Drawing for Jules: Claire Stankus
Sept. 17 - Dec. 7, 2024
Vaulted Gallery (Mary Helen Cochran Library) – Open 24/7
Drawing for Jules celebrates pairs of paintings exploring the visual playfulness of shadows, transparency, and mark-making. My paintings quite often start from a highly observed moment but find their way to speak more about an admiration of color and a mystery of simplified shapes. This work, in particular, dives deeper into the wonder of paint mixing and application. Is a mark drawn? painted? fast? slow? When is the paint opaque or transparent?
A personal detail of this work is these paintings were made a year before and a year after the birth of my daughter, Jules. Although not originally intended to mimic toddler scribbles, I have embraced the similarity and irony and continue to enjoy finding a new way to represent the objectivity of a paint mark. When these paintings are not recognized by their initial inspiration, they may be enjoyed purely by their patterns, subtle color shifts, and illusions of light and flatness. The remaining abstraction is where we may find unexpected curiosity or joy.
Claire Stankus was raised in Albany, New York, and holds an MFA from the University of Connecticut. The artwork in this exhibition was made during three artist residencies: the Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, NY, and most recently, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. Claire is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Sweet Briar College and teaches Painting: Color and Composition, Classic Drawing, and Mixed Media 2D Design.
Student Photo Show: Photographing the Natural World
Aug. 27 - Sept. 19, 2024
Benedict Gallery – Open 24/7
Closely observed photographs taken in wilderness areas around campus by Sweet Briar students Sydney Harris ’25, Medora Falls ’25, Julianna McIntyre ’25, and Paige Zellers ’26. Photographing the Natural World(VART 130) was led by photojournalist Medford Taylor in Spring 2024.
Scary Stories: The High Road/Strange Mirrors
Sept. 26 - Dec. 13, 2024
Pannell Gallery – Open Thursday-Saturday, 12:00-5:00 p.m.
Opening Event: Oct. 4, 2024, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road”—Stendhal, 1870
“If art reflects life, it does so with strange mirrors”—Bertolt Brecht, 1949
Horror, as a genre, along with the tremors it provokes—revulsion, relief, humor, uncanniness, and the sublime—already constitutes a ripple in the mirror. The symptoms of its alienations, however, are myriad.
For Scary Stories: The High Road / Strange Mirrors, more figurative works of art have been installed on the western wall of Pannell Gallery, more abstract works on the eastern wall. Dolls, devils, spiders, skeletons, cat-rabbits, hazmat suits, and a meat grinder on one side; on the other, ineffable sources of unease that perhaps demand greater participation from the viewer. For the former, traditional contextualizing panels have been provided, while language has been largely absented from mediation with the abstract work, coaxing viewers to lose themselves in Joan Mitchell’s black trees, Jon Schueler’s red heaven, Jules Olitski’s yellow hell. Such decisions were not made to suggest any essential relationship between language and figuration but rather just to create a unique experience. Even more important is the show’s hope that the arrangement subverts simplistic binaries—particularly between the figurative and the abstract.
This exhibition coincides with Professor Joe Sacksteder’s English and Creative Writing elective Scary Stories: Tradition and Innovation, and several pieces in this show are translations of works of literature and mythology into visual mediums: Peter Milton’s etching illustrations of Henry James’s ghost story “The Jolly Corner,” Hans Richter’s Faust, Ana Maria Pacheco’s Tales of Transformation, and multiple artists’ ekphrastic explorations of Carole Oles’s poem “For Evelyn,” including Sweet Briar’s own Professor Laura Pharis. In many of the narratives studied by Professor Sacksteder’s class, characters—and even the form of the stories themselves—attempt to impose order on forces that refute comprehension. Such is the case in “Permanent Collection,” a new story published by Professor Sacksteder in Bard College’s magazine, Conjunctions, which fictionalizes the context of this very exhibition and imagines a vast, mirrored web stretched over Pannell’s colonnade.
Situated between the figurative and the abstract walls, the altar of Amy Sacksteder’s gruesome ceramics—suggesting organs, surgical trays, and malignant masses—show the bridging of the spaces to, itself, be a zone not of clarity but of hemorrhage. Pocket galleries display work by the children of Sweet Briar’s faculty and staff, banished to cramped sub-staircase chambers for bad behavior (very bad behavior). As all of these different modalities of monstrosity stare each other down across the gladiatorial pit of Pannell, let’s not hesitate to shake the exhibition’s cages to see what new connections and antipathies arise.
Curator: Joe Stacksteder