WoskobFamily Gallery

After years of global uncertainty, Catie Dillon’s mural, Remain in Light, is a turn toward new beginnings.

Dillon choreographs a dreamlike dance as playful shapes and riotous colors set the stage for exploratory looking. Repetitive forms and patterns — invoking ideas of meditation, continuation, and growth — echo, evolve, and entwine. Referencing architecture, stained glass windows, and the facades of tiled buildings, Dillon reconfigures existing environments into newly invented spaces. Piece by piece, this space is constructed like a sprawling map serving as a guide to a brighter future.

Like the light from the sun, Dillon’s whimsical wall painting is an energizing force. It is a place to bask, explore, reflect, heal, and feel joyous rejuvenation. It is Dillon’s wish to remain here, in light and in hope, forever.

Bio

Catie Dillon (B. 1996) is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a BFA in painting. Dillon has been an artist-in-residence at Open Wabi Residency in Fredericktown, Ohio, Fish Factory Residency in Stodvarfjordur, Iceland, and PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal. Her work has been exhibited in a recent solo exhibition at the McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, Ohio, and in group exhibitions in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Italy, and Portugal.

The screened videos (Mold Garden and Tide Flowers) show two installations by Pennsylvania-based environmental artist Stacy Levy. Levy uses art as a vehicle for translating the patterns and processes of the natural world. Her work often addresses environmental problems and makes the functioning of the environment visible. Interested in watersheds, tides, growth, and erosion, Levy makes projects that show how nature functions in an urban setting. Bridging art with science, her research often includes collaborations with ecologists, biologists, and engineers.

Mold Garden (2000) shows enlarged images of common molds (bread and fruit mold) sandblasted onto glass. The carved-out areas serve as miniature petri dishes that are filled with growth medium and inoculated with mold spores. In Tide Flowers (2006) the changing tide on the Hudson River is made visible with bright, buoyant vinyl flower petals hinged to the pier’s piling. Connecting urban life to the daily schedule of nature, the flowers bloom at high tide and close at low tide.

Bio

Stacy Levy’s robust portfolio includes large-scale public installations that are designed to seamlessly highlight and work with the environment that they exist in. A graduate of Yale University, she received her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and attended a year at the Architectural Association in London. She began her work as an urban forester in the Mid-Atlantic region and has been working as an eco-revelatory artist in the public realm for 29 years. Levy has been awarded the Henry Meigs Environmental Leadership Award and the Penn Future Award for Women in Conservation.

Through the collection of secondhand fabrics, natural dyes, and my grandmother, Nancy Adams’ poetry, I am building a personal lexicon that connects my artist family to my actual family.  Adams’ poems reveal a woman’s perspective in the late 20th century. She explores emotional relationships and human connections; themes that are also evident in the history of fiber art. My ‘art grandmother’ is Anni Albers. Her textiles opened the door for many who have inspired me, including the 1960s feminist soft sculpture movement, Sheila Hicks and Faith Ringgold.

My artwork creates a safe space where I re-contextualize my experiences, translating moments into visual stories that fuse imagination with reality. “Room to Room,” a phrase borrowed from a Nancy Adams poem, is a dynamic environment I made by dyeing and sewing reclaimed fabric. Fiber is both personal and profound, being one of the first textures we touch when we are born, clothing us daily, and surrounding us as we fall asleep. Retrieving used fabric, I stitch together strangers’ stories into a fort-like, intimate installation to share.

Bio

Megan Leah Gottfried (b. 1998, USA) makes oil and fiber paintings that examine familial relationships through patterns and visual narratives. Her work has been exhibited at Greensboro Cultural Arts Center, the Tri-State Sculpture Exhibition and Conference, and Zoller Art Gallery. Megan Gottfried earned her BFA and interdisciplinary art and social practice minor from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently an MFA student at Pennsylvania State University. She lives and works in Pennsylvania.

Nichole van Beek’s window installation is made from kombucha cellulose painted with bio-based inks creating a soft stained-glass effect. Thank you to the bacteria, yeast, tea, sugar, and water traditionally used in brewing kombucha for producing the translucent, golden biofilm for this project. Black walnut, indigo, madder, and weld deserve gratitude as well, for the beautifully rich colors they have contributed.

Bio

Nichole van Beek received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 1998 and an MFA from The University of California, Santa Barbara in 2007. She has exhibited work at Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson and NYC), Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA), Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC), Interstitial (Seattle, WA), White Flag Projects (St. Louis, MO) and Ortega y Gasset and Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, among other spaces. She has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center (through a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation), Jentel Foundation, and Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts.  She was also the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in painting, and she participated in Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship.

She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Davidson College. She has taught painting, drawing, photography, language, and research classes at Penn State, Pratt Institute, SUNY Suffolk, Mt. Holyoke College, University of California Santa Barbara, and Hyogo International High School in Ashiya, Japan.