Published on 12/15/2020.
The College of the Redwoods Art Gallery presents the Art Department 2021 Faculty Exhibition, opening online February 23 and featuring work by Natalia Margulis, Shannon Sullivan, Tova Lund, Benjamin Funke, Lindsay Lacewell Kessner, Gary Christensen, and David Wilson. View image gallery.
The 2021 Faculty Exhibition allows viewers to virtually explore images of paintings, sculptures, ceramic, jewelry and photography, reflecting the diverse ideas and media that CR art faculty use within their individual studio practices. The artists present a range of visuals from luminous photography, intricately subtle sculptures, to boldly abstracted forms. This exhibit offers the opportunity to connect and learn from practicing professionals and demonstrates how these instructors integrate their artistic inquiries into their courses. The work exhibited exemplifies the skills and commitment required for relevant and rigorous contemporary art-making, particularly given the challenges of the ongoing pandemic.
Art professors Natalia Margulis and Lindsay Lacewell Kessner each present a duo of abstracted works on canvas, which are immediately distinctive in appearance, medium, and process. Margulis’ oil painting, Beginning, focuses on the interplay of texture and color, straddling the line between abstraction and representation while also attempting to express a range of emotion, from light to dark. Kessner’s work is an excerpt from a six-part series on elements. It emerged after her exploration into a wide variety of traditional and scientific systems for reducing the natural world to its most fundamental components. Kessner says, “I decided to develop an elemental system based on my own conceptions of reality.” Her mixed-media painting, Lambda, refers to the quantity of the energy present in the vacuum of space, which is responsible for the expansion of the universe.
Art Professor Shannon Sullivan’s ceramic sculpture, Folded Topography 3, is part of the ongoing project, Net Gain: An experiment in Geometric Folding by Central Booking, a non-traditional gallery in New York City. Artists were asked to use specific complex mathematical patterns, cut and folded from a single sheet of paper, as the starting point for their work. Her Folded Topography series emerged from Sullivan’s immediate affinity for the potential the Net Gain project presented. She states, “This project spoke to me from the very beginning. I enjoy being part of a community of artists from around the globe folding paper during the COVID isolation. I had dabbled in paper clay casting before, but this opened the door for a deep study.”
Viewers are invited to view the 2021 Faculty Exhibition on digital display from February 23 to March 25 at www.redwoods.edu/artgallery. Selected images will also be viewable on the gallery’s Instagram @redwoodsgallery and Facebook throughout the duration of the exhibition.
The CR Art Gallery physical space is currently closed to the public. For further inquiries, or to be added to the exhibition announcement email list, contact art-gallery@redwoods.edu or leave a voicemail at (707) 476-4100 ext. 4869.