Lindsay Bezich | Kimberly DeCicco |Sean Hurley | Denise Jansson | Erik Geoffrey Johnson | Rebecca M. Kallem | Lauri E. Lannan | K. Lee Mock | Kathi Smith | Lindsay Forrest Wraga
Lindsay Bezich
Bachelor of Fine Arts
I paint as a magpie, scavenging bits and pieces from the life around me. Sometimes these are visual bits, a moment in a forgotten room, kitchen table leftovers, the space between buildings. Sometimes these are literally pieces of junk. I get a real kick out of yard sale rummaging, beach combing, and attic digging, collecting obsolete treasures full of history. Some of these objects naturally hold drama or worldly associations while others are merely delightful or dear to me. These things make great characters in the daydreams that play out in my mind, holding in their rough thing-ness the qualities of people I love and the essences of far away places. I paint because it gives me a way to sing about desire and anxiety and freedom in the form of spoons and postcards and dusty chairs, belting in my private, made up language. I paint because I enjoy navigating between light and shadow, chasing those specific flitting moments when sun settles on the edge of glass, or gets absorbed into glowing fabric. I paint because it gives me roaming eyes to search the world for beauty to celebrate.
Kimberly DeCicco
Bachelor of Fine Arts
My recent work focuses on familiar interior spaces such as my bedroom and studio. I work to create believable spaces that, through expressive mark-making and texture, also remind the viewer of the physicality of the paint itself. My interest lies in creating a tension between an object and how I paint it, between the imaginative and the given. I believe that varieties of paint application and vibrant color worlds can evoke a truth of reality that may have little to do with the objects themselves.
Conceptually, I consider the interior space of a room to be a container, much like a person's body or mind. Windows are used to explore the idea of a space elsewhere that may contain something else that I can't quite reach, a glimpse of another world. Mirrors interest me because they can appear to be windows to a different existence, even though it is in fact your own surroundings reflected back at you. I strive for feelings of rejuvenation, and hope to demonstrate an awakened and resurrected reality.
Sean Hurley
Bachelor of Fine Arts
The industrial structures that stand on the edges of towns offer a metaphor for the transitory nature of the human condition. At varying stages of active use or abandoned loneliness, these manifestations of man’s ambition stand initially as grand monuments to our ingenuity, and later as lonely reminders of forgotten endeavor.
As I explore these ruins of our recent past, I am consumed by the profound conflict to which I am witness. Light dances across weathered brick walls, standing in futile resistance to the ravages of wind, rain, and time. These places are a silent battlefield, where engineered surfaces clash with an onslaught of encroaching vegetation. The result is a sublime and unexpected visual poetry.
By etching these places into copper I strive to lend permanence to something temporary. These prints are my way of remembering, on paper, relics which stand already forgotten.
Denise Jansson
Master of Fine Arts
I am intrigued by the number of different perspectives invoked by a single work or situation. As such, I find it challenging to get people to see things in new ways and to become aware that their original view was but one of many options, rather than the only truth. This can happen if they fail to recognize something they see every day, if it has been taken out of context, or has been presented from an unusual angle. My paintings contain something recognizable and yet are intended, through their distortions and variations, to raise questions in the mind of the viewer.
My figures sit within more abstract worlds, with forms and spaces moving between recognition and unfamiliarity to create some psychological aspect. Space is becoming as important as the figure to intensify this experience. I may do this by dissolving areas, creating an ambiguous relationship that questions where space and figure begin and end. By working from observation and concentrating on formal aspects, I am able to ignite my intuition and subconscious. My intention is to illustrate hidden dimensions of forms, and the relationships among forms, in a manner that rings true to the observer without becoming cliché. By invoking a feeling of uncertainty in the viewer, my own uncertainty about the world is shared, reducing the distance between us.
Erik Geoffrey Johnson
Master of Fine Arts
The driving force for my creative process is to tell a dream-like version of my life. My paintings are an attempt to create an alternate reality much like that dream world I so fleetingly remember. My art is focused on creating a bridge between abstract imaginary subject matter and the character of the people I know. Like finding imagery in clouds as a child, I revel in the searching and uncovering of possibility in randomness. Yet I want to provide access to what my imagination forms. In order to achieve this I employ my skills as an observational painter to harmonize the real with the imagined.
At times this process can feel like using my paint brush as a divining rod, to lead me to subject matter that is germinated and discovered in an unconscious state. Joy, to me, is finding a story in the funny twilight zone between the known and the sensed. My wish is to reveal, intermingled with the imagined inventions, a portrait creating the psychology of identity. Like the facts you remember to tell your friend about your dream, the concrete recognition is the sign post within the foreign territory. My aspiration as a painter is to remain an open- hearted artist as my life changes around me.
Rebecca M. Kallem
Master of Fine Arts
I’ve always enjoyed painting quickly and have embraced a way of working that somewhat sacrifices calm and care for a more intuitive, direct, and spontaneous engagement with my materials and the world around me. This is most apparent in the landscapes I’ve made from the view outside of my studio window. In this series, I explore repetition, revision, and variation. I find that the more similar the pieces are, the more significant minor differences become. The paintings are like a journal or diary, a daily record of the world around me and my feelings towards it. They explore what is static and certain on the one hand, and, on the other, how much things change.
In addition to trees and forests, my recent paintings are inhabited by teacups, small birds, shells, toy theaters, dragons, and doll-like people. I am fascinated by the beauty of small things and the strangeness of miniature worlds, and my work reflects a unifying interest in the feminized and fantastical. My paintings can be lovely and delicate, but there is also darkness: a strange scale shift, a dead bird, a mysterious shadow that implies violence. I think about the vulnerability of the small, a vulnerability which we all share. My recent toy theater paintings, while weirdly artificial depictions of “childish” things, allow me to most substantially and personally express experiences of fear, failure, love, and sadness through private symbols and implied narratives. I am drawn to small scale work because a small painting can be its own world, akin to a diorama or miniature recreation. A small painting can also show the childlike dearness of an object, and the painting itself is an intimate, singular thing. I enjoy the sensation of making an object. The small size of each painting also permits the quick, spontaneous mixing of colors. I make intuitive decisions about color, tone, and temperature and then adjust from there. Certain colors and combinations have become my favorites, part of my painting language: very warm yellows and ochres, cold soft pinks, dark blue-black, and small darts of intense red or orange. I like to combine aggressive use of the palette knife with a gentle brush lines and marks. This quality of touch, the use of glowing color and muted tones, and the play between clarity and obscurity, are elements in my work that I hope communicate a certain painterly and personal temperament.
Lauri E. Lannan
Bachelor of Fine Arts
As a photographer I spend many of my days wandering through and studying my immediate world, recording it with the camera. I photograph environs I find to be both visually and emotionally stimulating. At times I feel compelled to stop walking, when a scene is striking enough for me to go beyond the usual boundaries to get the shot: through fences, behind walls, down alleys.
A great strength of photography is that it can simultaneously explain and evoke. The subject matter I photograph is likely to be that which goes unexplored by others when encountered in reality. It is my passion to use photography as a means to explore my surroundings for such things, capture them, and finally, present them for others to explore in a new way.
The images in this series are the product of a photographic discovery of my environment, each one reflecting my relationship and response to it. What results, it seems, while simultaneously being documentary and realistic, is a sense of singularity, emptiness, and ambiguity in the photographs. What is in a public space takes on a mysterious, almost secretive quality. This results from my personal experience of finding these images: drifting alone for long periods of time, not interacting but observing. In a sense, I use the camera as a door. It is both a barrier that separates me from the surrounding environment, but at the same time becomes my means of access.
Street photographer Garry Winogrand once said that photography “is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” In my work it is not a particular object I am searching for, but a certain visual quality. Compositions are instinctually based on the spatial relationships between the forms in front of me, on the color relationships, and on the quality of light. Each photograph highlights geometric connections, with line and form overlapping, and with contrasting colors working both with and against one another. My eye is drawn to these elements and interactions that come together temporarily, and it is my dedication to capturing such relationships that gives each of my photographs a connection to the next.
K. Lee Mock
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Like a memory, my drawing and painting waver in and out of focus. My goal through these compositions is to depict observations as I remembered them through my imagination. Although these compositions are based in observation, the atmosphere and energy of my memory also shaped my perceptions. The objects depicted serve to guide me through an optical exercise between surface and depth. My interest is to capture the intangible such as air, light, and the space in between.
Kathi Smith
Master of Fine Arts
Nature contains the elements, in color and form, of all pictures,
as the keyboard contains the notes of all music.
But the artist is born to pick and choose…as the musician
gathers his notes, and forms his chords,
until he brings forth from chaos, glorious harmony.
–James Abbot McNeill Whistler
The landscape contains a wealth of information that I am constantly attempting to organize. I seek complicated spaces with an abundance of information and consider it my task as a painter to find order within them. The places I select to paint on site often involve a juxtaposition of man- made structures and nature. These motifs are both chaotic and dense but have moments of order and legibility. I aim to convey all of these qualities through the paint.
Landscape painting provides me space to think, breathe, and be in the moment. Increasingly, I find it important and comforting to be reminded that this world is larger than me. Every time I go out to paint, I shed the confinement of everyday life and open my eyes to a world full of possibilities and to the freedom of just being.
In the course of two years I have worked towards developing my own language and ideas about the landscape, inspired by American landscape painters such as Burchfield, Hartley, Inness, and Hopper, as well as contemporary landscape painters who have presented their vision of the world in a language true to themselves. This two-part process entailed choosing how to make an image as well as developing ideas for images. I began by literally ordering what I saw, by color, light, shape, and composition, and as I progressed I began to compose and develop images for the sake of the picture, not necessarily based on what was in front of me. In this series of work I have maintained my concerns with color, light, space, and mark and have focused on inviting the viewer to experience a place.
As my work has developed, so have the ideas behind it. I have situated myself in the landscape in specific positions that are outside looking in; my intention is to convey a sense of wanting to look into places that are in some cases private. At the very core, my paintings suggest both a separation and connection between the viewer (initially me) and the places depicted. In a sense, the paintings also speak of confinement and freedom in subject matter and idea. I revel in the in-between spaces, often beyond the subject itself. These are the places I am not sure people take the time to notice, or even feel comfortable stopping to look at, but I am captivated within them for hours.
My love and dedication to the landscape is shared with a love for paint and the physical act of painting. As a painting becomes more developed, I find myself just as enthralled in it as I am in the landscape. There is a back and forth conversation between what the painting needs, what I see, and what I envision. I am constantly working the surface of the canvas, editing and revising, until I find a particular balance. Surface, texture, mark, light, color, and paint all become interwoven in a physical act of distinguishing positive and negative space. All of these elements, when successful, harmonize and balance, creating a final product that is more evocative than descriptive of the site chosen. My paintings attempt to locate and engage the viewer with those spaces in which I find myself lost: lost in the paint and lost in a state of being.
Lindsay Forrest Wraga
Bachelor of Fine Arts
I am interested in creating a fantastical, ritualistic world where women are the only human inhabitants. Their daily lives are filled with attempts to organize, manipulate, and balance their world. By initiating sanctified ceremonies, building makeshift shelters, and walking on tightropes, the women seek to survive in an exotic environment that is ruled by plants.
Since studio painting requires that a great deal of time be spent inside, I prefer to locate my imagery in the world outside. The significance of plants and vegetation is central to the work because gardening and the natural world have been influential in my life. Nature and its profusion of diversity, saturated colors, and organic forms provide an escape from the bland grind of day-to-day interior life. My imagery is derived from imagination, vivid dreams, memories, life drawings, and observation.
