“Simpatico: Works by 2024 School of Art Faculty,” curated by Susan and John Turben Director of CVA Galleries Judy Barie, installed in the second floor of the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.
The exhibition “Simpatico: Works by 2024 School of Art Faculty” aims to celebrate Chautauqua Visual Arts’ return of programming at the School of Art by bringing together a collection of works created by this season’s guest faculty members.
The exhibition, on view now through Aug. 11, is housed on the second floor of the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center and was curated by Susan and John Turben Director of CVA Galleries Judy Barie.
For Sydelle Sonkin and Herb Siegel Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts Erika b Hess, “Simpatico” is a way to welcome CVA’s School of Art back to the Institution, stronger than ever. As the new artistic director, she was charged with the task of assembling a summer faculty and bringing a variety of artistic perspectives and techniques to the residency program.
“I was really excited about the faculty show because there had been a pause, and this is a very public announcement that we are back, we are growing,” Hess said. “We have fantastic faculty from across the U.S. that are not only going to be working with our student residents and teaching them, but are incredible artists in their own right.”
The exhibition, Hess said, is a good way to showcase the tie between the School of Art and CVA Galleries.
Alex Callender’s “Family Portrait, Midnight Dialogues c. 1765-present”
“I thought it was a nice segue, also, to show our connection, … and highlight that,” she said.
Hess’ oil paintings line the walls of Fowler-Kellogg, bright and colorful in their depictions of puddles and nature. She’s particularly interested in puddles for their reflective and contemplative qualities, and for their metaphorical value in looking at the past or future.
“My paintings are mystical landscapes that communicate emotions and experiences through the vibrant language of color, anchoring itself in the recurring motif of puddles. Puddles, symbolizing emotions and experiences, are fleeting pools of water that mirror their surroundings,” Hess said in her artistic statement.
“They materialize with the rain and vanish just as swiftly, paralleling the impermanence of human experience. Puddles also serve as metaphors for our past and future. They tend to form in the same location, etching impressions in the environment much like how our experiences deepen pathways within our psyche.”
Stephanie Pierce’s paintings depict her own observations within the context of the passage of time. Her representational work is transitory, often showing scenes or experiences in flow, rather than as a stagnant moment in time.
“I’m interested in how, over time, the complexity of the subject intensifies and is redefined,” Pierce said in her artistic statement.
“When the paintings have a complicated, buzzing visual intensity and verge on hallucinatory, I step away. Simultaneity, coalescence, or crystallization of an emotional light are the result of the unmapped course each painting takes.”
Taro Takizawa’s prints, informed by his background in graphic design, are geometric and precise in their composition. His prints blend, investigate and explore the boundaries of contemporary studio practices and traditional printmaking techniques.
The School of Art alum made his return to the Institution this year as a faculty member, which he said has been an educational and valuable experience — especially in terms of learning to improvise and pivot when in an unfamiliar studio space.
“I enjoy working with my co-workers and the people in the ceramics studio, other faculty members, our director and then also the residents — a huge, diverse group of artists and I get to work with them side-by-side,” he said.
Ceramicist Raoul Pacheco’s figurative sculptures sit on a nearby pedestal. Pacheco’s maximalist functional work combines thrown pottery with handbuilding techniques to alter the original forms. Glazes are layered over one another, flowing and gliding down each form.
In Pacheco’s artistic statement, he said that clay is his “steadfast companion” and is central to his making process.
“Storytelling, specifically personal narratives and everyday observations, informs the surface embellishment,” he said. “This has allowed me to remain flexible in my approach and consider a broad scope of ideas both personal and social.”
Taro Takizawa’s “Cotton Candy Mochi”
Equally as glaze-focused, to a much different end result, Kevin Umaña’s clay tablets are vibrant and bold, adorned with geometric patterns and designs. Umaña uses ceramics and glazes in addition to paint, canvas and other materials to create vivid and pigmented compositions exploring abstraction.
Umaña’s abstracted creations “evoke specific places from his childhood, memories of nature, beaches, plants, construction materials, food and religion,” according to his artistic statement.
Many of the faculty members with work in “Simpatico” also gave artist talks as part of the CVA Lecture Series, engaging with the community beyond their teaching. Throughout the summer, they shared their past and current work, and their artistic process.
Near Pacheco’s clay vessels, Sachiko Akiyama’s carved wood sculptures hang on a wall, breaking from the two-dimensional plane.
Akiyama’s work focuses on themes of nature and the world surrounding her, primarily informed by her proximity to the ocean, woods and wildlife, according to her artistic statement.
In the back of the gallery, Alex Callender’s large oil paintings are reflections on historical narratives and intersecting identities.
Callender’s work “engages the mythic and residual forms of coloniality to think about ways that we orient ourselves to the past; using different visual modes of annotation, hybrid narratives, and speculative storytelling,” according to her artistic statement.
Her work recontextualizes narratives of history in a way that considers how they relate to social forces such as time, scale and memory, according to her artistic statement.
Nearby, large-scale paintings made by Susan Lichtman interrogate spatial relationships and light. Lichtman, an oil painter, is a visiting faculty member with CVA this season.
Lichtman’s work investigates light, time and space through depictions of her interior surroundings, frequently manifesting in the form of her home and her family. Chautauqua’s scenery, she said, has influenced her work in unexpected ways.
“One thing I love about Chautauqua is the outside is so organized. It’s like an interior,” she explained. “I miss the geometry of the interior. When I’m outside at a park here, I feel like I’m in an interior.”
Lichtman said she appreciates how generous the community has been, and how strong Chautauqua’s arts environment is.
“It’s very rare to have this kind of community where art viewers and art makers are so close,” she said. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Simpatico” departs from typical gallery shows in that the overarching theme is not based on content, underlying motifs or medium, but is instead based on a collective of individuals who are working toward a greater goal: educating the next generation of artists.
For Hess, bringing together a group of talented and prolific artists who could simultaneously complement and contradict each others’ techniques was integral to the success of the residency program. Part of the goal of the faculty exhibition is to showcase the varying disciplines of the faculty members teaching in the School of Art.
“One of things I’m excited to be doing here with the School of Art at CVA is to be bringing in practitioners and artists from different disciplines,” Hess said. “We have artists who primarily work in printmaking; we have artists, like myself, who are painters; we have artists who are invested in research. But what really united them when I was looking for a faculty is the fact that they all have a really strong studio practice and are invested in making.”
For Lichtman, the exhibition flows as well as it does because of the varying perspectives and techniques that the faculty bring to the studio.
“This one held together because there was a vision,” she said; she enjoys that the variety of assignments given to the artists-in-residence introduce them to many ideas, and that the faculty complement and contrast one another in interesting ways.
“I feel so lucky that we all get along — our differences are differences that work together for the benefit of the students,” she said.
“It’s been a really, really great summer,” Takizawa said.
