CINCINNATI, OHIO.- Tree Conscious is an exhibition of twenty-one artists at Solway Gallery illustrating the distinctive beauty of trees through still life and portraiture. It will include a diverse range of media spanning the early twentieth century to contemporary art from Cincinnati, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, and other international locations. The selection of two- and three-dimensional work will highlight the tree’s historical significance as a provider of sustenance and shelter throughout time; as a metaphor for growth, humanity, monumentality, and enduring life force.

The exhibition will feature works by Vahakn Arslanian, Stephen Berens, Jay Bolotin, Charles E. Burchfield, Joan Drew, Bryan Nash Gill, Su-Li Hung, Hilja Keading, Tadataka Kishino, Robert Lobe, Robert Longo, Constance Mallinson, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Lucas Reiner, Greg Rose, Jane Alden Stevens, Katia Santibañez, Jim Wainscott, Jim Wainscott Jr., Peter Waite, and Michael Wilson.

Vahakn Arslanian (1975 - )

Born in Antwerp in 1975 but raised in New York City, Vahakn Arslanian began painting and working with glass at an early age. Deaf from birth and fascinated by the chaotic beauty of shattered glass, Vahakn found in his art both a route for his imaginative vision and a means of exploring the equilibrium between destruction and creation. His work frequently employs glass—sometimes broken, sometimes intact—as well as found or acquired objects like antique window sashes and hardware, massive airliner cockpit windows, lightbulbs, and even jet-engine fans. The images he places in and on the spaces thus created depict his vision of beauty and absurdity: a bird with a subway car for beak, a candle with too many flames, a flock of tiny Boeing jets converging on the vortex at the center of a shattered window. Vahakn's work has been shown at multiple solo exhibitions in London, Antwerp, Geneva, St. Barthélemy, and his native New York City, as well as numerous group exhibitions, including the St. Moritz Art Masters. His collaboration with Julian Schnabel, The Ones You Didn't Write-The Maybach Car, was displayed on the Grand Canal during the Venice Biennale. Vahakn divides his time between his studios in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Petite Saline, St. Barth.

Stephen Berens (1952 - )

Stephen Berens lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been included in exhibitions for over 45 years including institutions such as: The Museum of Modern Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Florida State University Fine Arts Museum, California State University, Los Angeles, New Orleans Museum of Art, Arizona State University, Sheldon Memorial Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. His work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and the International Museum of Photography, among others.

Jay Bolotin (1949 - )

Jay Bolotin resides in Cincinnati, Ohio and was born in Fayette County, Kentucky in 1949. He is a prolific visual artist, writer, composer, musician, set designer and filmmaker. His woodcuts are represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the 21c Museum in Louisville, the New York Public Library and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Previous theatrical productions include The Hidden Boy, which premiered at Center Theater in New York City and Limbus: A Mechanical Opera, presented at the Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh under the direction of world-renowned director, Jonathan Eaton. Limbus incorporated performers and the artist’s giant mechanical sculptures. As a musician and songwriter, Bolotin has worked with Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard and Dan Fogelberg. His own releases include The Songs of Jay Bolotin Volume 1: Shadow of a Beast and the recently re-issued Jay Bolotin, originally recorded in 1970.

Charles E. Burchfield (1893 – 1967)

Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893–1967) was an American painter, best known for his watercolor landscapes. Burchfield was born April 9, 1893, in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio. Five years later, his family moved to Salem, Ohio, where he graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1911. He attended the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916 and studied with Henry G. Keller, Frank N. Wilcox, and William J. Eastman. In 1921, Burchfield moved to Buffalo, New York, to work as a designer for the prominent wallpaper company, M.H. Birge & Sons Company. The next year he married Bertha Kenreich, with whom he raised five children. Fascinated by Buffalo's streets, harbor, railroad yards, and surrounding countryside, he adopted a more realistic artistic style. Burchfield's foray into realism lasted for several years.

Joan Drew (1916 - 2002)

Joan Drew Ritchings was born in Indiana. In 1938 she graduated from the Massachusetts School of Art in Boston, winning a scholarship in her junior year. After graduation Drew studied painting at the studio of Elsa Schmid for two years. She won a Merit Scholarship to the Arts Student League in New York City, where she studied with Harry Sternberg and Arnold Singer. Her work is in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Boston Museum of fine Arts, Boston, MA; Boston Public Library, Boston, MA; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA; New York Public Library, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; among others.

Bryan Nash Gill (1961 - 2013)

Gill was born in 1961 in Hartford, Connecticut and was raised on a farm in Granby, Connecticut. He attended Westminster School and graduated in 1980. In 1984 he graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, with a focus on glassblowing. He moved to Italy to learn stone carving before returning to the United States to study at the California College of the Arts. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in 1988. Gill began creating woodcuts from tree cross-sections in 2004. Most of his woodcuts were created from dead or damaged tree parts that he collected and took to his studio to prepare cross-sections of the wood for relief printing. Gill's work has been displayed at the New Britain Museum of American Art and DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and he was commissioned to create installations for Expo 2005 in Japan and the World Financial Center in New York. He was a fellow of the California Arts Council and twice received grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

Su-Li Hung (1947 - )

Su-Li Hung was born and educated in Taiwan. She is a printmaker, a painter and a writer. Su-Li has been making her woodcut prints for over forty years. She has won numerous awards, including a number of purchase prizes and gold medals. Her work is in 30 museum collections. These include the Fogg Museum, Library of Congress, British Museum, and Cleveland Museum. She is represented by and has exhibited with The Old Print Shop and June Kelly Gallery. In winning a purchase prize at the Delta Print Exhibition, 2010, juror David Kiehl, curator at the Whitney Museum called her print, “Palm Leaf”; “Noteworthy…, It is the cropping of the image and the sensitivity of her cutting that breathes life into this image.” Su-Li Hung has written 31 books that have been published in Taiwan, including books of poetry, essay, short story and has illustrated children books.

Hilja Keading (1960 - )

Hilja Keading lives and works in Los Angeles, and has been described as a pioneer of California Video Art, specializing in video installation. She has been commissioned to produce billboards and a 24 channel Filmstrip video installation for the Los Angeles International Airport. Keading returned to painting in 2010 to supplement her internationally exhibited video installation The Bonkers Devotional and is currently embarking on a series of 60 life sized paintings of Bonsai. Keading’s work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibits at LACMA, MOCA, The Henry Museum, The Bass Museum, The Japanese American National Museum, the Getty Museum, the Lyon biennale, VideoFormes in Clermont Ferrand, France, The Museum of Modern Art, and others.

Tadataka Kishino (1938 – 2017)

Kishino lived a humble and secluded life as a Buddhist monk. He left many breathtaking artworks, inspiring many talents, including his children, Kan and Sho. However, he never identified himself as an artist, nor having any artistic career. Therefore, there isn’t any traditional artist biography of him. Suiboku-ga, or ink wash painting, is a style of monochrome, typically black painting that emphasizes nuanced brush strokes and uses diluted ink to achieve an infinite range of shades. The style was brought to Japan in the 14th century by Zen monks returning from China, where they had undertaken Buddhist training that included the practice of ink wash painting. Tadataka’s works are careful studies of space and nature. Typical of ink wash painting, Tadataka’s works focus on the drawn line and tonal value of the ink, using the empty space of the bare washi paper or silk canvas to suggest physical space such as the sky or a body of water.

Robert Lobe (1945 - )

Robert Lawrance Lobe is an American sculptor. He was born in Detroit and grew up in Cleveland. He received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1967 and then pursued post-graduate work at Hunter College. His work typically depicts rocks and trees in heat-treated, hammered aluminum for which he is best known. He employs an adaptation of repoussé and chasing, in which he encases trees and rocks in sheets of aluminum. Employing hand-held and pneumatic hammers, he beats the aluminum until it assumes the shape of the wood or rock. His work is part of the collections of The Albright–Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin, Ohio). the Brooklyn Museum, Castellani Art Museum (Niagara Falls, New York). the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park (Lincoln, Massachusetts), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Mihama-cho International Outdoor Sculpture Garden (Mihama-cho, Japan), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Menil Collection (Houston, Texas).

Robert Longo (1953 - )

Longo is a is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician who was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Long Island. He had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to influence his art. Longo became first well known in the 1980s for his Men in the Cities drawing and print series, which depict sharply dressed men and women writhing in contorted emotion. He lives in New York and East Hampton. Longo has had retrospective exhibitions at Hamburger Kunstverein and Deichtorhallen, Menil Collection in Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1990, Hartford Athenaeum, The Isetan Museum of Art in Tokyo, and a Survey Exhibition 1980–2009, at Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain in Nice, France in 2009 and at Museu Colecção Berardo in Lisbon, Portugal in 2010. Group exhibitions include Documenta VIII, the Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. His photorealistic charcoal drawings were featured in the exhibition Proof at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 alongside works by Francisco Goya and Sergei Eisenstein.

Constance Mallinson (1948 - )

Constance Mallinson is a Los Angeles based painter, writer and curator. During her 50 year career, she has exhibited widely both in solo and group exhibitions and her paintings are included in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The San Jose Museum, The Crocker Art Museum, and the Pomona Art Museum, the National Academy of Sciences. Reviews and articless on her work have appeared in major art publications such as Art in America and Artforum. She has taught all levels of studio art and criticism at the major colleges and universities in Southern California and has written for many art publications such as Art in America, Xtra, Artillery, the Times Quotidian, and numerous catalog essays for university art museums.Her most recent curatorial projects have included “Urbanature” at ArtCenter College of Design, The Feminine Sublime at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and “Small is Beautiful” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a COLA fellowship. 24 of her artworks are installed at the Bergamot Station Metro Station.

B.J.O. Nordfeldt (1878 - 1955)

Both a painter and printmaker, Nordfeldt's direct and vigorous brushwork converted landscapes, portraits, and still lifes into powerful formal statements. Born in Sweden, he emigrated in 1891 to Chicago, where he began his art training in 1899 with a year at the Art Institute. Following a decade of painting, printmaking, and study in Chicago and Europe, Nordfeldt moved in 1919 to Santa Fe, where he remained for the next twenty years. While abroad he had absorbed the work of the Fauves and Expressionists. His first New Mexico paintings were Cézannesque renderings of Indian dances. Other etchings, lithographs, and paintings portrayed the simple dignity of Hispanic neighbors or analyzed the rugged topography of the Southwest. Nordfeldt's work in New Mexico represents a marriage of his formal predilections with an aggressive environment. Much of his later abstract painting would proceed from the interactions of these two elements.

Lucas Reiner (1960 - )

Lucas Reiner has widely exhibited internationally and his work is represented in public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the West Collection (Oaks, Pennsylvania, USA); Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung (Munich, Germany); the Diözesan Museum (Freising, Germany); Colección Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico); and the American Embassy Collection (Riga, Latvia). Over a prolific career spanning three decades, Reiner has produced several notable series of chromatically variegated paintings reflecting the artist’s perennial inspirations (contemporary urban trees, pyrotechnic explosions, traditional spiritual themes) and worked in a range of media (including oil, acrylic, tempera, watercolor, drypoint etching, monoprint, and photography).

Greg Rose (1964 - )

Greg Rose was born in San Francisco, CA in 1964, and was raised on the Monterey Peninsula, just south of SF, in a rural suburb known as Carmel Valley. He attended the Monterey Peninsula Community College and later transferred to CSULB in Southern California where in 1992 he received a BFA in Drawing & Painting. Rose then attended Claremont Graduate University, where he received an MFA in Drawing & Painting in 1997. Rose has since exhibited in a number of galleries and institutions including solo exhibitions with the Richard Heller Gallery and the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles, the Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco and New York City, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Rose has also been included in a variety of group shows in Southern California galleries including Miller Durazo Gallery, Domestic Setting, Acme, Raid Projects, Haus, PØST, Pedersen Projects, Andi Campognone Projects and Launch LA. Rose most recently exhibited at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, CA, with a solo exhibition titled, “Tree Fiction”.

Jane Alden Stevens (1952 - )

Jane Alden Stevens is a fine art photographer inspired by history at every level — personal, familial, cultural, and global. Stevens was born in Rochester, NY, and spent many years living and working in Germany. She is Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at the University of Cincinnati and has lived and worked in the Cincinnati, Ohio area for more than 35 years. Her photographic narratives, whether simple or complex, examine and interpret the relationship between humans and the world they create for themselves. Her artistic practice draws on her inherent thirst for reading and research, as she studies aspects of psychology, sociology, art, religion, music, economics, agriculture, politics, and geography. Her photographs are included in the permanent collections of the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Cincinnati Art Museum; and the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, Brazil; among many others.

Katia Santibañez (1964 - )

Katia Santibañez’s work utilizes grid structures to examine the intricacies and minutiae of organic forms. Beginning with a grid, she approaches the canvas precisely and allows every inch to have its own expressive quality. Santibañez examines how objects of nature can be structured to magnify a canvas. Layers of sharp, kaleidoscopic patterns come together to create hypnotic, yet tranquil abstract canvases. There is a vibrancy reflected through the order. The mixture of a rigid formal base with swirling swaths of color leads viewers to contemplate each component as its own entity while simultaneously absorbing how they come together as a whole. Katia Santibañez is an American, born in France. She studied painting at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts. She has been in residencies at Yaddo, NY; Casa Wabi, Mexico; The Albers Foundation, CT; Sitka, OR; and Civitella Ranieri, Italy. Her work has been collected internationally and is in both private and public collections including The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and The Morgan Library and Museum.

Jim Wainscott, the Elder (1911 - 1984)

Jim Wainscott {the elder} was born in Indiana in 1911. At some point he attended the John Herron institute. Thereafter he worked as a commercial illustrator/designer first in Indianapolis then New York and finally arriving in Cincinnati in the late 1930s where he met Anne Ketz in the early part of her long career as a fashion illustrator. The had two sons, Clay Wainscott and Jim Wainscott, both of which a currently painters living in this area. He died in 1984.

Jim Wainscott (1945 - )

In a career spanning more than twenty-five years, Jim Wainscott, an acclaimed and well-recognized painter within the Cincinnati arts community, has produced a distinguished body of meticulously rendered acrylic paintings that combine both traditional and contemporary painting techniques with his interest in the figure and landscape. Painstakingly applied translucent layers of paint on wood panels achieve an enigmatic effect that transforms these paintings into dreamlike visions. Wainscott’s laborious and time-intensive process of building his paintings through multiple layers of polymer medium creates a seductive glass-like surface that lures the viewer. Jim Wainscott received a bachelor of arts in 1969 and a master of fine arts in painting in 1973 from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Ky. Since that time, he has devoted himself full time to his painting, exhibiting his work in numerous regional and national venues including solo exhibitions at Gallery 2211 in Los Angeles in 2002 and the Weston Art Gallery in 2003. His paintings are represented in numerous private and corporate collections.

Peter Waite (1950 - )

For 30 years, Peter Waite has depicted public sites, usually architectural in nature, such as monuments, stately homes, prisons, industrial landscapes, public housing and ancient temples. His primary interest is in the intersection of personal and social memory. Waite is an avid traveler, and for him being there and experiencing a location first hand is of crucial importance. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Florence and New York City are some of the major cities that have captured his attention. He uses snapshots, memory and sketches done on the scene as source material. Peter Waite was born in North Adams, Massachusetts and now lives and works in Glastonbury, Connecticut. He holds a B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford and an M.F.A from the Art Institute of Chicago. His paintings are widely exhibited and collected. His work can be found in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; NASA, Washington, D.C.; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Waite is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Carl Solway Gallery presented a solo exhibition of his paintings in 1994.

Michael Wilson (1959 - )

Michael Wilson is a life-long resident of Cincinnati residing in Price Hill. He developed his interest in photography while attending Northern Kentucky University where he earned a bachelor of fine arts in 1981. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at such local venues as Baker Hunt Foundation (Covington, Kentucky), Thomas More Gallery, Thomas More College (Crestview Hills, Kentucky), In Situ Gallery (Cincinnati, Ohio), Carnegie Visual & Performing Arts Center (Covington, Kentucky), as well as the Cincinnati Art Museum and Contemporary Arts Center. Wilson's photographs have been exhibited regionally at the J. B. Speed Museum (Louisville, Kentucky); Rosewood Arts Centre (Kettering, Ohio); and Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (Cleveland, Ohio). His work is represented in the Cincinnati corporate collections of E. W. Scripps; PNC Bank; Frost & Jacobs; Deloitte & Touche; and Duke Energy. He is also represented in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum and the J. B. Speed Museum. In addition, his images have been featured in more than three hundred photographic projects working with musicians and record labels. Among the many artists Michael has photographed are: Lyle Lovett, B. B. King, Waylon Jennings, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Bill Frisell, David Byrne, Philip Glass, Dawn Upshaw, and Doc Watson. Clients include: Nonesuch Records, Warner Brothers Records, Sony Music, Capitol Records, Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Putnam, Mother Jones Magazine, Health Magazine, Uncut Magazine, and Pentagram Design.

Solway Gallery
Tree Conscious
September 28th, 2023 - December 15th, 2023