through my last dozen years of photography with the objective of compiling visual anthologies. The retrospective themes will reflect three areas of interest that have influenced much of my photographic efforts since I pressed the shutter button on my first camera at age twelve: America’s “Blue Highways” road trip scenes, landscape and nature impressions, and travel experiences. I am hopeful that bringing this mission to fruition will not take as long as the timeframe covered.
Windows by Lawrence Lee
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SEASON X:
MARC LEUTHOLD Built: Sculptural Trends in Clay (2008)
Most often, I have made sculptures from clay, discrete objects that I exhibit sometimes singularly and sometimes in dialogue with one another in installation environments. In these environments I often incorporate other media such as wood, glass, paper, bronze, literary texts, video, and viewers. Many of the sculptures refuse to plainly identify themselves. While their identities may be unnamable, they are distinct, composite forms suggesting transition: temporal, cultural, male and female, nature and artifice. After the Built exhibit at OSilas, curated by Creighton Michael, I have widened my practice to include more representational work. This has resulted in new figurative works and carved wheels and ovals. These new carvings depict a contour image – referencing a person or a work of art. The contour image is created by carving “thorns” or points within the fluted matrix that operate similarly to “connect the dots” drawings in children’s game books. I call these carved silhouette images “ceramic drawings.” Some of them are fairly visible. Others are almost indiscernible, and these pieces operate as nonobjective sculptures – which I embrace. The sculpture on view in the current OSilas Gallery exhibit depicts a phoenix image on one side. It is a gently curving back and forth representation that almost resembles a zigzagging river. The image was borrowed from a cobalt-decorated Ming Dynasty imperial-ware vessel. These ceramic drawings created within the carved fluted matrix have broadened my artistic practice. More information is available at www.marcleuthold.com
Phoenix Oval by Marc Leuthold
Celebrating a Decade
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BIBIANA HUANG MATHEIS Journey of Peace: Art as Meditation (2012) I took a portrait of a person, but instead of showing the human being, I took objects of their possessions and situated them on a chair, which then became my photographic subject. Human beings collect and use objects. By glimpsing at their objects, you get to see who the person is. I started with my own objects, and I chose my favorite chair – a children’s preschool chair. That I found in a second-hand store. Now, I am onto other people’s objects on their favorite chair. The series consists of photographs, essentially still life images on archival pigment print on 100% cotton rag paper. Since I had the honor to exhibit my Nuclear Haiku series at the OSilas Gallery at the Journey of Peace show, I have been working on numerous simultaneous projects, the latest being Chinese Mojo, which was most recently exhibited at the Western Connecticut State University, Visual and Performing Arts Center, in Danbury, Connecticut; and at the Peckham & Shenkmann Galleries at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, New York. Chinese Mojo is a project of symbolism and expressionism, a cross-cultural family album. It is a visual tapestry, a family treasure box. Ultimately, a family story is unveiled in photography. I have also had the great honor to be the recipient of the 2014 Dutchess County, New York Executive Arts Award – Individual Artist – selected in collaboration with Arts Mid-Hudson to recognize outstanding people in the arts. In 2015, I was fortunate to be bestowed the ArtsWestchester ‘50 for 50’ Arts Award, honoring 50 Outstanding artists on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the organization.
Kathleen Chair #1; Kathleen Chair #2; Kathleen Chair #3; Kathleen Chair #4 by Bibiana Huang Matheis
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SEASON X:
CREIGHTON MICHAEL Selective Viewing: New Work by Creighton Michael (2015) As the most recent series employing my detached drawing process, SCREENPLAY references the visual structure of traditional Japanese hanging scrolls, which combined illusionistic space with repetitive patterns underscoring the flatness of the object (picture plane) thus intermittingly denying any other existence beyond its physical reality. The visual tension produced by these opposing forces in SCREENPLAY creates an implied sense of movement much like viewing film frame episodes. Both the forms and the patterns employed in the SCREENPLAY come from the same source, the IDIOM series completed in 2011. The imagery in the central panel is a selection of previous marking episodes manually transferred from two digital drawings, IDIOM 211 and IDIOM 311. The border patterns are CIP (Corrupted Image Patterns), a computerized marking system or drawing equivalent to the imagery existing in IDIOM drawings. In essence SCREENPLAY is a drawing by two hands, the computer and mine.
Screenplay 915 by Creighton Michael
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MARY MIHELIC Journey of Faith (2012) Since my last art installation at Osilas, I have continued to explore the theme the role the imagination plays in faith. My newest artworks are about religious freedom, education for women, global feminism, and war under the guise of religion as it relates to the Boko Haram and the kidnapped Chibook schoolgirls. I am presently creating art inspired by the courage of the 53 (some say 57) Chibook schoolgirls in Nigeria who ran for their lives and hid in the landscape when their school was attacked by the Boko Haram. They got away while all their classmates who did not run were kidnapped. So I am creating fifty-some artworks of girls running – one for each girl – to bring attention to the many issues that surround the kidnappings of these schoolgirls. For example, many people are not aware of the fact that the Nigerian government captured and imprisoned the wives of the Boko Haram commanders prior to these kidnappings. The kidnappings of women by the Boko Haram started in retaliation for this. Women are being used as pawns by both sides in this bloody war. The artwork shown is Running Girl number 16. This Running Girl artwork comments on the 13-year old Mo’ne Davis who pitched the first shutout ever in the Little League World Series. Out of the 9000 players who have participated in the Little League World Series only 18 have been girls. Mo’ne is the same age as many of the kidnapped girls, and with a 70 mph fastball, isn’t afraid to show the boys what girls can do. She says, “I never thought that at the age of 13 I would be a role model, but now it’s real...” (As are all the kidnapped girls who put their lives at risk to get educated). The homeplate shape symbolizes a home and all those recently displaced from their homes due to religious wars. It is also a metaphor for the “homemaker”. The text art “steal home” wishes the kidnapped girls safe return home. In addition, this artwork builds on the history of art. Historically, artists were obedient servants to the papacy, yet many had heretical messages hidden in their artworks. Today, it’s vice versa. Artists are obedient to the contemporary art world and religion is heresy. So this Running Girl plays with that fact by hiding the religious symbol -- a sword representing Joan of Arc. The relevance of Joan is that she was a teenage martyr who was burned at the stake for her beliefs. She tried to escape captivity and argued in her trial, “It is lawful for any prisoner to try and escape.” (Note: the top of the sword is the top of the house and the handle is the foot.) The artwork reflects on the growing number of people around the world who are being forced to hide their religious beliefs to survive.
Running Girl by Mary Mihelic
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SEASON X:
THOMAS NAST Macculloch Hall Historical Museum
Thomas Nast: The Lightning Bolt of Genius (2006) The Thomas Nast Collection at Macculloch Hall Historical Museum in Morristown, NJ has grown over the past ten years and continues to expand. Just in the past couple of years the museum has added about 500 new pieces including engravings, books, paintings and pen & ink drawings. One of the highlights that the Museum acquired is a rare unpublished image painted by Thomas Nast during the final months of his life in 1902. New acquisitions and donations to the Nast collection have increased the total number of pieces to over 5,000.
Title Page Illustration for “Christmas Drawings for the Human Race� by Thomas Nast
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MARGARET NEILL Drawing the Mind: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Complexity (2012) Drawing is central to my work as an artist. I make drawings to explore new possibilities in my evolution as an artist. They are for the most part black and white and allow me to work through ideas in a more graphic way. Unlike paintings that are a gestalt of form in color, drawings separate out each idea into a primary graphic structure. They allow me to forge new territory and open up space in a way that I wouldn’t be able to do in a painting. In the three years since I made a wall drawing for OSilas Gallery in 2012. I have moved more deeply into drawing. And while the intention of the wall drawing at OSilas Gallery was different in that it was site specific, ephemeral, and created with the audience in mind. The experience allowed me to push up the parameters of scale in my work. I have been working continuously on a series of charcoal drawings on three sizes of paper, 22” x 30”, 30” x 40.” and 50” x 38” using charcoal as shape and line. Concurrently I am working on many layered graphite line paintings, using graphite and white paint on stretched canvases. In both painting and drawing I am process oriented. I draw and paint intuitively and directly on the surface of the canvas, paper or wall. This work is an internalization of a felt emotion or experience. The drawings are not preparatory work for the painting but further the exploration of movement into materiality. Using pencil on paper or directly on the wall, I explore a singular concept- a reaffirmation of place: a lived emotional and physical experience in sensation and memory. Linear or solid, dense or transparent, the drawings move from one to the next in ephemeral yet solid works that celebrate light, space, and movement. The pressure and buoyancy of the unfolding shape propels each work forward. And each shape interchanges with the next in a progression of form.. My drawings are a mechanism of idea, desire, and presence; these works seek a way of being that is quiet, continuous and alive.
Slipstream Series by Margaret Neill
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SEASON X:
HOBART & SPENCER NICHOLS Lent by Barbara Jacobs Sussman
The Nichols Brothers: A Dialogue in Art and Life (2010) New works by Spencer B. Nichols have surfaced since the OSilas exhibition in 2010. A small watercolor of a tree in full spring bloom was offered to our family by my mother’s college school friend at Marot Junior College, where Spencer B. Nichols taught. Our family purchased the painting after a lovely lunch reunion between two old friends who haven’t seen one another for over sixty years. They reminisced about Marot’s old times, painting classes with Spencer and tried to remember without success where the scene was painted in Thompson, Connecticut. Another painting surfaced when I made a visit to my 90 year uncle in Michigan, and discovered a gorgeous watercolor of a dilapidated barn painted on black paper hanging in his Michigan home for the past fifty years. I was so enthusiastic about the painting and my uncle so pleased with the catalogue from OSilas’s exhibition, The Nichols Brothers: A Dialogue of Life and Art, that I left Michigan with the painting under my arm! These paintings are not in the OSilas exhibition because they are currently on view across the river at Blue Hill Plaza, 501 Veteran’s Memorial Drive, Pearl River NY. The exhibition is entitled, Aesthetic Genetic and explores 5 generations of the Nichols families and another family of artist’s works. Please visit the exhibition, the space is open to the public and is on view through November 6th.
Autumn by Spencer Nichols
Butcher Shop by Hobart Nichols
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TAZEEN QAYYUM A Delicate Point: Images from a South Asian Diaspora (2010) I first exhibited at the OSilas gallery in 2010 in an exhibition titled A Delicate Point; Images from a South Asian Diaspora curated by Priyanka Mathew. My paintings at that time were drawing parallels between archival practices found particularly in entomology museum displays and the socio- political propaganda in the context of the war on terror. I used an image of a, delicately drawn, dead cockroach as a metaphor for the diminishing value of the human life, presented in repeated numbers, pinned and opened for investigation, to simultaneously attract and repulse. I continue to use the cockroach in my work to date, but the work and the appearance of the cockroach has evolved and expanded, as has the war, with its constant complex and shifting nature and its ramifications on the lives of ordinary people around the globe. Since 2010, I also expanded my art practice to include site specific installation, live performances, artists’ books and video works. My work has been since shown in several group and solo exhibitions, some of which include, site-specific installation Holding Pattern at the Toronto Pearson International Airport, The Veiled at the Textile Museum of Canada, The Rising Tide, Mohatta Palace Museum, Pakistan, and CodeLive Metro’at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Along with several critical reviews, I was nominated for the Jameel Prize(2013) and K.M. Hunter Award (2014).
Holding Pattern (detail) by Tazeen Qayyum (Photo Credit: Faisal Anwar)
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SEASON X:
AUGUSTE RODIN Lent by Iris Cantor
The Bronze Age: Rodin & the Methods of a Master (2013) The Foundation celebrated two milestones in 2013-2014: it received the OSilas Gallery’s first STAR Award and it welcomed its ten millionth visitor to its exhibitions. Additionally during this time, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation continued to showcase its knock-out collection of bronzes by Auguste Rodin, organizing two new traveling exhibitions of the French sculptor’s artworks. These exhibitions are scheduled to visit eleven museums during the coming three years. Note that one of these shows concentrates on Rodin’s portraits — inspired by the success of the exhibition here at OSilas. Continuing its efforts to share Rodin’s story with a broader audience, the Foundation has also newly made available on Amazon the award-winning film produced by Iris Cantor about Rodin’s life and work. There are currently also several large grants to cultural institutions; one supports programming at the Brooklyn Museum. The Cantor Foundation’s support for women’s healthcare has kept apace with its support for the visual arts. Indeed, during the period between 2013 and today the Foundation’s chief visionary and chair, Iris Cantor, has been honored by the Lupus Foundation and New York-Presbyterian for her ardent support for better healthcare for women.
Head of a Call to Arms by Auguste Rodin
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LISA SORENSEN Journey of Justice: Looking for Liberty (2013) My series of Statue of Liberty images were exhibited at the OSilas Gallery in February of 2013. Since then I been exploring life during winter. Dormancy. Hibernation. What looks like death but really is the period of time right on the edge of new life. I have been creating small mixed media pieces of photographs, wood, beeswax and encaustic paint. The focus of this series is trees. Tree images mounted on wood and sealed with beeswax.
Tree 1, Tree 2, Tree 3, Tree 4, Tree 5 by Lisa Sorensen
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SEASON X:
ROBERT TAPLIN Body & Soul: From Exploration to Expression (2007) Here is a letter I sent to Rosalind Krauss as a statement of what’s been on my mind. Didn’t ever hear from her. It’s about the conflicts between formalism and representation, modernism and post-modernism or, as I prefer to think about it, the ongoing battle between the rationalists and the romantics.
Dear Rosalind Krauss, My friends Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman sent me Under Blue Cup for Xmas - I don’t know if you know them or they just know your work. In any event, I read it yesterday and wanted to write to you. Your earlier work was important to me, first as a young sculptor – Passages in Modern Sculpture, your book on David Smith and some of the essays – particularly Notes on the Index. Later in the 90’s I wrote reviews Actaeon I & Actaeon II by Robert Taplin for Art in America, although I admit I never followed October closely. I was unaware of your illness and was a little shocked to learn of it but entirely admiring of your own personal effort to “suspend the unbearable contradictions of the real in the imaginary space of narrative” – a wonderfully concise formulation that I will now add to your earlier adage about sculpture being peculiarly located at the intersection of time passing and time arrested, as a good touchstone for my own ambitions. As I read your formulation of Barthe’s ideas about the pleasure of the text being a solitary or asocial bliss, I thought of something I stumbled on in reviewing Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes. In a footnote he says that theoria had an early meaning of a plural collective of public figures who as a group provided certain knowledge for the polis as opposed to aesthesis, which had to do with an individual’s perceptions. This seems to relate to Kant’s idea that aesthetics have to have a basis in public judgments i.e. the theoria of the accepted authorities has to provide the basis for the individual’s solitary pleasure in the text. But of course in the situation you describe so well, that has held since the 70’s, theoria becomes a form of aggressive forgetting against which the individual has to fight to maintain his aesthesis. Ironically the champions of theoria wish to drive us on to their narrative, which is one of constructed or illusory self hood and futile political resistance, a strange sort of certain knowledge for the polis. Kentridge’s politics are so much tougher, definitely encouraging solitary aesthesis and a lingering on the signifier while all the time struggling to find some certain knowledge for the polis. My objection to your account comes with your insistence that a recursive structure is the only valid way for a modern artist to preserve or extend his medium. For me this comes down to the ongoing conflict between the romantic and the rational wings of Modernism. The rationalist wing, which I guess starts with Diderot, Voltaire et. al. always has its eye on the progressive transformation of means, the apparatus of art. They are optimistic engineers, universalists. The romantic wing which starts, I suppose, with Rousseau or Herder, Goethe et. al. is more fatalistic and looks to the perennial paradoxes of content – the myth in which the unbearable contradictions of the real are suspended in the imaginary. They are gloomy gardeners and sailors, localists. Needless to say Rousseau was a
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brilliant formal innovator and Diderot and Voltaire had more on their minds than the form of the encyclopedia but there is a difference in tone, in emphasis. The romantic impulse, which obviously comes down into our time through the symbolists, the surrealists etc. is having a revival among younger artists as we speak. I regard much of what Derrida and his peers stood for as a kind of false Romanticism. Ostensibly advocating for the local, the marginal, the different against the totalizing or essentializing forces in rationalist modernism, but attacking the concept of individual experience, which is, of course, the fundamental ground on which Rousseau built his dissent from the Philosophes. So, while I thoroughly assent to your defense of the medium, it seems to me that if you accept the premise that art is also a matter of communication - a search for representations that can offer, if not knowledge than at least some sort of release or solace to the members of the polis, then you have to accept the romantic impulse in modernism which focuses on figuring forth the image or picture, the thing in itself as well as the medium or means of that image’s formation. I see that doing that in a recursive format has a power and its most certainly a part of Kentridge’s vocabulary but there are also moments in what he does where all that drops to the background and the representation itself stands up front. I like the biologist’s definition of representation as a negotiation between the organism and its environment. Obviously, a defintition of mental representations but I think it applies equally well to art. In other words there’s a pragmatic aspect to art as well as an ecstatic part. I suppose it comes back to the Dionysiac and the Appolonian or some such dichotomy but I see both in Kentridge and I think that’s his strength. So, I’m sure I’ve already tried your patience but I’ve enclosed a short proposal for an exhibition that I’m working on and the brochure for my current show at Grounds for Sculpture which will be there through April 11. I hope you’ve had a peaceful and restful holiday.
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SEASON X:
MARY TING The Flying Dragon: Tradition and Innovation in Chinese Art (2008) My artwork has naturally undergone changes since I last showed at the Osilas Gallery at the Concordia College in 2008. In the recent years with the passing of my mother, the growing needs of my father, my increased environmental activism, and the tumultuous state of the world at large, for me to continue as status quo would be to exist in a bubble. As artists, we reflect and comment via our work. The need to addresses urgent issues became paramount for me. As such I have two concurrent ongoing social community projects, Daffodil Ashes: On Grief and Artmaking and Compassion: For the Animals Great & Small, that focuses on illegal wildlife trafficking. I do continue to make installations and individual artworks. While my hand and mode of mark making is essentially the same, the work lives more in the psychological framework of human desires and desperations, loss, memory and nature. Pick, Poke, Choke is a remake of an earlier work, Saving Beauty that was “too pretty� to get its message across. The fragmented head is deliberately ambiguous perhaps eating her hand, or deliberately choking herself while poking and prodding her own face. These are the self-destructive manifestations of anxieties, social pressures: ancient, contemporary and pervasive. The Other Garden, my installation in the 2008 exhibition, The Flying Dragon: Tradition and Innovation in Chinese Art also had a fragmented head with a bird like creature in its mouth. However the head was surrounded by outsized natural elements and positioned the work in a mythological framework. This earlier work was inspired by the Chinese historical classic, Shanhaijing, Guide ways through the Mountains and Seas. While I still continue to be enthusiastic about the Shanhaijing text, my focus now is more societal in orientation.
Image Caption: Pick, Poke, Choke by Mary Ting
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STEINUNN ÞÓRARINSDÓTTIR Steinunn Thorarinsdottir (2007)
A lot of time, energy, headache and joy has gone into my public shows for the last few years in the US and Europe. It´s become one of my special interests as it is such a wonderful way for everyday life and art to cross paths. Since 2007 I´ve had shows in diverse urban environments such as f.e. New York City, Seattle, Dallas, Chicago, London and most recently in Copenhagen for the summer of 2015 where I have 22 pieces forming a path around the whole city. These shows are challenging due to all the interaction that takes place in the public realm but at the same time very gratifying. Throughout my career of over 35 years the work has been figurative but my figures are androgynous symbols of humanity, neutral in character to leave the works open to interpretation. I sometimes say that I´ve only had one idea in my whole career but it´s a big one! There are always subtle changes that inevitably occur. A visual world takes a lifetime to develop. During the last few years I have both worked in life size pieces that are based on my older son´s body but at the same time I have also been making smaller numbered edition works that I enjoy making very much. It is a very different approach. In 1976 I made small clay pieces but went away from that and did only life size work for a very long time. So it has been nice to return to making small “worlds” again.
View by Steinunn Þórarinsdóttir
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SEASON X:
AMY BRIGHT UNFRIED Bronxville Artists and Friends: Legacies Past and Future (2008) The Bronze Age: Rodin & the Methods of a Master (2013) My current work continues the exploration of the sculptural and imaginative possibilities offered by the pleasing form of the Moebius strip. As I have been doing for about four years now, using a variety of yarns and stitches, I knit strips of yarn, join the ends with the twist that gives Moebius strips their endless “infinity� properties, and after immersing the strips in wax and forming them, I cast them in bronze by means of the lost wax casting process. More or less abstract birds continue to complete the compositions, and lately I have also begun to include spiral forms that sometimes occur when I am working with wax. The patinas of my recent work are frequently bright with jewel tones.
Purple Moebius Whimsy with Green Spirals by Amy Bright Unfried
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Season X: Celebrating a Decade OSilas Gallery, Concordia College–New York
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SEASON X:
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SEASON X: CELEBRATING A DECADE List of Artists and Collectors: DEWITT CLINTON BOUTELLE
Courtesy of the Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Davies JOEL CARREIRO
Courtesy of the Artist XAVIER CORTADA
Courtesy of the Artist ANN BRAINERD CRANE
Courtesy of the Bronxville Historical Conservancy Collection SUSAN ELSE
Courtesy of the Artist KIT FITZGERALD
Courtesy of the Artist ELLEN FRANK ILLUMINATION ARTS
Courtesy of the Artists RANDY FROST
Courtesy of the Artist LOU HICKS
Courtesy of Miranda Arts Project Space JOHN ISAAC
Courtesy of the Artist KATHERINE JACKSON
Courtesy of the Artist KIKUJI KAWADA
Courtesy of the Collection of BNY Mellon JOHANN KÖNIG
Courtesy of the Arnold and Sena Davis Collection MARTIN KRUCK
Courtesy of the Artist FLLADI KULLA
Courtesy of the Artist LAWRENCE LEE
MARC LEUTHOLD
Courtesy of the Artist BIBIANA HUANG MATHEIS
Courtesy of the Artist & Kathleen Reckling CREIGHTON MICHAEL
Courtesy of the Artist MARY MIHELIC
Courtesy of the Artist THOMAS NAST
Courtesy of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum MARGARET NEILL
Courtesy of the Artist HOBART NICHOLS
Courtesy of Barbara Jacobs Sussman SPENCER NICHOLS
Courtesy of Barbara Jacobs Sussman TAZEEN QAYYUM
Courtesy of the Artist AUGUSTE RODIN
Lent by Iris Cantor LISA SORENSEN
Courtesy of the Artist ROBERT TAPLIN
Courtesy of the Artist MARY TING
Courtesy of the Artist STEINUNN ÞÓRARINSDÓTTIR
Courtesy of the Artist
AMY BRIGHT UNFRIED
Courtesy of the Artist
MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENTS
LeRoy Gregory Memorial
Courtesy of the Artist
OSILAS GALLERY, CONCORDIA COLLEGE–NEW YORK