Pieces in the “Homecoming: School of Art Alumni” exhibition are displayed July 6 in the Second Floor Galleries of Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.
JENELL TAYLOR
Staff Writer
Today’s contemporary artists share the fascinating ability to transform vastly differing practices and varied materials into works that consistently evoke similar ideas of perception, memory, purpose and permanence.
For artists exhibiting at Chautauqua Institution, a persistent itch to investigate unanswered questions drives their innate desire to create.
As a Nicaraguan American, multimedia artist Quinn Antonio Briceño said he used to feel pressure to assimilate into American culture and dismiss his Latin identity.
“As I’ve grown older and began exhibiting my artwork, I have consciously chosen to celebrate that other half of me that was hidden away,” Briceño said.
Drawing on his familial history as a foundation, Briceño said he has found healing and affirmation through his practice.
“Through the completion of each piece, I feel as if I’m reclaiming and reaffirming who I am as a bi-cultural person,” he said.
Briceño creates vivid paintings rooted in memory. He said he begins by accessing imagery from his personal database of family photographs, Google Earth images and photos of daily life that are inherent to the Latin American diaspora. He then combines and collages pieces that reflect his daily life in the United States. Briceño says this creates a space that “reflects [his] own duality.” Briceño’s paintings are displayed in “Homecoming: School of Art Alumni,” which can be found in the Second Floor Galleries of Fowler-Kellogg Art Center through Aug. 16.
Wood sculptor Vivian Chiu’s artwork also speaks to her identity and cultural heritage. “I was raised in a fairly traditional household in Hong Kong before moving to the U.S. for college,” she said. “In both places, I am perceived and treated differently.”
Chiu said she discovered a connection between perception, camouflage and disorientation when she was exploring her sexual identity and researching queer theory in her 20s. She said she started to make sculptural self-portraits that “interrogated these themes.”
Creating these surreal self-portraits using plywood and puzzles reminiscent of optical illusions, Chiu said she wanted viewers to “feel that confusion” embedded within her newfound ideas of visibility.
Her practice involves marquetry, or the art of applying decorative pieces of wood veneer to a structure to create images or geometric forms. It allows her to “combine traditional symbolism with signifiers of urbanization and modernity,” which she said speaks to Hong Kong’s social and economic growth.
To create her “Revolving Vessels” collection, Chiu was gifted a large quantity of heirloom crates from the Lum family at Wing On Wo & Co, the oldest operating general store in Chinatown, New York City.
“Each crate is meticulously deconstructed, cut into hundreds of individually faceted pieces and reassembled to resemble the ceramic vessels they once held,” she explained.
She said the lengthy process ensures the preservation of the markings imprinted on the crates, which serve as “tangible traces of their own journey from Asia to the United States — symbolically mirroring the migration shared by both the Lum Family and [herself].”
Chiu described how the crates were constructed to withstand the demands of overseas transportation, which parallels the experience of early Chinese immigrants in America, “many of whom endured forced labor, enslavement and racial discrimination,” she said.
Through “Revolving Vessels,” Chiu sought to pay homage to those who have helped to create better opportunities for future generations of Asian Americans. In her perspective, contemporary craft feels more important than ever because artists are “carrying forward not only the legacy of craft traditions, but also the histories embedded in the materials themselves,” she said.
Like Chiu, multimedia sculptor Kyle Cottier works to investigate ideas of memory and connection through wood manipulation. However, Cottier’s process holds photography at the center.
“An image is created by light but shaped by absence,” Cottier said. “I became interested in bringing that tension into the sculptures, allowing photographic processes to record traces of time, environment and perception.”
His largest work, “the light grew an eye to see itself,” is made of thousands of uniquely sized wooden blocks arranged to create a circular structure — each carrying a fragment of a collapsed image made from natural imagery. Cottier said photos capture only a fragment of a larger world, and through his sculptures, he seeks to “explore how something incomplete can still hold meaning.”
After wood has been cut and shaped, Cottier said it still continues to shift — expanding and contracting in response to its surroundings. “Rather than resisting those changes, I want to work with them,” he said.
For Cottier, the idea of permanence in woodworking or photography is essentially an illusion. His practice is driven by an interest in the coexistence of opposing states: stability and change, construction and collapse, image and object.
“The moment something takes form, it has already begun to change,” he said. “My instinct is to move toward repair — not by erasing fractures, but by finding ways to hold them.”
Cottier explained how incorporating photography in his work presents a unique kind of instability; he said that while photos appear to preserve a moment, in truth, they are a “fragment shaped by perspective, framing and interpretation.”
Sometimes, Cottier has disassembled pieces that have taken months to build. These moments are difficult, but he said they remind him that making is a form of care.
“Sometimes my faith is simply that my faith will return,” he said. “The work is ultimately a search for something grounded and felt — a place where vulnerability, uncertainty and presence can coexist.”
Both Cottier and Chiu’s works are on display in “Twisted,” a sculpture-themed exhibition housed in the Gallo Family Gallery of Strohl Art Center, on view through Aug. 24.
Contrasting with Cottier’s assembled forms, Daphne Minkoff uses paint to create landscapes that investigate memory and permanence as subjects.
“I’m drawn to ordinary neighborhoods, aging buildings, empty lots and spaces that quietly reveal the passage of time,” she said. “Even when I’m painting abandoned or deteriorating structures, I’m looking for beauty, light and resilience rather than loss alone.”
Minkoff’s works in “Homecoming” are paintings inspired by the memories of places she’s visited that refuse to fade. While rooted in the image of a specific place, she said her paintings are not intended to be exact records.
“As I work,” she said, “I edit, reconstruct and layer the imagery until the paintings begin to occupy a space between observation and memory.”
The buildings that Minkoff paints are representative of the places that occupy space in one’s mind long after they’ve left. She said they reach toward ideas of “home, belonging and change.”
Having her pieces shown in the alumni exhibition is especially meaningful to Minkoff because it marks “an important turning point” in her practice. When she participated in the Chautauqua School of Art residency program, she had just graduated with her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
“At the time, I was trying to continue making work connected to what I had been exploring in graduate school,” she said. “But I found myself in western New York attempting to paint places that existed somewhere else.”
Minkoff said there was a disconnect between where she was physically and the landscapes she was trying to create, which made it difficult for her to create work that felt rooted in substance. Looking back, she said that experience pushed her to focus less on “representing a specific location” and shifted her attention to “what it means to carry a place with you.”
That realization translated into a conscious step within her practice. Instead of playing a mental tug-of-war against her desire to capture scenes with intention, Minkoff said her work is now focused on “memory and the emotional resonance of landscapes.”
“I’ve become more comfortable allowing paintings to hold uncertainty instead of trying to resolve every question,” she said.
Similarly, multidisciplinary sculptor Jeremiah Ibarra says clay challenges his understanding of certainty and “what it really means to wash our hands and clothes.” As a medium, clay absorbs and reflects the conditions of its making. Ibarra’s practice stays true to this sentiment.
“Clay, in its fired and unfired forms, has a way of recording the history and environment it touches,” he said. “It’s messy. Red clay, especially — it stays with you.”
Ibarra’s works in “Homecoming” include ceramic jars from his cookie jar series. He said cookie jars fit comfortably into Americana culture; on kitchen counters and atop refrigerators, the jars slowly become fixtures in homes — monuments of the lives lived around them.
He said if one leaves a cookie jar alone for long enough, it will eventually “establish itself as a valued object and stake claim as one of your kitchen essentials without ever really storing cookies.” Ibarra draws on the jars, creating iconography that disrupts viewers’ ideas of continuity and timeline. Depicted on his jars are a series of referees, all engaged in irrelevant activities, such as browsing a menu or taking a phone call.
“I’m interested in seeing this character playing an arbiter or mediator doing anything else but refereeing a contest,” he said. “For me, this character becomes a stand-in for anyone making big decisions.”
The universal practice that unites these artists is a ceaseless internal call to investigate perception, memory and the unknown. From shredding paper into hundreds of pieces to molding structures from clay, one question brings together these exhibiting artists at Chautauqua Institution this season: What does it mean to be changed?
