2014 Selected Art Faculty Exhibition
New works by Kate Leavitt, Janet Sorensen, Sarah Sweeney, and Joanne Vella.
September 11 – October 19, 2014

Opening reception: Thursday, September 11, 5:30 – 7 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Tuesday, September 30, 4-5 p.m.
All events free and open to the public.

Excerpts from Artist Statements:

Sarah Sweeney is a new faculty member in the field of Digital Media and Interactive Design. Sweeney’s work is concerned with the relationship between technological duplication, like photographs and videos, and human memory. In one of her recent pieces, an iPhone application called The Forgetting Machine, users download the app and then take a photo using the phone’s camera. Each time they view the photo or press the refresh button, the image becomes slightly more obscured. Through the user's actions, the original becomes inaccessible, and is gradually replaced by an entirely new image.

A wild rose bush near the Spring Run Trail in Saratoga is the subject of the newest group of paintings by Janet Sorensen. Starting in 2013 and continuing throughout the course of a year, in all weather and all seasons, Sorensen visited the rosebush. She writes, ‘Returning sometimes three times in a day, I noted how, indeed, the exact same spot in the landscape revealed distinctly different aspects every time I looked at it…. I remain entranced by how fully the interplay of light and form defines each encounter.’

Kate Leavitt’s recent pieces deal with obsessive painting, beauty, and addiction. She states, ‘I have two obsessions (among many): making art and smoking. Much of this work combines the two. I admit to being preoccupied, preyed upon, possessed, haunted, and consumed by my obsessions. It is also the way I paint.’  

The subject of water has been an essential part of Joanne Vella’s work for almost thirty years; she uses it as an ‘intangible, elusive, ideal symbol,’ and as the stage for her implied narratives. The painting process itself is critical to the formation of her art; Vella states, ‘The act of building a painting through layers of revisions, deletions and further additions is the most challenging and satisfying part of my work.’