Sense of Place

Strohl Art Center, Chautauqua Institution

June 25 - July 23, 2023

Sense of Place is a non-traditional landscape exhibition that considers our relationship to place. These works conjure more of an aura than an illustration of a particular location. Through painting, textiles, video, and photography, they explore the interconnectedness of earth, water, and air. They question our responsibilities to and our place within the landscapes we inhabit. They document, dissect, imagine, and tend to these spaces. Sponsored by the Jerome M. Kobacker Foundation.

ARTISTS: Maria Fernanda Barrero, Samantha Fields, Liz Nielsen, Mika Obayashi, Hồng-Ân Trương and Lien Truong

Take a Video Tour

Photos: Erika Diamond

Curatorial Statement:

This non-traditional landscape exhibition considers our inextricable relationship to place. Each artist’s work is richly informed by philosophical and art historical contexts, but we are initially seduced by their deliberate and meticulous use of color and material. Conjuring more of an aura than an illustration of a particular location, these works explore the interconnectedness of earth, water, and air. They question our responsibilities to and our place within the landscapes we inhabit. They document, dissect, imagine, and tend to these spaces.

The grounding quality of earth is less present in most of these landscapes, favoring the ever-shifting spaces of sky and water. Rather than paint, Maria Fernanda Barrero uses a series of thin lines of thread to insist that there is no separation between sky and water, humans and the earth. Liz Nielsen paints with light itself, using an analog darkroom-based process in which no photograph was taken with a camera. The image is a representation of its own becoming rather than a “real” subject. The landscapes and relationships elicited when we look at them are built from our own perspectives and imaginations.

Works by Samantha Fields, Lien Truong, and Hồng-Ân Trương are the most representational in this exhibition. At once breathtaking and unsettling, their works are carefully crafted to emphasize nature’s response to the effects of climate change and human warfare, respectively. We are diminutive in comparison to the grandeur of Nature, but our effects on it are profound and often irrevocable. Fields and Truong complicate the history of contemporary landscape painting with decolonial and ecological agendas. There even seems to be hope on the horizon in Fields’ work, as we glimpse a bit of sun in the distance or a faint rainbow emerging.

In Mika Obayashi’s installation, we are offered the opportunity to see through three dimensions, as though viewing the strata that form the shape of a mountain over time. When experiencing this work built of indigo-dyed paper, we can be inside of it while also viewing glimpses of the surrounding exhibition. Like the ghost of a distant place, it is its own transcendent space within the gallery.

In this exhibition, one’s sense of place may reflect back to us as a sense of self. Who are we when we see ourselves as part of something greater? Where is the line between earth and sky? What are the boundaries, if any, between us?

Special thanks to exhibition installation team: Colin Shaffer, Rheanne Bouchard, Sarah Heink, and Grace Bukowski.

PRESS:

Read Howard Halle’s review, Chautauquan Daily, July 14, 2023

Read Julia Weber’s article, Chautauquan Daily, July 20, 2023