Visual Arts
Satellite and Sediment
January 3 - March 10, 2023
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Art
Crowell and West Galleries
Mon.-Fri. 9:00am - 5:00pm
Opening Reception: January 19,
4:30-6:30pm
Gallery Talks at 5pm
Take a virtual tour of the exhibit!
Satellite and Sediment features drawings and paintings by five contemporary artists working in response to the land. Manipulating satellite imagery, drone footage, collaged landscapes, and foraged materials, the artists mingle close observation and lived experience, body and nature, realism and abstraction. Collectively, their artworks depict human interventions that continue to transform the earth: hurricanes, blizzards, oil spills, property lines, unnatural forests.
Cynthia Lin reinterprets topographical details from NASA satellite imagery and magnified sections of skin with invented colors and unpredictable technical processes. Combining printmaking, scratch-board, solvent transfers, and oil on mylar, her large-scale works move from pores and hair follicles to lava flows and land boundaries. Sara Schneckloth forages natural material from New Mexico’s San Juan Basin to create pigments for her mixed media drawings. Based on low altitude drone footage, her loosely-referential maps of the region’s banded topography suggest geological formations and extensive resource extraction, as well as less-visible divisions between public and private lands.
Beatrice Modisett uses handmade charcoal and wood ash from her property in upstate New York in her monumental drawings of waves, wind, and extreme weather, suggesting a state between coalescing and collapse, forming and eroding. Barry Nemett’s accordion books combine multiple locations and climates, weaving intricate thickets and tree bark with expansive landscapes of patchwork fields, karsts, and canyons across continents. Athena LaTocha works her ink and earth drawings in concert with the land, often beginning them on and with the ground itself, letting the atmosphere, rain, sand, and soil direct the piece.
In Satellite and Sediment, the artists ask us to question distinctions between human systems and natural systems, and to reexamine scale and agency. Is it the earth we are seeing or our own skin? Is it land-made or hand-made? Topographical skin maps are magnified, aerial maps and weather systems become human scale, and monumental landforms fit in your palm. Bringing us into their intimate conversations with nature, these five artists encourage us to look closely at our own relationships with the climate around us, the sky above, and the ground below.
Artist Talk with Cynthia Lin
Fri. January 20, 12:50-1:50pm
Feigenbaum Center for Visual Art
Room 204
Lunch Buffet will be served.
Cynthia Lin reinterprets topographical details from NASA satellite imagery and magnified sections of skin with invented colors and unpredictable technical processes. Combining printmaking, scratchboard, solvent transfers, and oil on mylar, her large-scale works move from pores and hair follicles to lava flows and land boundaries.
Cynthia Lin was born in Taiwan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts Finalist in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts. Residency fellowships include MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Djerassi, Blue Mountain Center, Dora Maar House.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including Westchester Community College, College of William and Mary, Drew University, the Drawing Center, DeCordova Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, The National Academy of Design, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Yossi Milo Gallery, and Pierogi Gallery.
Co-sponsored by the departments of Visual Arts and Geoscience in conjunction with Satellite and Sediment, on view January 3 - March 10, 2023 in the Crowell & West Galleries, Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts.