October 4 - November 1, 2012
(click on artist's name to view artwork)
Exhibiting Artists
Samuel Bassett, Pepe Pool &
Pina Jurado
Mia Cinelli
Tessa Dallarosa
Adrian Deva
Marsha Karagheusian
Melissa Kreisa
Damon McArthur
Trude Parkinson
Tania Pryputniewicz & Robyn Beattie
Simone Shin
Graham Stephens
Suzanne Stroebe
Douglas Thielscher
Ronda Waiksnis & Dean M. Williams
Awards
Juror Award Best of Show – Tania Pryputniewicz & Robyn Beattie
Juror Award 2nd Place – Colleen Ellis
Juror Award 3rd Place – Graham Stephens
Gallery Award Best of Show 2D – CJ Hurley
Gallery Award Best of Show 3D – Douglas Thielscher
Chandra Cerrito is an art consultant, curator and gallery director in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in art history and a Certificate of Visual Art from Princeton University in 1991. Her studies included printmaking, ceramics with master ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu, photography with Emmet Gowin, and sculpture with James Seawright. Cerrito received an MFA in sculpture from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1994. With the guidance of artists like Linda Fleming, Mark Thompson, Bella Feldman, Paula Levine and Lewis deSoto, she studied the work of Robert Irwin, David Ireland, Eva Hesse and Anish Kapoor. Cerrito has completed several commissions including a temporary public artwork for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Market Street Art in Transit program. Cerrito’s drawings are currently represented in the flat files of Pierogi gallery in Brooklyn, NY.
Since 1991, Cerrito has worked in galleries and art consulting firms in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as an independent curator since 2003. In 2004, she started her own art consulting firm, Chandra Cerrito / Art Advisors, in Napa, CA. She has created exhibitions for institutions such as Dorsky Curatorial Programs, the Sonoma County Museum, di Rosa in Napa, and the Sonoma Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, she is the curatorial consultant and exhibition coordinator for the David Brower Center in Berkeley. In 2005, she founded Contemporary Quarterly, a fine art publication and web-based virtual exhibition space. Chandra Cerrito Contemporary gallery was established in 2007, and is located in downtown Oakland’s arts district.
Juror Statement
In early civilizations, visual representations of narratives were created to pass on religious, cosmological, historical and mythological stories to primarily illiterate populations. In today’s literate society, there is no longer such a need for art to serve storytelling. Despite that, however, poems and literature from all eras and all parts of the globe remain points of inspiration for visual artists.
What is perhaps most striking about the artworks selected for Visual Poetry is their range of styles, media and literary references. Source material ranges from the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu of 6th, 5th or 4th century B.C. Asia, ancient Greek myths, Biblical stories, medieval literature (“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and Dante’s Inferno) and Shakespeare to works by contemporary writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Alexandra Teague and Leonard Cohen. There are also works that reference or incorporate original writing, some by the artists themselves.
Poet Tania Pryputniewicz presents mesmerizing video reflections on historical and contemporary female figures, combining a montage of photographs by Robyn Beattie and the artwork of others, with her own voice reading aloud her original poetry. "She Dressed in a Hurry" and "Nefertiti Among Us" are set to the music of Scriabin and Bartok, performed by her father Stephen Pryputniewicz, and Michael Greenwood performs his original music for "Amelia". Graphic designer Colleen Ellis uses the ancient technique of calligraphy and Islamic geometric designs to present original stories written by people she met while living in Jeddeh, Saudi Arabia. Using two languages and non-representational geometry, she blends two disparate cultures, suggesting the common humanity between them. Other artists who incorporate their own or a collaborator’s original poetry include Janet Kozak and CJ Hurley, both of whom create paintings that pair with their own original verse, and Ronda Waiksnis, whose abstract landscape paintings are accompanied by poems written by her twin Dean Williams.
The styles of artworks in Visual Poetry range greatly, from traditional or folk art to conceptual, while the media represented span graphic arts, painting, classical and contemporary sculpture, collage, printmaking, drawing, ceramics and video. Mia Cinelli illustrates with text and images in colorful graphic prints a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. Parisa Ghaderi cut out letters in Farsi from a line in a poem by 20th century female poet Forugh Farrokhzad as inspiration for her portrait. In a reference to Fluxus art, Jessica Rowshandel used found haiku to inspire simple abstract drawings on small “cards” that are arranged and re-arranged in various rows of three, mimicking the haiku format while introducing chance and variability in the final composition.In another work that relies heavily on process as well as contemporary technology, Graham Stephens used two poems by contemporary poet Anis Mojgani as points of departure. He assigned each word of the poems coordinates based on the word’s location within the poem, its number of letters and the value of each letter. With civil engineering software, he mapped the poems and created sandstone topographies of them using a 3D printer.
The vast sweep of source material and resulting artworks in Visual Poetry reminds us of literature’s power to inspire not only people of its time, but also generations to follow. This exhibition demonstrates that writers from Europe, the Americas, ancient Greece, Asia and the Middle East, some of whom were alive centuries ago, are still sparking understanding, contemplation and inspiration today. As Emily Dickinson wrote and as Caroline Henry’s watercolor references, “There is no Frigate like a Book...How frugal is the Chariot that bears the Human Soul.”