Hydroflow Christian Benefiel Sukey Bryan Mike Calway-Fagen Eric Dyer Matthew Fisher Allyn Massey Lisa Moren Calla Thompson Elena Volkova
THE SILBER ART GALLERY Goucher College Athenaeum
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live.
Sylvia Earle
In the exhibit Hydroflow nine artists—Christian Benefiel, Sukey Bryan, Mike CalwayFagen, Eric Dyer, Matthew Fisher, Allyn Massey, Lisa Moren, Calla Thompson, and Elena Volkova—explore the multifaceted aspects of water, depicted through paint, photo, video, sculpture, and installation. Whether it is forming oceans, glaciers, swamps, canals, rivers and streams, lakes or puddles, water is all around us. It is familiar, yet mysterious, and as such, a natural resource we often take for granted. The artists in Hydroflow highlight just a few of the ways in which water impacts our life on earth. There is a sense of fluidity found in Christian Benefiel’s untitled sculpture; it ebbs and flows as air rhythmically enters then exits the malleable form. In watching this expansion and contraction one cannot help but also think about breath. For Sukey Bryan, the mutable properties of water are a constant source of inspiration. Her paintings and prints range from representational to abstract, often depicting glaciers and raging waters frozen in time. In Mike Calway-Fagen’s video, sight and sound coalesce as rushing water gives way to a subject navigating a dark and wet terrain, flashlights bobbing at the artist’s waist. In contrast, Eric Dyer’s video brings our attention to the underground workings of water and drainage systems. Matthew Fisher’s stylized landscape paintings offer a visual moment of reflection and solitude, the images void of people and everything manmade. Water is a large part of Allyn Massey’s iconography and appears repeatedly in her vernacular. The temporal nature of water evaporating is similar to the utterance or language of Massey’s sculptures and installations, constantly in flux and ephemeral in nature. At first glance Lisa Moren’s watercolor prints and postcards are minimal and beautiful. Then the viewer notices they were created by skimming the thin layer of an oil slick spilt at sea and water collected from the Chesapeake Bay, rendering them not quite so pretty anymore. The work of Calla Thompson asks the viewer to question global ecology, as icebergs float and loom, drift and advance, simultaneously playful and ominous. Elena Volkova is interested in water’s tangible forms such as snow, rain, and the sea, but also in the more ephemeral and tenuous cloudscapes. One must look closely at her work to see the almost-imperceptible traces of water depicted in her photographs. Salty or fresh water is everywhere—falling from the sky, rushing to the sea, lapping at the shores, and flowing deep within the earth. It is both protected and polluted. We drink it; we bathe in it; we breathe it; we swim in it; it sustains our agriculture, removes our waste, and provides countless other life-sustaining benefits. It is the vitality that sustains all forms of life. “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” — Jacques Yves Cousteau
— Curator Laura Amussen
Christian Benefiel
With his sculpture of marine materials, Christian Benefiel references the practice of using inflatable membranes to raise sunken ships from the sea floor. The expansion of form puts a quiet pressure on the viewer’s personal space, while the subtle rising and falling of the inflation cycle mimics the tidal motion of the ocean.
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untitled, 2009-2013 kevlar, cast iron, automated blower unit variable, 108” x 144” x 108”
Sukey Bryan
Water is the constant subject of Sukey Bryan’s paintings and prints. Her images of glaciers in various stages of solidity and thaw are meant to highlight their transience, as well as their beauty and majesty. She explores natural environments, learning as much as she can about the science that influences them, while seeking to respond to their visual impact. Melt waters, 2013 oil on canvas 80” x 63”
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Mike Calway-Fagen
Listen Up ’Em All, 2012 single channel video 2:56 minutes still from video
Mike Calway-Fagen has always been allured by exploring water with rubber boots, and his work as a Smoky Mountains flyfishing guide influences his art today. Water hides things in an unflinchingly raw way with layers, stratified through air, materials, minerals, movements, transference, and time. He approaches ideas aware that they are not completely graspable, but slippery, like water.
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Eric Dyer
In his video Eric Dyer uses manhole covers imprinted with patterns that become a crazy rush of kinetic visuals when spun. The art should inspire viewers to imagine the underground sights and sounds as wastewater makes its way to the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers.
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Coversong, 2012 still from video
Matthew Fisher
In Matthew Fisher’s imagery, sunsets, birds, wind, and waves are frozen in place, reconfirming knowledge of water, land, and sky. The familiar horizon is constantly hinting at the potential of distant lands just out of sight, while endless cycles of the sea and sun count the days, months, and years.
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Tale of a Tub, 2012 acrylic on canvas 9” x 8” Courtesy of the artist and Mulherin+Pollard, New York
Allyn Massey
Embrace, 2009 water, pumps, chair, constructed ball, recorded voice installation view, dimensions variable
Whether working with large-scale installation or constructing objects, Allyn Massey considers space, interval, sound, and scale as raw material. Throughout her work, materials—such as lead, glass, rubber, water, pumped air, steel, or clay—are chosen for emotional weight as well as formal properties, each sometimes paired with its metaphorical or physical opposite: hard/soft, warm/cool, sounding/soundless.
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Lisa Moren Most recently interdisciplinary artist Lisa Moren has been creating pigments out of polluted waterways, including her project “Chesapeake Bay Water Watercolors.” Her exhibit presents original photographs, works on paper, and an essay on her experiences collecting oil from the Deep Water Horizon rig spill for a series of marbleized papers.
LEFT
Marbleized Paper from the Gulf of Mexico I, 2010 oil on rag paper 22” x 30” RIGHT
Lisa Moren in Bastian Bay, LA, June 9, 2010 photography by Captain Patrick
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Calla Thompson
Untitled (Iceberg 2), 2009 pigmented print 15� x 15�
Calla Thompson’s series examines the landscape of the Arctic: impenetrable, distant, and foreign to most. Her inquiry depicts the iceberg, emblematic of the north, as unsettling and devoid of humans and politics. There is challenge and tension inherent in the human presence and impact over which the icebergs loom.
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Elena Volkova
Elena Volkova focuses on natural elements, through which she explores the threshold between nothing and something, and the ways in which they inform and question each other. Her photography focuses on forms easily recognizable and universally understood: water, sky, and land, forms that are part of the everyday world. The water is in tangible forms such as snow, rain, and the sea, but also in more ephemeral and tenuous cloud landscapes.
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Airscape, 2007 inkjet print, scroll 44� wide
Hydroflow Christian Benefiel Sukey Bryan Mike Calway-Fagen Eric Dyer Matthew Fisher
Allyn Massey Lisa Moren Calla Thompson Elena Volkova
April 9 – May 19, 2013 ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
Friday, May 10, 2013, 6-9 p.m.
THE SILBER GALLERY
Goucher College Athenaeum DIRECTIONS
GALLERY HOURS
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday 410-337-6477
The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
www.goucher.edu/silber
13446-J1948 03/13
The Silber Gallery is free and open to the public.