MAIN GALLERY
Human/Landscape
January 27 – February 24
Opening Reception: January 27, 7-9pm
Artist Talk: February 24, 1-2pm
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Laura – Lisa Cameron
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Too Deep – Jillin Caporlingua
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Bittersweet – Sharon Sayegh
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From Water To Ashes – Katja Valeur
Human/Landscape is a collection by four artists who share an interest in the natural world and an impulse toward personal narratives. Broadly, each artist uses the body/self as the vantage point for contemplating our relationship to the world. The four women met in 2007 as founding members of the Highland Park Artists Collective and have evolved an ongoing dialog ever since.
Overlapping influences include Carl Jung’s writings on creativity, Frida Kahlo’s use of personal narrative, as well as the symbolism and pastoral settings of renaissance paintings. Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollack, Jean Michel Basquiat, and the Earthworks movement are also sources of inspiration.
Sharon Sayegh uses events in her own life to conjure evocative, dream-like scenes, inspired primarily by family events or memory. A bemused version of herself often appears to ponder questions both personal and socio-political. Her meticulous surfaces and clean lines reference classical painting and pop culture alike.
Jill Caporlingua’s landscape of the body is more internal. Fragments of skeletons, brain cells, and floating figures exist in both inner and outer space, drawing our attention to the universality of human experience. Her gestural marks are immediate and physical; her luminous colors evoke a primordial sense of deep space and timelessness.
Katja Valeur works from intuition and impulse, starting with a discrete idea and developing it directly on the canvas in many layers, often using stencils and incorporating words in several languages. She uses oils, acrylics, spray paint and collage to create complicated, visceral, modern works.
Lisa Cameron’s figures are both in and of the landscape. Influenced by her career in landscape architecture, the scales and perspectives are mismatched in an effort to encompass the depths of the earth and the reach of the universe at once. The bodies are distinct yet universal, suggesting that though we each have a unique narrative, we are all taking the same journey of life.
The works of Human/Landscape, rooted in common experience and infused with familiar imagery, are immersive and empathetic. The approach to the body is from a female perspective: they are not the seen, but the seeing, holding sway over worlds bursting with organic matter, memory, physicality, pain, and mystery.
CHECK OUT OUR INTERVIEW WITH CURATOR, LISA CAMERON