Past Exhibitions

1 February–12 March 2006

Recent work by Mount Holyoke College Art Department faculty Nancy Campbell, Marion Miller, Rie Hachiyanagi, Nathan Margalit, Joseph Smith, Charles Spurrier, and Kane Stewart will be featured, along with selections from the museum’s permanent collection, chosen by the artists, that relate to their own work in some way.

Nancy Campbell, for example, develops prints by overlapping layers of information from a wide range of sources that include medieval Japanese scroll paintings, the media, children’s art, and studies from nature. She evokes an Eastern sense of balance between fragility and strength by using a system of highly structured, intricate abstraction. “Despite exacting and often tedious methods,” she says, “I work for a spontaneous result that inhabits an ambiguous realm between the visible and the invisible, the logical and the intuitive, the representational and the abstract. I find conceptual parallels and formal connections to Japanese narrative picture scrolls that I have ardently studied. At the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Hosoda Eishi’s woodcut prints from The Thirty-six Immortal Women Poets perfectly blend my interests in Ukiyo-e prints and classical revivals of medieval Japanese art. I am fascinated by the formal elements in these prints—their proportional harmonies, subtle color shifts, their sense of restraint, and their limited use of the third dimension. Japanese aesthetic models of the past continually inform my work.”

Rie Hachiyanagi specializes in installation, performance, and papermaking art and focuses largely on the creative relationship between social dislocation and inner peace. Hachiyanagi’s artistic development is threaded with a series of performance works inspired by autobiographical events and social issues. Benevolence, for example, shown last year at Brigham Young University, evoked an inner quietness with extremely slow and repetitive motions, questioning the exponential acceleration of our contemporary lives. For this exhibition Hachiyanagi, who has shown several times in New York City, has created an installation in the Rodney L. White Print Room, inspired by a Chinese jade cong (a ceremonial object) in the museum’s collection. Explains Hachiyanagi, “I felt an indescribable connection with the cong. I recognized its patterns as being from ‘Pa Kua’ trigrams, and this led me to try to understand a fraction of the complex ancient language of the I Ching. My installation will let us experience the cong in a new way.”

Painter Marion Miller draws much inspiration from George Inness. She states, “Inness developed a unique touch in his landscapes, a kind of caress of paint, which allowed him a particular scope and subtlety in responding to light and its own compositional powers. In his powerful painting Saco Ford: Conway Meadows here at the museum we can see how he draws the space of the sky, in itself filled with events...in an especially dramatic version of light informing space. This interplay of elements, where form is more than thing and light and space become positively charged, thrills me.”

Sculptor Joe Smith selected Native American Paleolithic tools to accompany his works. “These stone objects exist apart from us,” says Smith who developed an interest in these kinds of artifacts as a boy. “Theories about their function are pretty much speculation. We create these ideas about them. We tell stories about them. They generate meanings in us—none of which may be exactly true—and that is what I want my sculptures to do as well. The stone tools create a space for meaning to fill. Likewise, when my sculpture is really working, it separates itself from me and creates a space for multiple meanings—illusionistic or symbolic or dynamic. It takes some active role in the mind, just like those ancient tools did when I was a kid.”

Nathan Margalit feels a sense of kinship to a Roman fragment of a wall with a shrine in a landscape, from Pompeii, in the museum’s collection. “My connection to it," he says, "has everything to do with its physical, material presence—in just the same way as you might meet a person...and instinctively feel that you have something to say to each other. The hard, rich surface of the frescoed support; the sand and binder still evident in the small fragment, the granular surface…the ground on which the image will be painted intrigues me. I relate to the artist’s challenge of creating the illusion of space on a wall, constructing a window into an imagined place...describ[ing] buildings and people (not unlike Giacometti’s figures) in paint: foreground, middle ground and background, constructing space. These concerns are so familiar as I do what painters continue to do—pick up a brush, mix the color…proceed.”

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