Visual Arts

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The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present the 2021 Adjunct Faculty Spotlight exhibition in the Ildiko Butler Gallery. We are fortunate to have so many exceptionally talented Adjunct Professors teaching in our department, in fact, so many that we have had to divide this exhibition into two parts.

The first installment, Adjunct Faculty Spotlight Part One, will include a sampling of work from the following artists: Zeljka Blaksic, Doug Clouse, Amie Cunat, Patrice Helmar, Matthew López-Jensen, Anibal J. Pella-Woo, Kimberly Reinhardt, and Lesley Wamsley. This group of artists represents the breadth of disciplines offered in the Visual Arts Department, including film, graphic design, painting, and photography. Despite the differences in their mediums, approaches, and subjects, their works generate a lively dialogue.

New Generation, by Zeljka Blaksic, is a short animated video that relies on photographs found in START magazine, one of the most popular newspapers in the seventies and eighties throughout the territory of former Yugoslavia. Her piece utilizes the archive as source material and provides a critical analysis of sexual discourse in the cultural and political context of socialism.

Doug Clouse prints and paints over commercially printed ephemera, coaxing out new possibilities by altering existing images and text. He is a graphic designer in New York City.

Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Amie Cunat’swork is loud and flamboyant at first read; however, upon closer inspection, her paintings offer subtle play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.

Patrice Helmar’s Down By Law is a series of photographs examining the American dream’s dark mythology and the timeless story of returning home. The history of photography is rife with work made by visitors that often have little connection to people and places they depict. In Down By Law, the artist is not attempting to document or sensationalize working-class and queer life; instead, she records what she would like to exist about her communities in contemporary culture.

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based environmental artist, photographer, educator, Citizen Pruner, and community gardener. His projects combine walking, collecting, mapping, and extensive research. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and local landscapes. Featured in the Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is a recent walking-based artist project exploring Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The map, completely redesigned by the artist, centers an experience in the landscape around beech trees struggling to survive. The adjacent photographs are some of the trees featured on the map.

Selling Bananas In Ascending Order Of Ripeness is a project by Anibal J. Pella-Woo made up of 90 double-sided photographic prints. Each of the photographs was taken from the front seat of his car while parked at various locations. The texts accompanying the photographs are from overheard talk shows broadcasting on the car radio from when the photographs were made.

The structure for Crystal Gazing Amplifiers, Kimberly Reinhardt’s installation of ten naturally dyed, silkscreened bandannas is inspired by twill weaving patterns and Ellsworth Kelly’s Sculpture for a Large Wall. Relying on the exponential effects of repetition and variation, Reinhardt plays with the transmutation from vernacular utilitarian object to a contemplative device meant to harness and focus the tension that arises between the two.

Lesley Wamsley is a plein air artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY, with a deep commitment to drawing from life. The relationship between observation and documentation is the foundation of her practice, and her work aims to communicate the personal and historical consciousness of place and time. For Wamsley, context is an essential question—how does it feel to experience a place, and how does the broader context shape that experience?

Organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock.
For the Visual Arts Department Website: click here.