Ernest G. Welch School GalleriesJanuary 16th - March 13th, 2014

DOZIER BELL

CATHERINE HAMILTON

JANE ROSEN

KIKI SMITH

CURATED BY CYNTHIA FARNELL

ESSAY BY SUSAN RICHMOND

Anyone who maintains a backyard feeder or has been stopped in their tracks by the beauty of a flock of migrating geese knows that there is something celestial about birds. Their seasonal movements seem to be governed by invisible threads, connected to forces fundamentally ancient and mysterious. These tethers pull them to and fro on their migrations between hemispheres, across oceans and over fields and cities with reassuring regularity. Perhaps this is why they have played so many roles in literature, mythology, poetry and art throughout human history.

A GATHERING

The artists in this exhibition are all, in some way, charmed by birds. Deeply psychological images are brought to the surface in Dozier Bell’s charcoal drawings. Her moody landscapes evoke nostalgia for a time before language. Each image is like a tiny window into the ancient human psyche.

Similarly, Kiki Smith’s birds are actors in myths and fairy tale dramas with familiar but uncanny twists. We are never sure if her creatures are living, dead, or about to be re-animated by some unseen magic force.

Jane Rosen is also interested in the mythical and metaphorical potential of birds. In Rosen’s sculpture and drawings, falcons and other birds of prey assume the regal bearing of the Egyptian god Horus. Rosen’s birds are dignified and self-possessed, ready to pass on eternal wisdom.

The exquisitely observed naturalism of Catherine Hamilton’s watercolor and pencil drawings highlight the pathos of the deceased birds she depicts. Her analytic compositions invite the viewer to consider the complexity and beauty of the avian world.

In addition to their love of birds, Bell, Smith, Rosen and Hamilton all share a sensitivity for materials, technique, observation and gestural mark-making that each has adapted to her own expressive ends. Their unique visions meeting in this exhibition is an auspicious gathering.

~ Cynthia Farnell, Gallery DirectorErnest G. Welch School of Art and Design

DOZIER BELL

Dozier Bell, Raptors, Charcoal on mylar, 2.75” h x 4” w, Courtesy of Danese Corey Gallery, New York.

Dozier Bell was born in Maine, where she continues to live and work. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College in 1981 and received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. Among her many awards, Bell received a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany from 1995 to 1996, a Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003, and a grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in 2009.

Dozier Bell’s images of sea, landscape, sky and clouds are snapshots of an inner reality that finds echoes in the natural world of coastal Maine. Within this visual framework, Bell explores the transformative power of memory over lived events and the ongoing presence of the past. Animal consciousness – the level of awareness that humans share with animals, birds, and insects – is fundamental to all her imagery, rooting it in the realm of instinct. There is nostalgia in this work for a pre-industrial world unknown to us, as well as imaginative speculation about the future of nature and our place in it.

Bell’s meticulously executed, small scale charcoal drawings embrace a context that includes the work of Rembrandt, Constable, Fitz Hugh Lane, and the art, philosophy, literature and music of German Romanticism. While diminutive in size, these drawings are enormously evocative in their visual presence. The drawings are fully resolved, independent works, but in many instances serve as the conceptual basis for her larger scale paintings.

CATHERINE HAMILTON

Catherine Hamiliton, Collection V (Dowitchers), Watercolor, 18.25” h x 21.75” w, Courtesy of the artist.

Catherine Hamilton began drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil. The daughter of a neuroscientist and a rocket scientist (her mother was one of the first two women to receive a PhD from Caltech), her childhood was steeped in natural history and scientific inquiry. Her father, a bird watcher, took her on many trips to look for birds, and she started her first ornithological notebook at the age of seven.

Pursuing the fine arts in lieu of science, Catherine earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from Bennington College. She taught painting and drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1997-2003. She was obsessed with oil painting, and exhibited her work in group and solo exhibits from 1992-2003, but ultimately developed severe allergies from the chemicals involved with oils. In 2004, after her second anaphylactic episode, she left teaching and quit oil painting for good. Faced with unwelcomed change, she became fascinated with the lives of birds and immersed herself in their visual representation.

Catherine gave away most of her possessions and left her apartment in New York City in 2010, to draw and study birds while traveling across North, Central, and South America. She has been on the road for over three years, setting up her studio in wildlife refuges, urban environments, and in research stations. Following avian migratory paths, finding birds in all forms of natural and manmade habitats, and visiting museum specimen collections, Catherine has developed a body of work that crosses over the boundaries between artistic and scientific investigation. She continues to exhibit regularly, and her paintings and drawings can be found in private, corporate, and small museum collections. She was recently published in the Princeton University Press book “The Warbler Guide,” and is featured in the 2012 HBO documentary “Birders: the Central Park Effect.”

JANE ROSEN

Jane Rosen, Accipiter Series, Hand blown pigmented glass, dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist.

Jane Rosen was born in New York City where she grew up and began her career as an artist. After early successes in galleries such as Edward Thorp Gallery, Grace Borgenicht Gallery and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to a horse ranch in San Gregorio, California, on the coast south of San Francisco. She keeps her studio there and is frequently visited by the birds you see in her work. 

Rosen has the unique ability to evoke both enigma and precision in her sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints. Her chosen subjects are wild and tame animals through which she explores instinct and natural intelligence.  For Rosen, understanding animal nature is a key to understanding our own human nature.  Much of her work concerns itself with the posture, the gesture or the essential quality of the life she beholds. 

Rosen was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their 2010 Annual Invitational in New York.  She has taught at numerous institutions including the School of Visual Art, Lacoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.  Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Art News.  Her work has been exhibited across the United States and is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

KIK I SMITH

Kiki Smith, Falcon, Etching and aquatint, 34.75” h x 28"w

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Kiki Smith is a leading figure among artists addressing philosophical, social, and spiritual aspects of human nature, whose career spans more than three decades. Smith employs a wide-range of non-traditional materials ranging from hair and latex to beeswax and gold to a diverse body of work that includes painting, photography, bookmaking, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. From Smith’s transgressive works of the mid-80s that dealt with mortality, bodily dissolution and decay to her explorations of the natural world and domesticity, her work is layered with meaning and metaphor.

Kiki Smith Falcon, Etching and aquatint, 34.75” h x 28” w, Courtesy of Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts

Bird imagery has a rich metaphorical tradition in art and literature. It would seem that more so than other creatures, birds lend themselves to anthropomorphic symbolism: they are solitary yet also social; they roam afar but also nest intimately; they are curious but also stoic; they coo and bill yet also hunt and kill. Literary scholar Ellen Moers has suggested that birds are particularly expressive of qualities associated with female identity. Specifically, she proposes that the contrasts birds offer—“such a mixture of the domestically familiar and the mysteriously exotic”—make them notable symbols of female self-expression. Even when they operate through negation, as when Charlotte Brontë’s gothic heroine Jane Eyre proclaims, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” avian tropes remain salient symbols of women’s selfhood. Of course, such metaphors are by no means exclusively “female,” and yet the frequency with which they are invoked indicates, at the very least, how well (and how broadly) bird images serve women’s creative voices.

NO NET ENSNARES ME

The scope and richness of bird imagery is evident in the works of the four artists selected for A Gathering. In all cases, the birds carry both literal and metaphorical significance. In many of Catherine Hamilton’s watercolors, the creatures are beautiful yet tragic victims of manmade environments, poignant reminders of the transience of life. For Jane Rosen, conversely, birds are cunning survivors and symbols of strength and endurance. In contrast to the more iconic nature of Rosen’s sculptural figures, the birds in the artist’s two-dimensional work possess quirky personalities, more like pets than wild creatures. In her diminutive charcoal drawings, Dozier Bell captures both the collective and solitary nature of a bird’s life; in one image, the birds cluster on a telephone wire like a clique of intimate friends.

Of the four artists featured in the exhibition, Kiki Smith perhaps draws the strongest link between female identity and avian imagery. Paralleling her interest in recuperating female archetypes, and notably the Virgin Mary, Smith’s treatment of birds frequently entails a similar coupling of physical mortality and spiritual transcendence. Despite the prevalence of death in her work, Smith strikes a poetic rather than morbid tone. As with the other three artists in A Gathering, however, Smith’s birds cannot be neatly ensnared by any one interpretation, but instead demonstrate a complexity of artistic technique and treatment.

~ Susan Richmond, Associate Professor, Art HistoryErnest G. Welch School of Art and Design

My deepest gratitude to the artists, Dozier Bell, Catherine Hamilton, Jane Rosen and Kiki Smith, in addition to Sears Peyton Gallery, Danese Corey Gallery and Michael Klein Arts, all in New York; Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Susan Richmond, Associate Professor of Art History, Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design; gallery staff Aubyn Stafford, Tori Tinsley, Krista Clark and Mike Logan. Graphic design by Glenda Tolbert. Thank you all.

~ Cynthia Farnell, Gallery DirectorErnest G. Welch School of Art and Design

THANKS