"Art Notes: Central Vermont Gallery Examines ‘Dartmouth Influence’" - EmmaJean Holley, Valley News
05/24/2018
05/24/2018
The Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College is one of the region's most exciting under-graduate college art programs. With the recent expansion of its facilities (the Black Family Visual Arts Center, in Hanover) the college makes a strong statement for the arts as a major force in the region.
Dartmouth Influence showcases eleven women artists -- faculty members, adjunct professors, and the visiting artist -- to survey the breadth of philosophy, teaching capacity, and advancing commitment of the department.
This exhibit presents a rare opportunity to see examples of the artists working in a broad array of mediums. It displays a traditional and contemporary viewpoint marking an almost thirty year span and reflects the influence of the art movements of the day.
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, May 19 from 5-7pm
Page Cover: Zenovia Toloudi, Silo(e)scapes 2016-now, Installation detail view
VIRGINIA BEAHAN
virginiabeahan.com
Virginia Beahan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received a BA degree in English from the Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She has taught at Harvard University, Massachusetts College of Art, Wellesley College and is currently Senior Lecturer in Photography at Dartmouth College.
JENNIFER CAINE
Jennifer Caine received a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Painting from Boston University. Her work includes paintings, prints, drawings, and artist books and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions were held at the UMaine Museum of Art, Soprafina Gallery, Boston, MA, CoLab, Austin, TX, The Painting Center, New York, NY, Strauss Gallery, Dartmouth College, and Guerilla Arts, Dallas, TX. Other recent exhibition venues include the National Academy Museum, New York, NY; The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; The Hunstville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL; Big Medium, Austin, TX; 808 Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA; FPAC Gallery, Boston, MA; Ice Cube Gallery, Denver, CO; Jewett Gallery, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; The Carillon Gallery, Tarrant County College, Fort Worth, TX; and ArtSpace, Maynard, MA.
She is the recipient of many awards, including the Constantin Alajalov Award at Boston University, and was included in the book, 100 Boston Painters published by Schiffer Publishing.
She currently teaches at Dartmouth College. Before joining the faculty at Dartmouth, she taught at Boston University for five years, and she has been a visiting artist at many colleges including: Providence College, Providence, RI, Lyme Academy College of Art, Old Lyme, CT, and the Museum of Fine Arts School, Boston, MA. She is a member of the Boston Printmakers.
Kari Cholnoky holds an MFA from Cranbrook and a BA from Dartmouth College. She has participated in group shows in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago and solo shows at David Klein Gallery in Detroit, Big Medium in Austin, TX, and the Mercedes Benz Bank in Berlin. Cholnoky has completed residencies at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, and The Fountainhead in Miami, FL, and has had her work featured in Editorial Magazine, ArtNews, Hyperallergic and Maake Magazine. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
LOUISE HAMLIN
Louise Hamlin (BFA University of Pennsylvania, New York Studio School in Paris and New York, Skowhegan School for Sculpture and Painting). Her paintings, drawings, and prints are shown nationally in group and solo exhibitions, and she is affiliated with the Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.
Awards include: 2009 Gold Medal, CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education) Circle of Excellence Awards (for film ÒInk Across TimeÓ, co-produced with Michael Sacca), Sony Research Fellowship, Vermont Council on the Arts Fellowship, Mellon Foundation Research Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, Residencies at the Djerassi Foundation in CA, the Hartford Art School, and the International School of Art in Italy.
She has published art reviews, provided cover art for many books and literary magazines, and collaborated with Coffee House Press to produce a limited edition boxed set of hand-printed poems by 15 poets, each accompanied by an etching of hers. Her work is included in many public and private collections, including the Walker Arts Center, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the University of Iowa, Bryn Mawr College, Swarthmore College, Otterbein College, Dartmouth College, and the Wellington Management Co. She has also taught at Union College, Vassar College, the State University of New York at Purchase, Queens College of the City University of New York, American University and The International School of Art in Italy, The Chautauqua Institute, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.
Former department Chair, she is the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Studio Art, Area Head of Printmaking, and faculty advisor to the Book Arts Workshop. She has taught painting, drawing, printmaking, freshman and senior seminars, and basic design.
Karolina Kawiaka received her AB in Fine Art, Art History and Architecture from Smith College, and her Master of Architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She teaches Architecture, Drawing, Digital Drawing and Senior Seminar courses in the Studio Art Department, and has taught Sustainability classes in the Environmental Studies Department and Engineering School. She is a faculty advisor to both the student architecture club Arc@D and DADA- Dartmouth Alumni in Design and Architecture- both of which she helped to found.
She is a registered architect and the principal of the Karolina Kawiaka Studio in Vermont. Her firm's work includes building, landscape and furniture design focusing on sustainable design and infrastructure, as well as digital drawings and installations. Recent work includes projects in Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Washington DC and Washington State.
Kawiaka has been an invited critic at Yale Graduate University School of Architecture, Columbia/ Barnard Architecture Program, Middlebury College, University of Texas Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Rhode Island School of Design, Bennington College, Mississippi State University School of Architecture, University of Arkansas Department of Landscape Architecture, Norwich University School of Architecture, Yestermorrow Design-Build School, University of Washington Architecture School, Parsons the New School for Design and Marlboro College, among many others.
Her work has been published in The Washington Post, USA Today, The International Business Times, Fine Homebuilding Magazine, ArchDaily, ArchitectureBoston and Design New England Magazine, and has been shown nationally, including at the Shelburne Museum, and is in the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art. She was nominated for a Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Award and is the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship, Leslie Center for the Humanities Faculty Travel and Research Grants, Neukom Institute Grants, a John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding Research Grant, the Dartmouth College Student Assembly Profiles in Excellence Teaching Award, the Dartmouth College Distinguished Lecturer Award, Dartmouth's first Faculty Lorax Sustainability Award, the Campus Compact of NH Humanitarian Award, two Vermont Arts Council Creation Grants. She most recently was a winner in the Washington Monument Grounds Ideas Competition and the Honor Award from the VT ASLA for Landscape Planning, Research and Analysis.
STINA KÖHNKE
stinakohnke.com
Her studio is a stockpile of antique and curious objects. She is drawn to antique items for their design, integrity and history. Before she begins building a construction, she spends a disproportionate time collecting appropriate objects. She then experiments with disassembling these items to the extent where she feels she is able to synthesize the object’s former context with her own meaning. With her interest in taxidermy, toy construction and industrial hardware, she enjoys the challenge of distilling recognizable items into alluring abstractions. She consciously preserves some evidence of the objects’ former use. Her habit of disassembling and rearranging her components helps her test the parameters for merging incongruous elements into convincing scenarios.
Beyond fragmenting her found materials, she transforms these objects into her own narratives by reconfiguring them in unexpected ways. As these recognizable images are morphed and upended, their context becomes more dreamlike. As in a dream, her work’s appearance is simultaneously plausible and improbable.
She doesn't trust this light that reveals everything, lays it all before her like death. It's in sleep without eyes that we see the faceless ghosts of lovers and other soundless things that change just before waking, that hide themselves, small secrets that we don't know and that make us and that give us our names.
home.dartmouth.edu/faculty-directory/colleen-m-randall
Colleen Randall received her MFA in Painting from Queens College, City University of New York, her BFA in Painting from The University of Iowa and her BA in Art History from Macalester College. She is an abstract painter whose work explores space and light through the materiality of paint.
Randall is a member of The Painting Center in New York City. She is the recipient of the National Academy of Design’s Edwin Palmer Memorial Award for Painting, a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship Grant and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Grant. She has been selected for artist residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony and Landfall Trust in Brigus, Newfoundland.
She has taught Master Painting and Drawing Workshops at the National Academy of Design in New York City, Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO, and Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua, NY. She has been a visiting artist at numerous universities, art institutions and colleges, including the Vermont Studio Center, University of New Hampshire, Binghamton University, Haverford College, American University, Delaware College of Art & Design, Art Institute of Boston, Swarthmore College, and the Caumsett Summer Painting Program.
A Professor in the Studio Art Department, she has taught at Dartmouth College since 1989 and was Chair of the Department from 2000-2006 and from 2012-2013. The courses Professor Randall teaches at Dartmouth include: Drawing, Painting, Special Topics in Color, and Senior Seminar.
christinaseely.com
Interested in human understandings of time and the natural world, Christina Seely’s expedition based work explores global systems, both built and natural, and finds its home in the conversation between the photographic image and our contemporary relationship with the planet.
Embedded in the work is a dialectic between the surface documentation of representative media and the complex reality that lies beyond that surface – how beauty can suggest the simple and ideal while both subtly reflecting and obscuring an often darker more complicated truth.
An experiential examination of our relationship to time and the natural world makes up the root of her practice. While the work culminates in photographic, textual, collaborative and performative translations it is guided by both the potentials of the photographic medium as an artistic tool and its deconstruction as a dominating cultural syntax.
ESMÉ THOMPSON
esmethompsonart.com
In Esmé Thompson’s paintings and multipanel wall reliefs the use of color and pattern create a dynamic and engaging viewing experience. Colorful and bold, the paintings attest to a lifelong interest in decorative designs as diverse as those found in Islamic textiles and ceramic tiles to those of medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts.
Over the last decade, Thompson has undertaken an investigation into the creative intersections of her many influences, forming alchemies of design, pattern, and color. In so doing, she has fashioned a visual vocabulary that is distinctly her own, imbuing each painting with the overlapping and intersecting language of symbols amid repeated articulations of line and color. She creates wall reliefs of multiple panels on metal or wood.Thompson says: “I hope that my work represents possibility; I hope it embodies change. The repeated, interrelated images are meant to allow for a cyclical and cumulative, rather than a linear, reading. The experience of viewing the painting becomes a journey that continues to unfold, reminiscent of the ongoing pattern of organic growth. I seek to make paintings that blur the boundaries between high and low art and that celebrate the work people have made throughout time and across cultures.”
Thompson’s travels inform and enliven her art. She has been a resident of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, and returns to Italy often to pursue her interest in medieval painting and the decorative arts. She has travelled to Morocco to study ceramic and fiber art and to Ireland to study Celtic manuscripts and lacemaking. Thompson lives in New Hampshire and is Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College.
ZENOVIA TOLOUDI
zenovia.net
Zenovia Toloudi is architect, artist, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Studio Art, Dartmouth College. Her work critiques the contemporary alienation of humans from nature and sociability in architecture and in public space, and investigates spatial typologies to reestablish cohabitation, inclusion and participation through digital, physical, and organic media. The founder of Studio Z, a creative research practice on art, architecture and urbanism, Zenovia has exhibited internationally, including at the Biennale in Venice, the Center for Architecture, the Athens Byzantine Museum, the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and the Onassis Cultural Center. She has won commissions from Illuminus Boston, and The Lab at Harvard. Zenovia's work belongs to permanent collections at Aristotle University (AUTh), and the Thracian Pinacotheca.
Zenovia has been an invited speaker on topics of spatial light, art installations, bioart, and bioarchitecture at venues such as the Light InSight interdisciplinary lecture series at New England College of Optometry, the International Symposium for Electronic Arts, the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Museum, the Aga Khan Symposium, the AIAS Forum, and the International Making Cities Livable Conference. Her writings on bioarchitecture, the vernacular, and art/architecture installations were published in Routledge, Technoetic Arts, MAS Context and Organs Everywhere. Zenovia’s recent analysis on 21st century public space crisis, published by The Conversation, was republished in more than 30 venues, and was featured by The Aspen Institute.
Zenovia’s work has appeared internationally in press including at Artdaily and Artnews. She was interviewed by The Matt Townsend Show, BYU Radio on public space crisis; by Delta TV with one episode on her practice; by Vimagazino for her latest project on future architecture and agriculture; and multiple times by The Dartmouth for her practice, pedagogy, and vision. Zenovia is the recipient of The Class of 1962 Fellowship. She was a Public Voices Fellow, a Research Fellow at Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT, and a Fulbright Fellow. In 2011, Zenovia received her Doctor of Design degree from Harvard's GSD, a Master's of Architecture degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2006), and in 2003, she graduated from the AUTh in Architectural Engineering.