Julia Weber
Staff writer
Chautauqua’s School of Art opens another season with not just an influx of resident artists but a gallery full of artwork produced by past residents, too.
“Radiant,” curated by Sydelle Sonkin and Herb Siegel Artistic Director of Chautauqua Visual Arts Erika b Hess, is on view through July 12 at the Chautauqua School of Art Gallery at the Arts Quad.
“I curated this exhibition to bring together work that explores color and light, reflecting the spirit of early summer and celebrating the launch of the CVA season,” Hess said.
Former resident artist Audrey Goldstein described her experience in the two-week residency program last August as being a “lovely exchange of ideas” among artists working in different media, themes and materials.
“(The residency) was a really beautiful balance of participants, and I really appreciated that,” she said.
“Also, Chautauqua is gorgeous.”
Goldstein is a professor of art and design at Suffolk University, so short-term residency programs like those hosted at Chautauqua’s School of Art are useful to her because her teaching schedule often doesn’t allow her to engage in longer programs.
“I knew that doing the residency would be this last blast for me in August, so I wanted this intensive experience,” Goldstein said.
Rather than beginning any new sculptures, Goldstein took the two weeks to continue working on pieces she had already started.
“I didn’t need to use the residency to completely change the way I was thinking because, at that moment, I walked into the application process with a new body of work, and I wanted some place to concentrate on it,” she said.
Goldstein’s sculpture on view in “Radiant” is part of a newer body of work with this specific piece exploring isolation, chaos and breakage during the COVID-19 pandemic. She explained that during the first days of the pandemic, she felt more aware of the physical objects surrounding her.
“Whenever something would break, you felt the loss of it even more. … Anything you touched became more poignant,” she said.
One day, wind blew over a glass table top outside and shattered it, forcing Goldstein to clean up the mess in her yard. “I ended up saving these shards of glass because there was something about the process of being forced to clean grass that stuck with me,” she said.
Goldstein repurposed the shattered table top into a quiet, reflective sculpture combining glass, pigment and silk. The piece casts light and shadows in its proximity as light reflects off the surface.
Now, in the company of other former residency participants, Goldstein’s work is on view for Chautauquans to enjoy in the coming weeks. For Goldstein, it’s a special experience to showcase her work with other artists she became close with during the program.
“It’s really an honor to be able to be in the show with the other people. It was a really fabulous artist community that formed,” she said. “Even though it was just two weeks, people got really, really close because everyone is working so hard and people were in different places in their lives.”
