Pictorial Arts Faculty Exhibition
Artist Walk-through:
Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Art #127, Department of Art and Art History
SJSU campus
Opening Reception:
Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery
Gallery Open by appointment
The Department of Art and Art History is delighted to present this periodic opportunity to view recent works by current faculty in the Pictorial Arts area: Irene Carvajal, Donald Feasél, Erik Friedman, Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian, Shaun O'Dell, Matthew Weston Taylor, Michelle Wilson and Lucia Znamirowski. Featured are a divergent group of artists who, although displaying a wide range of media, style, and technique, share an interest in working with pictorial arts media and a devotion to teaching. This exhibition is both provocative and stimulating, revealing a variety of aesthetics and creative solutions to formalistic issues of shape, scale, and composition.
Irene Carvajal is a Costa Rican-American artist, working in printmaking, collage, video, performance
and installation. Her work examines labor, gender and globalization through the lens
of mass produced objects. In performative video works Returned and Soil and Soul,
Carvajal explores history as a series of overlaying complex stories. Some of them
prevail, some fragment, while others get erased or forgotten. Often these stories
are embedded in textile patterns or on tiles underfoot.
Donald Feasél’s Citadel series seeks an immediacy of impact achieved through minimal means. Freezing
gestures within a colorfield expanse, he performs the rituals of chance to escape
the inwardness and the isolation of painting.
Erik Friedman’s Variance series begins as an investigation that considers the structural foundation
of form and shape within pictorial space, related specifically to visual language
and the deconstruction and obliteration of typographic letter forms. Its ongoing progression
is inspired by metaphorical ideas related to Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space”
and Joris-Karl Huysmans “Against Nature”.
Emanuela Harris-Sintamarian is an artist originally from Romania, but lives and works in Oakland, CA. As an immigrant,
her work is informed by the relationship between her identity to her sense of displacement,
and the ways she has devised to reconcile those incongruous elements. Harris-Sintamarian
is interested in perception, memory and the mechanics of motion, their visual translation,
and the dichotomies intrinsic to them (transfer vs change, action vs reaction, and
time linearity). She explores the fluidity and tension generated by contradictions:
organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated imagery, and imperfections.
Shaun O’Dell explores the intertwining realities of the human and natural orders. The History
of Itself Being Made Part 1: Score For Hephaestus’ Foot is the first work in a series
of large-scale history paintings. This painting is the first in a sub-series about
the history of the volcano and is specifically a meditation on Hephaestus the Greek
god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, artisans, sculptors, and metallurgy. The scene
does not retell a story of Hephaestus from the Iliad or Odyssey, but rather assumes
the volcano to be the earth’s original author. It situates the volcano’s creation
of the earth’s surface as an original, radical, primeval act of creative and narrative
agency and presents a visual account of how the volcano’s authorship has deposited,
accumulated, stored, and distributed narrative throughout earth history.
Matthew Weston Taylor is a painter who works primarily in oil. His current body of work was inspired by
narrowboat youtube videos, which he discovered at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Narrowboats were originally designed to carry cargo and were pulled by horses, yet
people live on them today and slowly cruise around. Taylor watched countless videos
about narrowboat residents and their lives and experiences. This body of work is inspired
by these narrowboat shows, but it is also about pandemic time and the watching of
life move slowly forward and backwards.
Michelle Wilson’s work finds synchronicity between personal narrative and contemplative activism.
As an interdisciplinary thinker, it takes the form of handmade paper, installations,
sculptures, prints, artist books, collages, and social practice interventions. A Longer
Table is based on Wilson’s experience volunteering for a food distribution program
for the Oakland Unified School District and the East Oakland Burrito Roll and documents
the people who made sure that the most vulnerable people in the community did not
go without food during a pandemic. In Sudama and Avicence from the series Sorrow,
Wilson creates metaphors to explore her personal losses during this time.
Lucia Znamirowski is an artist, educator, and graduate candidate at San José State University. Lucia’s
work focuses on memory and forgetting, post-post modernism, and the recursive nature
of identity. Her recent exhibition at Herbert Sanders Gallery, I Am Having So Much
Fun Here Without You (2022), grapples with the articulation of fictional identity
through the works of two of authors. Since graduating from California College of the
Arts in 2010, Lucia has been an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute, in Berkeley
(2010), the recipient of the Helen Dooley Scholarship (2021), and Auvil Printmaking
Scholarship (2021).
All of these artists have individually received noteworthy acclaim for their works.
As a group, they combine significant successes in regional, national, and international
exhibitions, public art commissions, and museum collections, as well as numerous grants
and awards. We are delighted to have this opportunity to feature their thoughtfulness,
craftsmanship, and vision in this special display.
In conjunction with the opening of this exhibition, each exhibiting artist will speak
about their work, its context, and its development as part of a walk-through in the
Thompson Gallery, which will be held from 5 - 6 pm on April 19, 2022. This presentation
and the following opening reception, held immediately afterward from 6 – 7:30 pm,
are free and open to the public.
Artist Walk-through:
Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 5:00pm - 6:00pm
Art #127, Department of Art and Art History
SJSU campus
Opening Reception:
Tuesday, April 19, 2022, 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery
Gallery Open by appointment
Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery
Department of Art and Art History
San José State University
