SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Schick Art Gallery presents Parallel Play, an exhibition co-curated by Skidmore Assistant Professor of Sculpture John Galt and featuring works by Chris Duncan, DeWitt Godfrey, Coral Penelope Lambert, and Mary Neubauer, four sculptors who also create drawings and digital prints. For each artist, working in two dimensions is an end in itself, as well as a means of engendering ideas.
Reflecting on drawing and his development as an artist, Chris Duncan says, “I became very engaged in the immediacy of making work on paper, and much less interested in using drawings as a provisional or intermediate step toward something else.” Duncan’s sculptures and drawings play with opposition between process and finish, and they hum with compressed energy. He aims for a “tension between the raw and the cooked.” Duncan has shown his work extensively at venues in the United States and Germany, including the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York; Project ArtSpace in New York City; and the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. He is professor of visual arts at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Natural geometries and systems, including plant spores, seashells, and honeycombs, inspire DeWitt Godfrey’s work. He uses circular shapes in repetition to create large-scale sculptures with dramatic presence. His drawings feature repetition of shape as well, along with subtle variations of mark or edge, resulting in works both dynamic and allusive. Godfrey has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, among other recognitions. He has installed site-specific commissioned works at numerous venues, including the Cambridge Arts Council in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Kennedy Art Museum in Athens, Ohio.
For Coral Penelope Lambert, “Making the mold and essentially losing the form in the process, letting go of control, is to me where the magic happens.” Internationally recognized for working in cast metal as well as producing large-scale outdoor sculpture, Lambert is interested in the rich history of metals in myth and alchemy, as well as our use and abuse of Earth’s resources through activities like mining. Lambert’s works in Parallel Play are both playful and pointed in their approach to issues of environmental degradation, and her perspective is vast, incorporating ideas from astronomy and quantum mechanics. Lambert is professor of sculpture at Alfred University, where she is also director of the National Casting Center Foundry. Exhibitions of her work include Journeys in Iron Outdoor Sculpture Invitational at The Bascom Center in North Carolina (2017) and Fire + Iron Earthwork at Daniel Spoerri Sculpture Garden in Italy (2015).
Mary Neubauer uses data visualization combined with traditional foundry processes to create extraordinary and striking sculptures that echo forms and patterns found in nature. “My artistic processes focus on the hidden aspects of our surroundings, emphasizing artistic and tactile ways of understanding,” she says. In an ongoing series, she visualizes a wide range of phenomena, from river and tidal flows, to environmental pollutants, to air traffic. Neubauer regularly exhibits with organizations such as Ars Mathematica/Intersculpt and Art and Science Collaborations Inc. (ASCI). She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright Fellow in Cambridge, England, among other fellowship positions. Neubauer is currently head of the Art Foundry at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University.
Both Chris Duncan and Coral Penelope Lambert will attend the opening reception on Oct. 28, and Mary Neubauer will deliver a lecture on her work on Nov. 17; please check www.skidmore.edu/schick for specific time and location information.
