Space 3: Environment and Perspectives
This space features artists understanding nature, environments, and perceptions. These artists examine how this can inspire to create, transform our perceptions, and shift our perspectives, creating a series of echo-systems.
Artist Statements
1. The Sun and the North Wind by Raquel Roberg
This piece is my illustration for the existing Aesop's fable, The Sun, and the North Wind. The story has been told in many ways over the years, and many artists have illustrated it. I wanted to create my own stylistic twist on this story, drawing inspiration from the work of these other artists.
2. Portals Series by Angela Sileo
Cyanotype, by the nature of its medium, is inherently a story of collaboration. It exists between an artist and their process. Image making can be facilitated with both digital and analogue means. It is the artist who paints the paper with chemistry and decides on exposure timing. How heavy or how light their hand is, and the decided duration of exposure can determine every result following. The partnership between the medium and the artist can often disintegrate. No matter how hard the artist attempts to gain control over the process, the cyanotype will choose its own path. The essential components of cyanotype—chemistry, UV light, running water, and time— can be fickle in nature. Cyanotype is a medium by which collaboration is needed to eventually achieve a desired result, yet sometimes, the fateful result of a first proof can be the art itself.
3. Tree of innocence by Sebastian Zapata
The piece is called The Tree of Innocence. With this piece, I wanted to bring people together. We as humans have a place, we go to clear our minds for me it is this tree back home in Maryland and this is where I would cultivate my best idea. With the piece, I would like the viewers to get up close and converse about the intricate piece that goes into this piece.
4. Forest Amphitheater, Andorra Natural Area, Philadelphia, PA by Holly Goeckler
This topographic model was inspired by my work on a restoration project with the Wissahickon Valley Park, the Andorra Natural Area, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The model describes a forest amphitheater at a high point of the natural area with proposed ADA accessible trails from Northwestern Avenue via Ridge Pike.
5. The Blue Hour by Heather Phillips
This piece intertwines the themes of time and nature. It captures the ethereal moment when the sun sets, evoking the enchanting "blue hour," when daylight gracefully transitions into dusk. The piece invites viewers to reflect on the profound connection between our environment and ourselves, prompting contemplation of our place within nature's ever-changing landscape, and fostering a deeper appreciation for the world around us.
6. Beyond the Edge by Erin Boyle
Waterfalls can symbolize change and transformation in something or someone, as well as the potential and opportunity of something. In my work, I use forgotten, recycled, and plain materials that are woven and bandaged together to transition into something beautiful. Collaboration plays a crucial role in this process, acting as both a method and a theme. The environment is conceptualized in my art and becomes a site for artistic intervention and collaboration, blurring the lines between the personal and the universal. The collaborative aspect is not just about working with others, but also about the dialogue between the artist and the material, the past and the present, the individual and the collective. It thrives within a creative ecosystem, where echoes of past experiences, shared stories, and collaborative moments resonate, creating a tapestry of connections. My work seeks to amplify these echoes, inviting viewers to engage in a communal exploration of what it means to belong, to be part of a space, and to see the extraordinary obscurity in the everyday objects that surround us.
7. Enso Floe by Dermot Mac Cormack
The development of this project represents the latest in a long series of digital Enso artworks that incorporate various technologies and methodologies. The music was composed by an alumnus of the Tyler Painting Department. The audio track features underwater recordings of melting glaciers and ice floes. This concept is derived from years of study as a Zen student, intertwined with my current concerns about climate change.
8. Suffocation by Theodore Gretz
Can you see what I see? Can you feel what I feel? What is the color red in your own eyes? Can you see my red the way I see it? Can you feel it the way I feel it? We can name things and talk about them with others through agreed-upon language, but we have no way of determining the nuances of perception from one to the other. We can, however, determine that red travels at wavelengths ranging from 620-750 nanometers. I posit that the lines of your lips, the folds of your skin, the fat and flesh encased within those folds may be red for others but black for you. This work reflects the distortion of one's self-image through sound, video and physiological restriction. When a viewer places their head into the mirrored amorphous hood, they see their own image distorted from the video’s cast light in the fleshy folds of the silver cloud. The sculpture sensually duplicates the social distortions placed upon us through social standards, trauma, or even just not giving a fuck, and asks is understanding each other actually “all in our head?
9. Primordial Pool by Macy West
My long-time fascination with perception has taken a turn to questions about its limitations, a pivot toward what I am calling the “perceptual periphery.” The gaps in our collective perception and the places between each individual vantage point create an ambiguous space, one I want to illuminate. It requires recognition of our inability to experience the whole as an individual and the necessity of engaging with one another on our quest for a better perception.
10. Love Letter to the Night by Naz Khoury
This work was inspired by the stillness of night, illuminated by lights of cityscape. There is something enthralling about how individuals lighting their own spaces and city infrastructure mesh together to form a luminous phenomena- one that, in turn, we individually take whilst going about our lives. The world is still for those few hours, and yet it is also not.
11. Black Mirror by Charlie Jarboe
My series of black mirror pieces was developed through an exploratory and collaborative process involving numerous members of the glass community at the Tyler School of art and beyond. The work is interactive and collective not just in its creation, but also in its concept. The black mirror places the viewer in self-awareness and interaction and re-evaluation of their place in their surrounding environment through many reflections. The genesis of the formal idea arose through assisting visiting artist Natali Rodriguez on her work for her solo exhibition at AUTOMAT Collective. Her lens-like forms and glassblowing processes inspired me to further explore the notion of glass as an optical device capable of magnification, distortion, reflection, and refraction all at once.
12. Unto the Lands Flowing of... by Kayla Cantu
The development of this work questions perceptions of what reads as "body." By paralleling glass to landscape, the work questions surrounding preconceived expectations of what body features "should" look like. Skin folds echo landscape, and vice versa, drawing upon the duality of the macro and micro.
13. and 14. Different from what it seems by Esther Park
I was born and raised in Korea, and upon setting foot in the United States to pursue graduate school, everything felt new and awkward. Life became a series of communication challenges and moments of embarrassment. As an Asian, I was used to using a chopstick every meal. Observing the disparities in eating habits, which fulfill our most basic human needs, and noticing the contrast in utensils used, I anticipated challenges in building rapport. Simultaneously, I sensed a similarity between myself and single-use disposal plastic utensils, both relegated to short-lived interactions and struggling to establish deeper connections with others. As a response, I collected these utensils and manipulated them into a novel form of jewelry. Through this process, I sought to create my endeavor to belong here by adopting the same utensils as those around me. I collected used plastic forks from places like school cafeterias, where utensils are commonly used, to create artworks. The warmth and traces of various students at Temple University enriched the artwork even further. I worked to give new life to plastic that was once used and discarded, giving it functionality, and capturing traces and memories of the environment and users.
16. Down the Line by Andrew Mahaffie
My piece, “Down the Line,” is a collaboration between my own creative energies, the city of New Orleans, and the team of talented assistants who participated in the making of the work. The materials I used were all recovered from waste generated in and around New Orleans. The glass was all melted from recycled bottles gathered from the Uptown neighborhood. The steel components used to make the base were found objects recovered from a scrap yard just south of the city in Belle Chase. The work thinks about the passing of time, spiraling ever onwards. Each individual piece of glass has movement of its own, tendrils reaching outwards away from the main body of the piece. Yet they are all connected as part of a grander symphony of movement in the form of a gradual spiral moving horizontally across the body of the work.
Forming and sculpting hot glass could be considered the team sport of the art practices. Without exception, a glass artist relies on numerous assistants, all executing a beautiful, choreographed dance of making. The larger and more complex the piece, the more the roles of the assistants influence the final form of the work. The sculpture is not so much the brainchild of the individual artist, as much as it is the culmination of numerous solutions to the challenges encountered throughout the process of the making. Many of those solutions come not from the artist, but from the environment and people surrounding the maker.
17. Assembled Poetics & Living In-Between by Rae Helms and Ari Zuaro
Thinking through collage and assembly, Rae Helms and Ari Zuaro explore themes of the built environment, the spaces in-between, and the history of community in Philadelphia. In a collaborative effort, and as two artists new to the city, they work by observing and deconstructing both image and language.