Faculty Biennial Art Exhibition Opens Jan. 26

01/15/2015 

The Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland opens its “2015 Art and Art History Faculty Biennial” exhibition on Monday, Jan. 26. The exhibition runs through Friday, Feb. 20.

The show includes recent pieces by 10 Art and Art History Department faculty members including Martine Barnaby, Jeremiah Donovan, Lori Ellis, Charles Heasley, Kevin Mayer, Jenn McNamara, Paul Parks, Jaroslava Prihodova, Vaughn Randall and Bryan Valentine Thomas. Participants teach courses in art history, ceramics, design, drawing, fibers, painting, photography, printmaking, new media and sculpture.

“The exhibition offers students the opportunity to view work by their mentors,” said Gallery Director Erika Fowler-Decatur. “And it gives the campus community and region the chance to contemplate artwork in a wide range of media being produced within the department.”

An opening reception for the artists is set for 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29. Refreshments will be served.

The faculty exhibitors will discuss their artistic vision during two separate “Artist’s Talk” events, the first at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 4, and the second at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 10. Donovan, Heasley, Mayer, McNamara and Thomas will discuss their work on Feb. 4. Barnaby, Ellis, Parks, Prihodova and Randall will be available to interact with the public at the Feb. 10 event.

Fairy tales, folklore and childhood games comprise the foundation of Barnaby’s work. In describing her own focus, she alludes to the C.S. Lewis statement, “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

Her recent series, which includes the 4.5-inch by 4-inch mixed media piece “Red, Mother, Grandmother, Wolf (detail),” explores notions of growing up, rites of passage and memory.

Lori Ellis painted this oil on birch panel piece called “Microclimate II. Above left, this digital print, film and vintage View-Masters piece, titled “Red, Mother, Grandmother, Wolf (detail),” is from Martine Barnaby.

“My imagery is a visceral response to the disguised symbolism of adult themes that are neatly tucked away in classic tales for children,” Barnaby wrote. “I am interested particularly in the traditional role of the storyteller as well as in the delivery of narrative structure using both old and new technology.”

For the last several years, the subject matter of Ellis’ paintings has been the microclimates of garden plants, the task movement of insects and many unanswered questions about the dynamics of growth and weather. 

Ellis has focused on gardens, artist studios, commercial kitchens and construction sites to study how environments are created in time and space from both material objects and patterns of task movement.

In her most recent work, she has begun to consider human patterns of time and movement in relation to immersive tasks and created environments. Her 2014 painting, “Microclimate II,” attempts to celebrate the “reverie of observation and the consequent suspension of time and space,” she stated for the exhibition.

“Full-sense observation — including the visual, auditory, kinesthetic and olfactory senses — has the potential to interrupt normal time cadence, both compressing and stretching the familiar markers of seconds, minutes and hours, Ellis noted. “Movement is stilled in varying lengths of time, leaving memory traces of pattern.”

All Dowd Gallery events are free and open to the public. The gallery is in Room 106, Dowd Fine Arts Center, which is located at the corner of Graham Avenue and Prospect Terrace. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and by appointment. The gallery is closed on weekends.

Group tours are available and can be arranged by contacting Fowler-Decatur at 607-753-4216 or erika.fowler-decatur@cortland.edu.

For more information, visit the gallery website.