2020 Senior Thesis Exhibitions
Faculty Spotlight 2019
Faculty Spotlight 2019
Featuring work by Abby Goldstein, Richard Kalina, Carleen Sheehan
November 25, 2019 – January 5, 2020
Reception: TBD
The Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2019 installment of the annual Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. Each year three members from the Department of Theater and Visual Art are asked to share a sampling of their production with the Fordham community. This year the Painting concentration is represented by both Richard Kalina and Carleen Sheehan with Abby Goldstein representing the Graphic Design concentration. Despite the differences in their mediums and approaches, their works generate a lively dialogue.
Abby Goldstein
Deep red by the side of the road, 2019, pigment and matte dispersion on paper, 44″ x 30″
My work is shaped by my surroundings; to what I see, to what I read, what I hear, and how I feel. I begin by setting visual guidelines, e.g.: medium, color, form, and size. I then develop a visual narrative using repetitive shapes, linear marks that transverse the picture plane. Improvisation is integral to my process. Each mark informs the next defining the composition as it develops. I move between representation and abstraction; my objective is to suggest an imaginary landscape that is based on environment, observation, and memory.
Richard Kalina
Prospect 9, 2014, 16″x16″, collage, acrylic, flashe on linen
The works in this show are nine out of the twelve paintings in the Prospect series. I began work on them in the early summer of 2014. I had been looking at and thinking about Le Corbusier and visionary, Machine Age architecture. A question arose when I drew and painted these works: were they plans or elevations, diagrams (with rooms and balconies) or fully fleshed abstract images? The paintings are built from a toolkit of components: panels, bars, circles, and complex linear connectors. They are constructed from painted and torn rice paper layered and collaged on linen. There is also a governing, game-like logic — a way of putting a rational order on sets of intuitive processes. In this case, the number of the internal panels matches the number of the color bars (and no color bar repeats) and the circles always come in two of each color. This sounds rather serious, but the paintings are meant to be playful and while they are at it, musical in a baroquely contrapuntal way. Importantly for me, they opened the door to my investigations of abstraction over the last five years.
Carleen Sheehan
detail, Cove (2019), acrylic, gouache, mixed media on canvas, 48″ x 34″
A central focus of CARLEEN SHEEHAN’s work is the intensity of contemporary space, with its accelerated temporal shifts and collaged eccentricities. Recent imagery celebrates the spectacle of the natural, depicting small fragments of ephemera: the movement and density of water, shifts in light, color and atmosphere. The work relies on the inter-connectedness of visual forms and processes across categories and disciplines, and on descriptive qualities inherent to different levels of information.
For further information on the exhibition please contact: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
Right Coast/Messengers Photographs by Susannah Ray & Kota Sake
Right Coast/Messengers
Photographs by Susannah Ray & Kota Sake
Curator: Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
The Lipani Gallery
July 10–October 10, 2019
Reception: TBD
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com
*The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays
Fordham University is proud to present a new two-person exhibition of photographs in our Lipani Gallery by Susannah Ray and Kota Sake. Upon immediate inspection, the images by these two photographers could not be any more different in terms of content, style, process, or presentation. However, upon closer inspection, a certain resonance begins to emerge between the two bodies of work.
Both evidence a clear dedication to exploring and documenting their respective topics over an extended period of time. As well, each selection of photographs examines how we utilize our free time, pursue our pleasures, and engage with our passions and pastimes. On the most direct level, both bodies of work clearly have something to do with water; however, none of these possible interpretations quite nails their connection down solidly. This ambiguity should serve as an invitation to come to visit the gallery and see the individual bodies of work, as well as an enticement to ponder their linkages.
This exhibition could be seen as a classic summer gallery show aimed towards pleasing the crowds—in this case, with surfers and animals. Nevertheless, beneath the initial hook of breezy, summer reading are numerous aspects of a more nuanced and provocative nature.
website
Susannah Ray
Right Coast
In fall of 2004, following my growing obsession with maritime weather models, cold-water wax, and 7mm neoprene mittens, I began documenting surfing in New York City. My life as I knew it had succumbed to my constant urge to surf, and it became clear to me that my photography would suffer from neglect if I did not begin to document the new passion that occupied most of my waking thoughts and many of my dreaming ones.
The project title, Right Coast, is a nickname for the East Coast that not only indicates its location on the continental US, but also asserts an underdog’s dreams of superiority. Surfing on the right coast, particularly in New York City’s Rockaway Beach, lacks most of the lifestyle and allure of West Coast surfing. Yet making up for the dearth of good weather, consistent waves, and beautiful surf spots is a community that has a surfeit of heart, dedication, and soul. Or in a word, aloha.
In the fall of 2012, less than a year after I concluded this series, Hurricane Sandy devastated Rockaway Beach, forever altering the landscape and our relationship to the sea. These photographs have become a testament to halcyon days, to a way of life lost, and to a life regained.
Kota Sake
Messengers
Chances are that at any given moment millions of digital pictures of unbearably cute animals are being uploaded to the Internet for viewing and pleasurable consumption. Second probably only to adorable baby pictures, cute animal pictures no doubt pervade our consciousness as we go about surfing the Internet, paying bills, and generating various status updates.
So, in looking at Kota Sake‘s traditional, gelatin silver photographs of animals one must ask why they seem so unfamiliar, resolutely not cute, and at times tragically strange. Considering that we are constantly exposed to such creatures online, in calendars, and in physical form at the zoo, it is an admirable achievement to transform something seemingly familiar into something otherworldly and mysterious.
Suspended in the netherworld of zoo tanks, these creatures glide, drift, sink, and loiter, isolated and mostly indifferent to our presence. There are no Technicolor creatures singing cheerful or cautionary songs for our education and pleasure. Theses creatures exist purely outside of our realm of understanding.
Images: Susannah Ray, On the Jetty, 2005 (L), Kota Sake, Messengers, 2019 (R)
For further information on the exhibition please contact:
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
Guest Photographer Susannah Ray: 2/26/19, 11:30, SL24G
2019 Senior Exhibitions
William Conlon: 21 Floors
William Conlon: 21 Floors
The Ildiko Butler Gallery
February 20–March 6, 2019
Reception: Wednesday, February 27, 6–8PM
Fordham University at Lincoln Center MAP
113 West 60th Street at Columbus Avenue
New York, NY 10023
fordhamuniversitygalleries.com
*The galleries are open from 9 am to 9 pm every day except on university holidays
The Fordham University Visual Arts Department is proud to present the new exhibition William Conlon: 21 Floors in our Ildiko Butler Gallery.
After years of painting works on canvas, this project was something exciting and different for me. It was an opportunity to create twenty-one paintings in a unique way for a new audience, the tenants of the Royce Residences, a large affordable housing complex located in downtown Syracuse, NY. The Royce Residences underwent a $20 million renovation in 2016-2017, under new ownership by the Mulholland Group, led by developer Royce Mulholland. Now that all the work has been installed and put to good use, I look back on this project as a giant printmaking edition conceived in collaboration with artist-turned-curator Marius Muresanu (in charge of the Public Art program for the property), Ben Diep, master printer and digital tech whiz, and Tim Wirtz of Graphic Image Flooring, the Minnesota company that did the beautiful vinyl flooring printing.
Ben and I spent three plus weeks in the spring of 2016, sitting in front of his large computer screens, and creating digital files inspired from high-resolution photographs of fourteen original recent paintings of mine. All of the twenty-one files that emerged are original designs, not copies of the paintings—and seven of the digital files were created from scratch, using bits and pieces from the source paintings. About four months later the paintings, printed on vinyl flooring, each measuring 10’ x 13’, were installed in the elevator landings at the 550 South Clinton Street site. It is my hope that the tenants of the Royce Towers will enjoy these special works of art.
William Conlon, 2018
For further information on the exhibition please contact:
Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
For the Visual Arts Department Blog: click here
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here
New Visual Arts Department Faculty Books
彦島 Hikoshima
by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock
About the Book
The images in this book are selected from a body of work made in the south of Japan over the past ten years. I first started photographing on the small island of Hikoshima in the city of Shimonoseki during visits to see my wife’s family. I wanted to walk where she had walked, gradually discovering a sense of place through observation. After my son was born I continued my walks; however, with him strapped to my chest, my camera in one hand, and a baby bottle in the other. My son and I now walk the island together and he often points out things to me that he thinks would make interesting images, in addition to making his own images with a point-and-shoot camera. It is enormous fun, as well as a means for him to connect to the place in which he was born.
Pictures of: Verticals and Horizontals
by Anibal Pella-Woo
About the Book
“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past”
John Berger, “Ways Of Seeing”
“An individual is no match for history.”
Robert Bolaño, “By Night in Chile”
These images were sourced from over 38,000 images that were rescued or recovered from used, low capacity compact flash memory cards. The cards were purchased online in 2017 and 2018.
Zoom
by Mark Street
About the Book
Painting and bleaching the surface of a 35mm film print of a Dutch/French thriller reveals another level of psychological complexity.
RAY KOMAI: DESIGN FOR AMERICA
RAY KOMAI
DESIGN FOR AMERICA
Exhibition on view
January 18–February 19, 2019
Reception at the gallery
Friday, January 25, 6:00–8:00 pm
Ildiko Butler Gallery
Fordham University at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street
New York, NY 10023
With radiant talent, determined industry, and a cheerful disposition, designer Ray Komai built an unusual career. After forced removal to Manzanar, the World War II incarceration camp for Japanese-Americans, the Los Angeles native designed notable furniture, textiles, and magazines in New York City in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. He left New York to design exhibitions and publications for the United States Information Service, promoting the country that had once put him behind barbed wire. Komai left behind beautiful work and a career that provides insights into design and nationalism.
image: Ray Komai, c. 1955
© ArtCenter College of Design, Pasasdena, CA
Sponsored by the Visual Arts Department, Fordham University
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