Colby-Sawyer College to Host Exhibition of New Works by Fine Arts Faculty
NEW LONDON, N.H., Oct. 24, 2011 – Colby-Sawyer College will host the annual Faculty Art Exhibition, featuring current creative work by the studio art faculty in ceramics, digital/electronic art, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, mixed media work, sculpture and watercolor.
The exhibition opens with a festive reception on Thursday, Nov. 3, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery, in celebration of art and creativity at the college. Refreshments will be served and admission is free. The show runs through Thursday, Dec. 16.
This year's exhibition features the works of Deborah Campbell (painting); David Ernster (ceramics); Nicholas Gaffney (photography); Brandy Gibbs-Riley (graphic design); Jon Keenan (ceramics); Michael Lovell (painting); Kurt McQuiston (digital/electronic art); Mary Mead (printmaking and sculpture); Jane Prophet (mixed media); Namita Sharma (graphic design and mixed media); Kristin Tupper (watercolor); and Bert Yarborough (painting).
The annual exhibition inspires the faculty artists to create and share their new work with the community, with each member contributing eight to ten pieces, according to Fine and Performing Arts Department Chair and Gallery Director Jon Keenan. The show also introduces the work of artists who have recently joined the teaching faculty, such as Jane Prophet, a British conceptual artist who works with light, space and time. “I am pleased and excited Jane will be contributing works to the exhibition for the first time,” says Professor Keenan.
Deborah Campbell, an adjunct assistant professor with a B.S. from Northeastern University, teaches courses in visual identity and branding and plans to exhibit small landscape oil paintings that feature local scenery. “I am grateful that I am able to express myself through my art, be it graphic design, writing or landscape oil paint,” says Professor Campbell. “I love painting en plein air and find unlimited inspiration from the beauty of nature. My goal is to capture light and atmosphere in every painting while creating a well composed, unique and interesting work of art.”
David Ernster, who earned a M.F.A. from West Virginia University, has taught ceramics courses for many years and is now a full-time faculty member. He describes his recent work in clay as a collection focused on the traditional function of ceramics and the pertinence of these cultural traditions in modern society. Nicholas Gaffney, who joined Colby-Sawyer in 2008, will exhibit his photography. Professor Gaffney teaches courses in photography and new media and holds a M.F.A. from The Pratt Institute. Gaffney, whose photography is typically unaltered, has in the last few years concentrated on documenting landscapes where natural and manufactured worlds intersect.
Brandy Gibbs-Riley, who joined Colby-Sawyer in 2007, will exhibit works in graphic design and mixed media. She teaches courses in all aspects of graphic design and holds a M.F.A. from Boston University. Kurt McQuiston, an adjunct assistant professor with a M.F.A. in Visual Information Arts from Memphis College of Art, believes design is one of the most ubiquitous, powerful and overlooked communication tools of our modern world. He encourages his students to be open and not limit themselves.
Professor Keenan's recent work in clay features hand- and wheel-built anagama wood-fired ceramics that are both sculptural and functional. He joined the Colby-Sawyer faculty in 1990 and teaches courses in ceramics, art history and the visual arts. “My ultimate goal is to make work which is compelling, enriching and responsive to our daily experience,” he explains. In 2009, Professor Keenan was named the Joyce J. Kolligian Distinguished Professor of Fine Art and traveled to Kyoto, Japan, to research contemporary Japanese ceramics and teach at Kyoto Seika University as a Fulbright scholar.
Paintings by Michael Lovell will also be featured in the exhibition. Professor Lovell is technical director of the Sawyer Fine Arts Center and the executive director of an upcoming fall theatre production. He teaches stagecraft and holds a M.F.A. from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mary Mead, who teaches courses in printmaking and sculpture, will show new prints that combine silkscreen, monoprint imagery and woodcut techniques. Professor Mead holds a M.F.A. from Boston Museum School/Tufts University.
Jane Prophet, professor of Art and Interdisciplinary Computing at the University of London's Goldsmiths College, has worked with new media for two decades, integrating it with traditional materials to produce surprising and beautiful objects. Professor Prophet is involved in a number of internationally acclaimed projects that are breaking new ground in the arts and sciences, such as collaborations with stem cell researchers, mathematicians and heart surgeons that radically re-envisage the human body, and the award-winning web site, TechnoSphere. In 2005, she was selected for a National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts Fellowship to develop interdisciplinary artworks.
“Most of my art works, in whatever media, are influenced by my interest in the physical structure of objects (the growth structure of trees, the shape of the human heart, the particular spatial qualities of a building),” says Professor Prophet. “I'm equally interested in the way that these familiar objects and places feature in our social and economic landscape: how we use them as symbols (the oak tree becomes shorthand for 'Englishness'; the heart symbolizes 'Love'; landmark buildings both past and present are presented as signs of affluence, regeneration and 'Progress').
For this show, Professor Prophet will install a series of vignette pieces titled “Model Landscapes” in which she combines old and new media with rapid prototyping techniques to show her sense of the British landscape. Engaging with our desire for the perfect landscape and our willingness to mold or model these through large and small-scale interventions, she creates miniature landscapes viewed on small monitors, drawing the viewer in and demanding close inspection.
Kristin Tupper teaches beginner through advanced watercolor classes at Colby-Sawyer. A graduate of Bridgewater College, she will exhibit her recent work in watercolor painting. Bert Yarborough, who joined Colby-Sawyer in 1997, teaches courses in painting, drawing and the professional practices and portfolio Capstone course. He holds a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Early in his career his painting, drawing and print work was primarily abstract with iconographic images incorporated from his experiences working in the Provincelands National Seashore in Provincetown, Mass., and studying traditional Yoruban carving in Nigeria through a Fulbright Fellowship.
“My current work represents an extension and distillation of my engagement with the figure that began in earnest in 1996,” Professor Yarborough says. “I began to work with the figure to give voice to a level of expression I felt I could not reach through abstraction. Drawing was, and continues to be, the key component to my investigation and exploration with the human form. I began by drawing figures on the beaches in and around Provincetown. As the years have progressed I have been extracting the essential elements from this environment - the water, sun, birds, figures - and reconstituting them with the mark-making language of previous abstract work, combining this language with a variety of figurative and symbolic images from my African experience.”
The Fine and Performing Arts at Colby-Sawyer College
With a 12:1 average student-faculty ratio, 24-hour access to studios on campus, and integration with the other liberal arts programs on campus, the Department of Fine and Performing Arts offers unlimited possibilities to explore and develop as an artist through its programs in Art History, Graphic Design and Studio Art. Additional courses and experiences in dance, music and theatre are available. To learn more visit the Fine and Performing Arts.
