SuperNatural, featuring the works of three prominent New York area painters, was displayed in the Center Gallery of the Lowenstein Center at the Lincoln Center campus from October 3 to October 31. An opening reception on October 24 included a roundtable discussion with the artists.
The show’s curator, David Storey, artist-in-residence in Fordham’s Department of Theatre and Visual Arts, said that the 15 paintings illustrate the dynamic relationship between the “joyous intellectual and the joyous sensory” in nature.
“SuperNatural is a [deliberately]provocative title,” Storey said. “The normal assumption is that supernatural would be about the occult, or the paranormal. But I use the word to signify how art has always taken us to a hyper-awareness of nature, how it makes us very aware of our relationship to the living—and dying—world and what is always around us.”
Two of the artists constructed images of nature, while the third approached nature from a meticulous, “intellectualized” vision, Storey said. Judith Linhares’ flower paintings are saturated with color, lightness and liveliness that represents an “external idea of realism,” while simultaneously evoking an inner, poetic realism, he said.
Greg Kwiatek constructed abstract, iconic images in earth tones inspired by his photographs of seaweed and debris on an isolated island off the coast of Maine; Storey said this work represents a darker, transformative aspect of nature. Englishman Trevor Winkfield painted meticulous, mechanical still-life collages of intense color that Storey called “an intellectual enterprise, a reconstruction of nature.”
“As a whole,” Storey said, “the show speaks to what Darwin referred to as the ‘tangled bank,’ the interconnectedness of the natural world.”
Storey began planning the show in 2005, looking for representations that would “transcend the anecdotal” in art. “I thought of these artists because each is in the full summer of their craft,” he said, “and each [has]that interior vision that is the heart of all serious work.”
The Center Gallery features approximately 12 shows per year, curated by both students and faculty in the Department of Theatre and Visual Arts.
– Janet Sassi
