Endless State
Virtual opening & conversation with the curators:
January 7, 2021, 4PM EST
Zoom Meeting Link:
https://skowheganart-org.zoom.us/j/97925324534
Meeting ID: 979 2532 4534
Find a number to join by phone here.
Brian Alfred, A '99
Avantika Bawa, A '08
Farrell Brickhouse, A '71
Sue Collier, A '79
Bully Fae Collins, A ‘17 and Jonathan Chacón, A '17
Karishma D'Souza, A '17
Esteban del Valle, A '11
Maggie Ellis, A '17
Mark Ferguson, A '94
Hadrien Gerenton, A '18
Mark Haddon, A '91
Elisa Harkins, A '15
Michelle Hauser, A '81
Kunlin He, A '18
Erick Hernandez, A '17
Ditta Baron Hoeber, A '61
Jack Hogan, A '19
Terry Holleman, A '65
Kyung Jeon, A '03
Gary LaPointe Jr., A '13
Amanda Lechner, A '18
William Leech, A '73
Jon Marshalik, A '14
Lilly McElroy, A '06
Nancy Modlin Katz, A '78
Julie Ann Nagle, A '10
Ann Oren, A '09
Liza Phillips, A '89
Daniel Rich, A '04
Pallavi Sen, A '17
Kuldeep Singh, A '14
Matt Smoak, A '19
Felipe Steinberg, A '14
Joan Steinman, A '82
Eve Sussman, A '89
Brian Zegeer, A '10
The Skowhegan Alliance is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works Skowhegan Alumni made during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. Juried by Xinyi Cheng (A'14), Yui Kugimiya (A'10), and Jagdeep Raina (A'17), this is the first exhibition of its kind to be organized by Skowhegan.
The works in this exhibition embody a unique combination of paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, installation, and photography that grapples with building a new visual language in order to come to terms with understanding the strange new world we have all individually and collectively found ourselves in. A curiosity with listening to what's shaped the day to day lives of these artists—where time seems to have become compressed and the outside world becomes more intangible with the digital inside—are at the core of the psychologically charged works that are being presented. Whether it is the figurativeness, the tactility of material, the traces of hands, or the subject matter and daily life, these artists prod away at what it means to stitch together the threads of vulnerability that the world has suddenly been exposed to; a vulnerability that has rarely been shared before in such a global state.
But coming to terms with this current reality also forces us to deal with the inevitable longing for a world long disappearing into memory. It is this delicate balancing act where time collapses and the past, present, and future become blurred that these artists embrace so fearlessly in these presented works; a blurring that also allows us to see that the things in our lives that were once so mundane, familiar, and taken for granted are suddenly being acknowledged. Yet, these artists don't just force us to see this acknowledgement, but also teach us how to compassionately confront the unknown every single day, no matter what kind of state we continue to find ourselves in.
Text by Jagdeep Raina, image by Yui Kugimiya and Xinyi Cheng over Zoom
Click 𐁉 icons for more information. // Some works have multiple images; navigate with < > buttons on top. // Best on desktop, full screen.
𐀀.
Amanda Lechner
Sitting in discomfort
2020
buon fresco on foam panel
18x12"
𐀁.
Amanda Lechner
Moonage Daydream
2020
buon fresco on foam panel
24x24"
𐀂.
Pallavi Sen
Left:
Onam Pookalam
Summer 2020
A pookalam is traditionally a floral arrangement made on the floor during Onam, a harvest festival in Kerala. In India we celebrate various harvest festivals, and though Onam is not something my family traditionally celebrates (we are not from Kerala), our neighbours did and we celebrated with them. This Onam was particularly meaningful to me as I brought in my first harvest, and also in the painful feeling of celebrating something that makes my very being in a place that is so far away from it, and so far away from anyone who understands this love for this particular festival. The Pookalam is on my living room floor, made of the week's harvest + burdock that grows around the beds.
𐀵.
Pallavi Sen
Right:
Tomato Harmony
Summer 2020
a rangoli / floor drawing of tomatoes I harvested on one of the weeks this summer, from my first garden, before they were distributed the next day. The floor is my living room floor, my home being where the tomatoes were stored between picking and distribution, sometimes to ripen the green blushing ones, and other times for just waiting with them at home which is better than them being bitten by groundhog on the vine.
𐀃.
Karishma D'Souza
Leaving
March 2020
monoprint on paper
30 x 63 cm,
A day before the Indian government closed India’s international borders I arrived in Goa from Lisbon. I made it back like a mosquito entering the house with you as the door is closed for the evening!! Some work had been successfully completed and I looked forward to being in a more familiar place again.
𐀄.
Karishma D'Souza
Family Portrait
May-October 2020
oil on canvas
122 x 153 cm
This is a portrait of my mother listening to herself. She sits in our garden, under a Laburnum tree planted by her. The Laburnum sheds its leaves and bursts into flower a month before the monsoon. The changing landscape has a tiled roof house and a building. The hill in the background and the forests are a part of her: She would walk in the forests every weekend each monsoon. This is the first portrait I have done, in a long time, of people close to me, painting them outdoors, in open spaces, partly in reaction to the lock-in, to paint people in particular landscapes they are a part of, but also to begin portraits I’ve wanted to paint for years.
𐀅.
Karishma D'Souza
The Garden and the Sea
March 2020
PDF of images made with the phone during an online meeting with friends
In the first week of the lock-in in Goa, Nash organised an online meeting calling it a Crafternoon session. This PDF incorporates a memory of Nash’s, Divya’s and Jonathan’s projects, Divya was working on a pinhole camera, Nash on a collage and Jonathan made a clay elephant. The PDF ends with a reference to T. S Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ‘..Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’
𐀆.
Brian Zegeer
Kitchen Garden
2020
4 minutes and 50 seconds
Kitchen Garden is a collection of computer-generated animations made during the lockdown, detailing my family’s efforts to cobble together our spring vegetable garden. At the beginning seeds were sold out at the few open stores, and then we were busy isolating after virus exposure. So we planted sprouted potatoes, carrot stubs, seeds gathered from kitchen veggies. The animations themselves reflect this turning inward, as all source material--texture images and so-forth-- originates from within our apartment and back lot. Our intimate space is projected onto the infinite extensibility of the cg environment. Scoring was arranged on my daughter’s educational Ipad, and she lends her voice in some sections.
𐀇.
Brian Zegeer
Now Gnosis
computer-generated animation
10 seconds (infinite loop)
2020
𐀈.
Jon Marshalik
Morning of the Magicians
2020
acrylic and colored sand on canvas over panel
48 x 40 in
𐀉.
Jon Marshalik
Window
2020
acrylic, colored sand, rock, and collage on canvas over panel
48 x 40 in
𐀊.
Kuldeep Singh
The Neo [queer] Rāgamāla paintings are a part of an ecosystem that integrates the emic approach to the study of South Asian music and visual art, along with immersive performance components – in finding inventive ways of representing queer male body, its limbs and parts to plural ecological elements. It aims at blurring the border between body, nature and eventually the spiritual itself. Thus questioning nature of the body, its genesis and defects, as well as systems of knowledge. The works bank on the historic rāgamāla paintings of courtly tradition of Central India (16th to 18th century CE, with their characteristic anthropomorphic representation of musical melodies along with abundant portrayal of nature) as an entry point. But eventually embody a contemporary interpretation of the concept, through a quasi-scientific trajectory with social anthropologist’s quest.
Left:
Euceladona in Raag Kedar
April 2020
oil on canvas
24 x 18 inches
𐀶.
Right:
Kuldeep Singh
Circumnavigating in Raag Yaman
September 2020
oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches
𐀋.
Bully Fae Collins & Jonathan Chacón
Haha Salad: Egg, Vase, Buttplug
10/16/20
Colored pencil on inkjet print
𐀍.
William Leech
Left:
No 1. Fever Dream
July 2020
Graphite on Paper
11" x 14"
Right:
No. 2 Fever Dream
February 2020
Graphite on Paper
11" x 14"
𐀎.
Terry Holleman
Two Lions at Sonoma Coyote
Spring 2020
𐀏.
Maggie Ellis
Hunched Over
2020
ink on paper
𐀐.
Maggie Ellis
Sparrow With Shadows
2020
Watercolor and ink on paper
𐀑.
Esteban del Valle
The End is Near: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear...
2020
color pencil on paper
14" x 16.5"
𐀒.
Esteban del Valle
The End is Near: Delayed
2020
color pencil on paper
22" x 17"
𐀓.
Erick Hernandez
Self Portrait in Mask
2020
Oil on Canvas
18 x 24 inches
𐀔.
Erick Hernandez
Platicerio; felt like the whispers of a vanishing hand
2020
Acrylic on Canvas
48 x 60 inches
𐀕.
Julie Ann Nagle
A Wing is a Fin is a Limb
2020
Mirrors, wood, steel, moths, butterflies, beetles, wasps, flies, dragonflies, and other winged creatures.
As this oversized kaleidoscope slowly rotates, reflections of the winged insects at the far end are abstracted to suggest new evolutionary creatures.
𐀖.
Ditta Baron Hoeber
Left:
Drawing Me II
2020
Sequence of three brush and Sumi ink drawings on Bristol paper. 7.5 x 28.5 inches.
𐀷.
Ditta Baron Hoeber
Right:
Handbook
2020
15 Brush and Sumi ink drawings on Bristol paper mounted in 6 x 8 inch accordion book made of Stonehenge paper with Museum board ends and Stonehenge jacket.
𐀗.
Gary LaPointe Jr.
(invisible grid 1-2)
2020
focused sunlight and acrylic on wooden panel
diptych 25 x 16 x 7/8”
The color of this diptych sits between pink insulation foam, the album cover of the 1977 release of NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS here’s the Sex Pistols, and the pages of BUTT magazine, a gay publication that started in the early 2000s. The images are burned from focusing sunlight and are in reference to a technical zig-zag welding pattern; interweaving cultural and marginalized homosexual markers with the focused energy of the sun.
𐀘.
Brian Alfred
LA Trance
LA Trance is an animation made under quarantine with collaboration with Ben Radatz who took photos of an abandoned LA and musician Four Tet.
𐀙.
Kyung Jeon
Coronavirus and Dog Walking
2020
Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas
18 x 24 inches
Coronavirus and Dog Walking takes an everyday scene during the time of the Coronavirus 2020 quarantine and depicts the isolation and loneliness of daily life in the city. The dog owners wear masks and social distance, while watching their dogs. A jogger appears on the bottom with her mask under her chin. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the weight of uncertainty.
𐀚.
Kyung Jeon
Coronavirus and Mask Wearing
2020
Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas
18 x 24 inches
Coronavirus and Mask Wearing takes an everyday scene during the time of the Coronavirus 2020 quarantine and depicts the isolation and loneliness of daily life in the city. A child looks out the window, as another child hides under his mother's dress for protection. Garbage sits on the curb as the city's streets are abandoned and a biker rides by. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the weight of uncertainty.
𐀛.
Kyung Jeon
Coronavirus and Black Lives Matter
2020
Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas
18 x 24 inches
In the painting titled Coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, the artist Kyung Jeon collected powerful images of protestors demonstrating against police brutality and systemic racism during the time of the coronavirus pandemic and recreates them in this peaceful protest scene. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the tear gas used against peaceful protestors."
𐀜.
Farrell Brickhouse
Adrift, Ship of Fools Series
2020
oil on canvas
8" x 10"
Sometimes the brush just seems to know where to go! "Ship of Fools Series", the mast once the tree of knowledge and so we are now all adrift at this moment. Foucault-" Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange "drunken boat" that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flem- ish canals."--and here it all is again floating on the ethers of the internet enabling the foolish and the sinister authors of decline and we're all on the same boat.
𐀝.
Liza Phillips
Cloud Boat
2020
acrylic on canvas
44x60 inches
𐀞.
Liza Phillips
Sublimated
2020
acrylic on canvas
50x78 inches
𐀟.
Lilly McElroy
Because of the pandemic, the spaces that I have access to and am thinking about are much more contained. I am now working from home and spending much more time on my couch. It has stopped being simply a piece of furniture where I safely nap and watch TV. My couch has become the world where so many of my invisible internal dramas take place. I’m using my couch as a symbolic space where I perform gestures that point to the horror and absurdity of our current experience.What happens when you no longer feel comfort? How do you keep yourself and the people you love safe during all of this? How do you stay sane? It seems impossible. My only option was to crawl under the couch cushions and make a photograph.
Left:
Trying To Make Myself Comfortable Using Every Cushion That I Have
2020
Archival Inkjet Print
𐀸.
Lilly McElroy
Center:
Trying To Make Myself Comfortable Under Every Blanket In My House
2020
Archival Inkjet Print
𐀹.
Lilly McElroy
Right:
Still Trying To Make Myself Comfortable
2020
Archival Inkjet Print
𐀠.
Matt Smoak
Bricolage shirt
2020
cotton yukatas, cotton shirts, wood
𐀡.
Eve Sussman
Sudoku Session #5
April 2020
An improv performance from quarantine, in which the performers are also the audience.
Shortly before lockdown I had been working on a dance piece called "Madison Color Theory". Anyone could show up + take part in rehearsal. When meeting in person was no longer possible some of the participants suggested we try to rehearse online.
We found rehearsing the dance together online wholly unsatisfying, and so came up with new protocols and directives to drive an improv based on instructions and responses to the other players in the grid. Like the live dance piece anyone could show up and take part and each meeting rendered a different group of people as the assembly morphed from 3 people in Brooklyn to upwards of 20 signing on from places near and far (New York, Seattle, Berlin, Paris, Athens, Lisbon)
The only constant was that each person appear with a plain colored background + dress in a single color. We did 15 Sudoku Sessions March - August.
𐀢.
Michelle Hauser
Title: MEETING HALL MAINE: COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FOUR FRONT VIEWS OF ACTIVE AND REPURPOSED GRANGE, ODD FELLOWS, MASONIC AND KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS HALLS
Medium: PHOTOGRAPHS, 24 ARCHIVAL DIGITAL PRINTS
Individual Print Size: 9” x 6.167”
Collective Size unframed approximately: 37” (h) x 36” (w) DATE: 2020
Meeting Hall Maine records for posterity the cultural tides reflected in the documentation of hundreds of meeting halls. These lone structures reflect our time that implores us to be physically distant and refrain from large gatherings. Presented in grids the project showcases a typology of structures, by adhering to direct vantages, frontal, side or back views centered to form a kind of abstraction.
𐀣.
Michelle Hauser
Title: MEETING HALL MAINE: COLLECTION OF NINE SIDE VIEWS OF GRANGE AND MASONIC HALLS
Medium: PHOTOGRAPHS, NINE ARCHIVAL DIGITAL PRINTS
Individual Print Size: 9.5” (w) x 6.5
Collective Size unframed approximately: 20” (h) x 29” (w) x DATE: 2020
Meeting Hall Maine records for posterity the cultural tides reflected in the documentation of hundreds of meeting halls. These lone structures reflect our time that implores us to be physically distant and refrain from large gatherings. Presented in grids the project showcases a typology of structures, by adhering to direct vantages, frontal, side or back views centered to form a kind of abstraction.
𐀥.
Avantika Bawa
A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, Kutch, India (Part 1)
45.5’x32’x40’ (HxWxD), Painted scaffolds. Dec 2019 - Early March 2020
A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, is the third installation of the ‘Scaffold Series’. Here scaffolds are transformed into an object of beauty through the color pink and the location of the salt desert, thus ceasing to be an object of function. With A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, I build yet another scaffold that highlights the beauty of the vast landscape, its location by an international border, and its current state of flux due to climate change, in a way that is visually impactful and conceptually powerful.
𐀤.
Avantika Bawa
A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, Kutch, India (Part 2a)
38’x 55’x50’ (HxWxD), Painted scaffolds, End March 2020 - August 2020
Somewhere in the vastness of the Rann of Kutch stands the second iteration of the ‘Pink Scaffold’.
My friends/collaborators at Agrocel reinstalled this end February in a more open and infinite location than the first, with much less foot traffic.
Why?
Because we wanted to let the work and landscape be more in tune with each other, allowing the occasional spectator an experience that was more powerful due to the one-on-one experience. The landscape, the work and the lone viewer. A few individuals got to experience this and I hear it was sublime.
The plan was to deinstall it by end March when the land gets softer and the work can start to erode.
But then the pandemic struck.
And The Pink Scaffold still stands, in solitude and solidarity. Watching, waiting and hoping.
𐀦.
Mark Ferguson
Untitled
2020
graphite and color pencil on synthetic paper
12"x12"
𐀨.
Daniel Rich
Midtown, NYC
2020
Acrylic on Dibond
78.75 x 55 inches / 200 x 140 cm.
𐀩.
Elisa Harkins
Pony During Pandemic
For the past year I have been working with a dancer based in Montreal, Canada and a dancer based in Stockholm, Sweden. We have collaboratively been working on a dance piece called Radio III. The works in Radio III feature music composed by me and some songs are in the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) languages. We have been figuring out new ways of working with each other under the circumstances and performed "Pony" from Radio III via Zoom for PICA's TBA Festival.
The lyrics for Pony are in English and in Muscogee (Creek).
lyrics
Rodeo
Rolling like a star
Corotke
(Crippled)
Cuko-essiyv
(Painter)
Dream away
Did you tell a story
Honece
(Wild)
Ue-home-eskv
(Whisky Drinker)
When they come at night, I ride away
Hoktet rakkon ohlikes
(A woman is riding a horse)
𐀪.
Joan Steinman
Portrait of an Artist and His Dog Bosch
2020, 48x48, Acrylic on Canvas
𐀫.
Joan Steinman
Red Umbrella II
2020, 36x48, Acrylic on Canvas
𐀬.
Nancy Modlin Katz
Come and Play
May- June 2020
Porcelain,underglaze,glaze
5.5"x 4.75"x 3"
Porches were a safe place to play, read and watch those passing by. Two young children, at a distance, seem not to understand the changing world. Play must continue.
𐀭.
Felipe Steinberg
Not I, Not Here, video for browser, sound, 3 min (loop).
Those weeks at home became an endless space of receiving and forwarding messages of the current situation, as much as it became a space where different forms of interpersonal communication erupted. Having in mind the current disembodiment of the voice through the occlusion of the mask, and by looking at Samuel Becket's play “Not I” (1972), the work presented here takes the form of an epiphany. Different contents (texting, Whatsapp and emails) - that were shared privately with me - from different sources were collapsed into one. If it was imagined that the Internet would have a great emancipatory potential by allowing a breakdown of the authority of those who speak, eventually reducing the power of manipulation of the cultural industry, the advent of it might actually represent a radical rupture between the transmission and reception of the message, where the the origin of the information has lost its relevance.
𐀮.
Mark Haddon
The Well, People Explore a Submerged Forest in 1810.
2020
Ink on paper
5 feet by 9 feet (150cm high by 270cm)
The work shows a group of indigenous Californians coming out of a submerged forest to discover Krishna and Radha by a well. All the drawing emerges from the well.
A note on key sources in the drawing: The image of Radha and Krishna taken from a painting in the Gita Govinda Set, Kangra, Late 18th Century and found in the Gujarat Museum in Ahmedabad. Image of Native Californians (possibly Muwekma Ohlone Tribe) at the Mission of St Joseph (San Jose) about 1804 is taken from a print by the Russian naturalist GH Von Langsdorff in his account of his journeys in North America between 1803 and 1805: Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World.
𐀯.
Sue Collier
Left:
Migrants
2019-2020
Color Pencil on Print Paper
48" x 96"
This most recent drawing of Migrants expresses the current world-wide condition of migration fraught with horror and the lack of humanity it gives rise to. How much distance will they have travelled from their own lives and how far do they have to go to reclaim part of their lives back again? And will they know when they have arrived? Deprivation creates shame and humiliation, the loss of power and dignity, intimacy and privacy. We are dehumanized all of us when some of us are treated this way. We climb into flimsy, crowded boats and cross impossible bodies of water, sacrificing all we know and understand to take a risky ride, hoping to survive.
𐀺.
Sue Collier
Right:
Perilous Walk Home
1918-2020
Triptych Oil on Canvas
50" x 168"
A Perilous Walk Home is a dark painting, a dark story that has been with me since childhood. Covid has allowed me the rare, consistent, and introspective time to work I needed to tell this story. Size was important because it gave me distance and I was painting an experience where I had to recreate the house, yard and neighborhood from memory. Within the painting each figure’s place matters because they rely on the other, yet none are confident. Facial expressions mattered because fear, anger, love, innocence, trust coalesce and strain against the possible violence.
𐀰.
Jack Hogan
Keepers
2020
My narration in this video considers increased enclosure, happening even in advance of this year's pandemic, what to keep from the old days, and what to discard. I want to reject the frictionless market and corporate control of socializing, via private space online and in person, that reduces interclass contact conducted in a mode of good will. But I want to keep the newfound refocus on the local in 2020, as the political form of the international; in Huey Newton’s terms, the local as the condition for intercommunalism. I also want to keep the oft-trivialized revolutionary value of imagination that many have re-engaged during the pandemic, via mutual aid, self-organization, direct action and voluntary association. And I want to maintain the pursuit of a collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy, practiced amidst awareness of our participation in a system that brutalizes us and privatizes survival. This is what Herbert Marcuse calls “images of a gratification that would destroy the society that suppresses it”; spectres of societies that could be free.
𐀲.
Kunlin He
Half-Luna Dome
2019
golden acrylic drawing on three difference layers (bottom: aluminum, middle: mylar, top: acrylic sheet)
72(L) X 48(W) inch
Note This painting is the one of painting in my project “2092: Tale of Moon Trip”.
𐀳.
Ann Oren
Blue
How to overcome the locked-in syndrome of the computer screen? A meditative reflection on the urban jungle with the color blue as the main protagonist. BLUE is a part of Ann Oren’s video journals, a short video series responding to media culture and Instagram specifically with the square format, often starring animals.
𐀴.
Hadrien Gerenton
City Hall
2020
oil on linen
48x32cm