Once Upon a Time‌
The Silber Gallery
Goucher College Athenaeum
“ The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.� Scott Turow
Once Upon a Time‌ Rochelle Abramowitz Libby Barbee Erin Fostel Brent Green
Katelyn Greth Nora Sturges Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum James Allen Swainbank
Storytelling has always been intertwined with various art forms—artists cull inspiration from scriptures, history, literature, mythology, current social or political events, personal experiences, and their own imagination. Narrative works depict events unfolding, often compressed into a single image or object that implies something has happened or is about to take place. These stories are powerful tools with the potential to evoke a multitude of emotions, allowing an audience to identify with common experiences or imagine situations they might never encounter. In Once Upon a Time‌, Rochelle Abramowitz, Libby Barbee, Erin Fostel, Brent Green, Katelyn Greth, Nora Sturges, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and James Allen Swainbank unite characters, plots, and imagery to create a brief escape from the everyday world.
– Laura Amussen, curator
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Rochelle Abramowitz has been making tiny things since she was a child; however, she only recently rekindled her love for all things small and began making miniature diorama sculptures. Her newest work is inspired by music from singer, songwriter, and harpist Joanna Newsom. Abramowitz’s Monkey and Bear visually translates Newsom’s lyrics, and the imagery they conjure, into delicate scenes. Monkey and Bear tells the story of a monkey and bear who escape from captivity. Ironically, the bear quickly finds that she is captive to the monkey and must perform to appease the monkey, who proclaims his love. Playing with this idea of captivity, Abramowitz depicts these scenes inside of 16 mason jars. In the final jar, the lid is off and the bear, having snuck away from the monkey, sheds her costume into the sea. By depicting the story in multiple dioramas, like chapters from a book, the fluid narrative is clear, and the viewer is free to create their own interpretation. This piece not only captures the whimsicality and ambiguity of Newsom’s storytelling, but also depicts the weighty ideas of confinement and freedom.
Monkey and Bear, 2010 mixed media
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Libby Barbee is interested in the narratives that cultures create to describe their relationship to the natural world and how these narratives establish cultural identity. In In Search of the Myth, Libby examines the historical relationship between Americans and their environment as it is represented in the American frontier myth, which has served as the primary creation myth for the United States. Though it has mutated over time, it continues to be the dominant narrative from which contemporary American political attitudes and identity derive significance. In portraying the conflict between man and coyote, Libby alludes to a metaphor that describes the relationship between America and its most reviled enemies. By projecting the myth of the Other and revealing the myth’s construction, Libby questions contemporary American values regarding violence and conflict.
In Search of the Myth, 2010 mixed-media installation
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Gale Force, 2009 charcoal on paper 21” x 52”
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As a child, Erin Fostel spent hours in her room writing, daydreaming, and drawing. She created different worlds on paper, and disappeared into them. It was a time when her dreams and her reality were divided by such a thin line that she sometimes lost touch with the present. Fostel wishes she had retained that pure, na誰ve imagination. In this series of drawings, she creates narratives where the imagined play has become all-consuming, and the audience witnesses what the characters have created. These drawings are about the spirit of imagination, a power so strong it can change your world.
Brent Green is a filmmaker, writer, musician, and, perhaps above all else, a storyteller. Spun from tragedy, yet steeped in hope, his films unfold with a building sense of urgency. They begin as words on a page, distilled down to their essence, each sentence forming an image, an emotion. Shot on his farm in rural Pennsylvania using stop-motion animation, Green creates handmade elements to accompany his narration. Connecting form to content, Green’s evocative voice and musical selections heighten the emotional effect and create a resonance between otherwise disparate images. His prosaic characters are passionate and driven and tragically consumed by the world around them—their circumstances seem odd, but also familiar; thus, it is easy to identify and empathize with their stories. In the end, nostalgic feelings and loss transcend to a state of wonder, a thoughtful reminder of Green’s idea that “there is euphoria all around you—you’re swimming in it.”
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Carlin, 2007 stop-motion animation still
Little Red Riding Hoof, 2009 mixed media
Katelyn Greth is interested in dark fairy tales, surrealism, and the inner child. Drawing inspiration from childhood fables, such as Little Red Riding Hood, and her subconscious dream state, she creates doll-like sculptures that are simultaneously familiar and otherworldly. Sometimes, her characters appear as small children suspended in a languid state of enchantment. Other times, she imbues her characters with a combination of bizarre humanistic and animalistic traits, which seem to breathe life into fragmented memories culled from nightmares. Each sculpture depicts a moment from a larger narrative; thus, encouraging the viewer to ponder and imagine the story behind its creation.
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Nora Sturges’ series of paintings was inspired by the narrative structure and subject matter of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, in which a fictitious Marco Polo describes to the Kublai Khan all the cities he has visited on his travels. The paintings grew to encompass the artist’s personal experience of travel and cultural displacement, as well as ideas she took from The Travels of Marco Polo. Sturges explores xenophobia, tourism, exoticism, and cultural difference as Marco Polo, depicted as a wealthy westerner and the quintessential tourist, is drawn to and made uneasy by the foreignness of the places he visits. While each painting has its own narrative, Sturges is most interested in the larger narrative suggested by the series: the reappearing Marco Polo becomes a sort of everyman, and viewers begin to understand the good, the bad, and the contradictory aspects of Polo, and, ultimately, our own characters.
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Marco Polo writes in his Journal, 2005 oil on panel 10.75� x 14�
We wanderers, 2008 collage, glass beads, drawing on canvas 16� x 22�
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is interested in how travel experiences can become mythologies that address the traces of history, stories, and memories from individual and collective identities. Her work is often interdisciplinary and ranges from love poems collaged from news headlines, to photo animations, drawings, performance, and sound works, to installations composed of found materials and traded goods. Sunstrum was born in Botswana and spent much of her childhood living in different parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. She believes that as a result of her early experiences, she became interested in how traveling can spur our imaginations to invent myths out of our everyday landscape. Sunstrum has always felt that she has lived in-between many places, many cultures, many identities, and believes this experience is common within the African diaspora—that forced or voluntary migrations, movements of laborers, and other systems of globalization have created complex transnational populations. Her recent work features an alter-ego named Asme who becomes an entity that is transcultural, transhistorical, and transgeographical—she belongs nowhere and everywhere all at once.
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Themes of fantasy and nostalgia pervade James Allen Swainbank’s paintings, and he attempts to evoke the viewer’s memories of youth and early imagination with culturally familiar icons and figures. Swainbank presents these themes in a style and handling from centuries past—the work directly and indirectly borrows from early- and high-Renaissance painting of the northern and Italian traditions, as well as mimics the techniques of the old masters. But despite the art-historical context in which Swainbank’s narratives are created and staged, the characters and issues are wholly contemporary.
Nights Revel, 2009 oil on panel 5.5” x 7”
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Once Upon a Time… Rochelle Abramowitz Libby Barbee Erin Fostel Brent Green
Katelyn Greth Nora Sturges Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum James Allen Swainbank
April 5 – May 8, 2011 artists’ Reception
Thursday, April 7, 2011, 6-8 p.m.
The Silber Gallery
Goucher College Athenaeum Directions
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus. Gallery Hours
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday. 410.337.6477 The Silber Gallery is free and open to the public.
www.goucher.edu/silbergallery
11379-J296 03/11
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.