An intriguing new exhibition at Steinberg Museum of Art explores how artists use structures to understand their surroundings—both natural and man-made.
Called “Reimaging Constructs and Surroundings,” the exhibit features the work of Darlene Charneco, Heejung Cho, Ana Golici, Cheryl Molnar, Jason Paradis and Winn Rea, who is a faculty member of the Art Department at LIU Post. All the artists have Long Island roots, stretching from the Hamptons to Brooklyn. Two are currently working on international exhibitions—one in Romania, which has become a hotspot for contemporary European art collectors, and the other in South Korea.
The guest curator for this exhibition is Dawn Lee, who is art curator of the Omni Gallery in Uniondale. She is also an artist, professor and chair of the art department at St. Joseph’s College, and coordinator of the artist-in-residency program at Fire Island National Seashore. When she puts an exhibit together, Lee says what she enjoys most is seeing how the artists interpret things like nature, spirituality, personal experiences, social issues and aesthetic concerns and flesh out these concepts in different ways.
“With this collection of artwork I believe that I was able to include a group of artists who explore meaningful aspects of their environment and experiences including responses to natural, manmade, and personal spaces in which they find value,” Lee said. “I hope the viewers are able to enter these spaces and discover qualities that correspond with their own lives and reveal new perspectives.”
As the program’s statement explains, the works now on view at Sternberg Museum of Art “reflect the innate human need to establish order from the interwoven aspects of our complex existence.”
Here’s a closer look at the artists included in this free exhibit, which runs until July 27, 2018. On Sunday, July 15, there will be a special reception at the museum from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Darlene Charneco utilizes techniques seen in mapping to look at how people forge their own networks to create a continually expanding community, and to enlighten how human existence is a trace of connections.
Heejung Cho is interested in how the understanding of our environment can be a personal experience. She focuses on objects of familiarity and how these structures and our emotions attached to them are continually evolving, ultimately becoming an “architectural abstraction over time.” Her brick wall pieces provide dynamism, repetition, uniformity of construction.
Ana Golici explores a boundary of human understanding, the natural environment. By enlarging select elements, and her choice in layering materials, Golici illuminates the complexity yet fragility of the interconnecting web of structures that make up the whole of an organism, such as coral or an insect wing.
Cheryl Molnar juxtaposes the natural with architectural features in a collage process of fragmentation and reassembly that mimics the alteration of natural landscapes by human development.
Jason Paradis deconstructs an experience of the night skies with relation to self and concept of time. Creating a framework through lines, planes, and found materials, Paradis explores the voids and connections of a space vast and beyond.
Winn Rea reinterprets the landscape through an aerial perspective provided by maps. Among her understanding of the topography of the land, she inserts the viewpoint of one’s experience in their immediate surroundings with suggestions of the foliage and shadows of natural elements.
Normal summer hours for the museum are Monday through Friday, from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The gallery is located on the ground floor of the Palmer Library building on the LIU Post campus. For more information, call 516-299-4073, or go to liu.edu/museum.
