Annual Exhibition at Washington College Showcases Works by Studio Art Majors

View photos from exhibition

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Two exhibitions running April 22 through May 12 will showcase the thesis works of senior Studio Art majors and selected works from other Washington College art students in gallery areas inside the Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts.

An Opening Reception in honor of the artists will be held Friday, April 22 at 5:30 pm. The gallery show and reception are free and open to the public.

The senior Studio Art majors show, "Liminal States-Evolving Boundaries," will fill Kohl Gallery with the work of 11 graduating students in the Department of Art and Art History. Exhibition curator Monika Weiss, assistant professor of art, says the student artists have worked across disciplines in a fluid manner, merging traditional techniques with New Media and incorporating painting, installation, video, animation, sculpture, sound and photography.

Weiss gives an overview of the works in her curatorial statement:

“ ‘Liminal States-Evolving Boundaries’ combines works by eleven artists exploring physical and conceptual states of passage and transition. While some of the artists focus on the body and its biologically and socially fragile envelope (Kristin Tremblay, Kristina Kelley), others explore its physical and mental limits (Susanne Vaughn), or the visually anthropomorphic qualities of animal body (Kathryn E. Johnson).

“Science becomes a point of reference in some of the new media work (Joe L. L. Yates), while abstraction is once again redefined through the discussion of embodiment (Allison Mae Schellenger). Artists in this exhibition invite the viewer to experience journey and change as a form of meditation, dealing with time and loss (Elizabeth Claud) while also exploring personal geographies and revisiting ancient cultures and their lost relationship with nature (Caroline Amelia Knuth, Shannon Davis). Internal and external spaces are being examined as a continuous negotiation between the place (Sarah Cannon) and the self (Michael Powell) through mapping out inner and outer territories of experience.”

The Annual Exhibition of Selected Works by Studio Art Students will be installed in the William Frank Visual Arts Hallway adjacent to the Kohl Gallery. Curated by visiting professor of art Ricky Sears, the show will include works from various divisions of the studio program, including drawing, painting, photography, video and sound, ceramics, and design.”

This year’s exhibition jurors are art dealer Carla Massoni, artist and art critic Mary McCoy, and artist Randi Reiss-McCormack. The Gibson Center for the Arts is located on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue. Kohl Gallery hours are Wednesday and Thursday, 1 to 5 p.m., Friday noon to 6 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

Participating students include:

Senior Thesis Exhibition "Liminal States-Evolving Boundaries":
Sarah Cannon
Elizabeth Claud
Shannon Davis
Kathryn E. Johnson
Kristina Kelly
Caroline Amelia Knuth
Michael Powell
Allison Mae Schellenger
Kristin Tremblay
Susanne Vaughn
Joe L. L. Yates

Selected Works by Studio Art Students:
Wesley Bill
Tory Banknell
Tara Barber
Gabie Batista
Anna Black
Mallory Blessed
Katie Bradley
Bryan Botti
Kat Cohen
Chelsea Collison
Kristine Cunningham
Posey Daves
Shannon Davis
Thor Deegan
Kang Dong
Rettie Duke
Brittany Dunbar
Melissa Erdman
Gary Fenstamaker
Jamie Frees
Courtney Gowland
Katherine Greenlee
Darby Hewes
Masaya Kato
Tara Keefe
Caitlyn Klein
Emmy Landskroener
Sophie Laessle
Katy Laury
Lauren Lawson
Laura Lazenby
Rachel Levin
Paige Martin
Anthony Martino
Hailee Marsh
Ryan Mulhearn
Kendall Mulligan
Martha O’Neill
Catherine Pavis
Alison Payne
Vincenzo Piccinini
Gabby Rojas
Sarah Roy
Leah Sbricia
Amy Shaw
Chris Soper
Tracy Spielberger
Thomas Stattel
Eric Swenson
Katy Ulrich
Erica Walburg
Andrew Wallace
Erica Ward
Emily Willen
Alex Woodworth

International Art Curator to Share Insights Into Contemporary Exhibition at WC's Kohl Gallery

CHESTERTOWN, MD—An expert on international contemporary art and art history, Dr. Julia P. Herzberg, will visit Washington College Wednesday, March 30 for a lecture on the work of professor Monika Weiss, whose powerful exhibition “Lamentations (Sustenazo)” is installed in Kohl Gallery through mid April. Following the 4:30 p.m. lecture in Decker Theatre, Weiss will join Dr. Herzberg on stage for a conversation about her art.

Celebrated vocalist Karen Somerville will open the event by singing the spiritual “Mother Child and Soon Ah Will Be Doneand a reception will follow Herzberg and Weiss’s conversation. The event is free and open to the public (some content in the Kohl Gallery exhibition may not be suitable for children).

Dr. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator and Fulbright Senior Specialist whose wide-ranging work centers on art with interdisciplinary global contexts. Since 1990 she has organized more than 25 exhibitions of artists from around the world, including Monika Weiss, Wifredo Lam, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Leandro Katz, Pepón Osorio, Ernesto Pujol, Catalina Parra, Franco Mondini–Ruiz, Leandro Erlich, and Chen Xiaoyung.

As consulting curator at the Patricia and David Frost Museum at Florida International University, she recently curated “Navjot Altaf: Lacuna in Testimony, and Nela Ochoa: DNA and Art” (2009). She has also been a consulting curator for the 8th, 9th, and 10th Havana Biennial (2003, 2006, 2009) and was curator for the Official U.S. Representation for the III International Biennial of Painting Cuenca, Ecuador in 1991.

Dr. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published in the United States and abroad.

Monika Weiss is an internationally recognized Polish-American artist who works in drawing, projected video, musical composition, performance and sculpture, often combining these elements in her public installations. The current exhibition at Washington College includes the first U.S. showing of “Sustenazo (Lament II),” which was created as part of her 2010 solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Ujazdowski Castle, in Warsaw.

“Sustenazo” was inspired by an event that took place at Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle when it was a hospital. On August 6, 1944, during the onset of the Warsaw Uprising, the German Army forced more than 1,800 patients and medical staff to abruptly evacuate the hospital overnight. With that incident as its reference point, Weiss’s art explores visual and musical aspects of the ancient feminine ritual of lamenting. She completed the work while on sabbatical from Washington College, where she serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History.

“Lamentations (Sustenazo)” is curated by Donald McColl, the Nancy L. Underwood Associate Professor of Art History at Washington College. For more information, please visit http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu/. To read a review of the exhibition by former Washington Post art critic Mary McCoy in the Chestertown Spy, click here.

Photo: A still image from a projected video in the Lamentations exhibition, which will be installed through April 15 in the Kohl Gallery, Gibson Center for the Performing Arts, at Washington College, 300 Washington Avenue .

Kohl Gallery Hosts Multi-Media Installation by Internationally Acclaimed Artist and Washington College Faculty Member Monika Weiss

CHESTERTOWN—On Friday, February 25 the Kohl Gallery will open a one-person show by internationally acclaimed artist and Washington College faculty member Monika Weiss. “Lamentations (Sustenazo): Recent Works by Monika Weiss,” will run through April 15 at the gallery, which is located in the Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Weiss is a Polish-American artist who works in drawing, projected video, musical composition, performance and sculpture, often combining these elements in her public installations. The new exhibition, which is being shown for the first time in the U.S., is drawn from a larger exhibition of 2010, “Monika Weiss: Sustenazo,” held at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Weiss completed the work while on junior sabbatical leave from Washington College, where she serves as assistant professor and coordinator of the studio art program in the Department of Art and Art History. The U.S. Embassy in Warsaw provided a major grant for “Sustenazo,” which also received support from the Central Medical Library, Warsaw, the Warsaw Rising Museum, the Historical Museum of Warsaw, Media in Motion, Berlin, and a number of individuals, including a physician. The exhibition later traveled to Berlin.

“Lamentations” is curated by Donald McColl, the Nancy L. Underwood Associate Professor of Art History at Washington College and former Director of Kohl Gallery. The first of several special events planned around the show will be the opening reception, Friday, February 25 at 6 p.m. On Wednesday, March 2, from 4 to 6 p.m., the Kent County Arts Council will host a “Town & Gown” event for the local arts community that will include a talk by the artist, a walk-through of the exhibition and a reception. And on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 30, internationally renowned art historian, critic and curator Dr. Julia P. Herzberg will come to Chestertown for a lecture on Weiss’s work and a conversation with the artist. Each event is free and open to the public; some content may not be suitable for children.

Sustenazo is a Greek word meaning to sigh or to lament inaudibly together. Weiss’s exhibition on this theme was inspired by a specific event that took place at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, when it was a hospital—and actually was installed there, in the cellar, the only portion of the castle to survive. On August 6, 1944, during the onset of the Warsaw Uprising, the German Army forced more than 1,800 patients and medical staff to evacuate the hospital overnight. With that incident as its reference point, Weiss’s art explores visual and musical aspects of the ancient ritual of Lament and its historical connection to feminine expression, especially as contrasted with the notion of the heroic myth within the narrative of war. “An important part of this work is the motif of lament as a form of expression outside language,” she says.

“Lamentatons” speaks to the essence of a hospital as a metaphor for healing, but in the context of the specific horrors of the Nazi evacuation of Ujazdowski Hospital and the general oppression of human rights throughout history. The artist’s original sound composition (Weiss trained for many years at Warsaw’s Conservatory of Music) incorporates the voice of a surviving witness of the hospital’s expulsion along with voices of average Germans reading passages from the second part of Goethe’s classic play “Faust.”

Weiss’s installation also juxtaposes original objects and documents related to the hospital’s exodus—mostly old books and small pieces of medical equipment—with other images, including video. The interplay of all these visual layers in video projection with the mix of voice and music creates a poetic environment in which viewers can form their own assumptions and conclusions. “Much of my art investigates the relationships between memory and history, but I build it from multiple narratives in order to leave the meaning open to interpretation,” says Weiss, who teaches drawing and new genres at Washington College.

London-based art critic Guy Brett has written of Weiss, “Her work is a remarkable, individual counterpoint between technological media (video projection) and the ancient activity of drawing. Sound is also an important element, meticulously composed by the artist. It lifts the silent filmed actions into another emotional register.” The result, he says, “is an alternative experience of space and time, … steady and enduring, establishing and deepening a human presence.”

Curator McColl adds that Washington College is “exceedingly fortunate” to have Monika Weiss on the faculty. “She not only maintains a complex, thoughtful, and highly successful international practice—one based on cutting-edge trends in media and culture, as well as a deep-rooted knowledge of history, literature, language and myth, let alone everything from philosophy to medical theory—but she also holds such deep convictions about teaching and the mentoring of our students,” he says.

Weiss’s past exhibitions include the 2005 “Monika Weiss: Five Rivers,” a comprehensive survey of her work at Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, and a two-person exhibition with the pioneering filmmaker and performance artist Carolee Schneemann at Remy Toledo Gallery, New York, in 2004. She has also exhibited at such venues as the Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami, the Frauenmuseum in Bonn, and the Kunsthaus Dresden in Dresden; examples of her work are also in the permanent collections of places from Vienna’s Albertina Museum to the Drawing Center, New York.

Weiss’s work is featured in the book on contemporary drawing practices Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art, (I.B. Tauris, London). Her papers have been published in books and journals, including Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research (Intellectbooks, Bristol, UK) and Being Syncretic (Springer, Vienna/New York). She co-edits the contemporary drawing magazine Tracey, published by England’s Loughborough University.
Weiss is represented by Galerie Samuel Lallouz (Montréal) and Remy Toledo Projects (New York). A member of the Washington College faculty since 2006, she lives in Chestertown and New York City.

"Lamentations" is sponsored in part by the Chestertown Spy. To learn more about the artist and her work, please visit: http://www.monika-weiss.com and http://art.washcoll.edu/faculty_monikaweiss.php.

Kohl Gallery is open Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m., Fridays noon to 6 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays noon to 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays and Tuesdays).

On exhibit in the William Frank Visual Arts Hallway outside the Kohl Gallery through Sunday, Feb. 27 is the photography exhibit, “Photography Exposed,” curated by Brian Palmer, manager of the Multimedia Production Center at Washington College. Each photograph has an accompanying QR Codes, or “Quick Read” matrix barcode, that can be scanned by any iPhone, Android phone or new generation iPod (those with cameras) to gain access to a video or text message from the photographer.

Related Links

• Learn more at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
• Visit Monika Weiss' faculty profile page
• Youtube: The Chestertown Spy profiles Monika Weiss
• Youtube: Interview with Prof. Weiss on "Sustenazo"
• Visit the Kohl Gallery site
• Review: Monika Weiss – "Sustenazo, Lament II"