The Wildling Museum of Art and Nature’s upcoming discussion series, Bio/Mass: Summer Artist Talks, will highlight six artists from the Wildling’s current exhibition, Bio/Mass: Contemporary Meditations on Nature, in conversation with one another.
Participating artists are Karen Kitchel and Catherine Eaton Skinner, Scott Chatenever and Dorothy Churchill-Johnson, and Maria Rendón and Sommer Roman.
Dates for the three-part Zoom series are:
Tuesday, July 20, 4-5 p.m. with Kitchel and Skinner; moderated by Stacey Otte-Demangate, Wildling Museum executive director.
Tuesday, Aug. 24, 4-5 p.m. with Chatenever and Churchill-Johnson; moderated by Nicole Strasburg, Bio/Mass exhibition co-curator.
Wednesday, Sept. 1, 4-5 p.m. with Rendón and Roman, moderated by Holli Harmon, Bio/Mass exhibition co-curator.
Artists featured in Bio/Mass: Contemporary Meditations on Nature, use a diverse range of media, including sculpture, found materials, ceramic, encaustic, mixed media, and painting.
Through the series, participants are invited to learn more about each artist’s individual practice and process as observers and interpreters of the natural world around them.
Whether examining patterns in nature, studying landscapes, or combining and recombining elements that accumulate into a revealing larger work, the artists have translated their observation of their environments into works that beckon viewers to find beauty in the details of the world.
Suggested donation for each of the virtual programs is $5. To register and learn more about the artists, visit www.wildlingmuseum.org/news/2021-summer-artist-talks. Email info@wildlingmuseum.org or call 805-686-8315 with any questions.
Kitchel’s environmentally resonant works embody a sustained effort to extend the definition of landscape painting. Unconventional combinations of image, material and form conspire to energize and subvert this traditional genre.
Kitchel’s oil paintings and installations have been featured in exhibits nationwide, and are in private and public collections worldwide, including the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, Pomona College Art Museum, University of Colorado Art Museum at Boulder, and the U.S. State Department.
Kitchel lives and works in Ventura. She was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, and graduated from Kalamazoo College and Claremont Graduate University.
Skinner, whose creative sensibilities stem from growing up among old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, said, “We live in a world where it may be difficult to feel a part of the whole, but we continue trying to find ways to connect to place and to each other.”
Working in Seattle and Santa Fe, she incorporates multidisciplinary media with exploration in painting, printing, sculpture, glass and photography.
Her monograph “108” (Radius Books) showcases her investigation of this symbolic number. Publications include Monk, LandEscape Art Review (London), ARTfolio2020, Artists on Art, Magazine 43 (Berlin, Hong Kong, Manila), The Woven Tale Press, and Apero.
Public collections include: The Embassy of the United States, Tokyo and Papua New Guinea; Henry Art Gallery; Museum of Northwest Art; Swedish Orthopedic Institute; Virginia Mason Medical Center; and Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Chatenever always liked making things and was good at math, so the grownups told him to be an engineer. Fortuitously, he discovered the UC San Diego Craft Center, where he took a pottery class after learning that engineers only get to make things by committee.
Some 30 years on, he still finds clay a compelling medium for the exploration of nature and human perception, ritual and relationships. Craftsmanship continues to be an important element in his work. His studio is in Ojai.
A graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Churchill-Johnson has been a working artist in Santa Barbara since 1976. She is known for her mural-size contemporary realist oils on canvas in which she seeks to synthesize hard-edge realism with other contemporary influences like pattern and decoration, neo-pop, op art, and abstraction.
By finding beauty in the ordinary details of everyday surroundings and blowing them up to visual extremes, she hopes the viewers will feel as if they are seeing something familiar for the first time.
Churchill-Johnson’s work has been collected by museums, major corporations, hotels, hospitals, and private collectors worldwide. She recently exhibited a retrospective of her work at The Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio.
Rendón, a Mexico City native, who lives in Santa Barbara, received a BFA from Universidad Anáhuac, a second BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and completed her MFA at UCSB in 2014.
Exhibits include: But Only So An Hour at HeyThere Projects, Joshua Tree, California; Two by Two at PØST, Los Angeles; Everyday Transformations at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Missing Rib at Atkinson Gallery; Alter at Art Design and Architecture Museum UCSB; Rock Paper Candy at Gallery 1328 UCSB; and Unholy Mess at Santa Barbara Museum of Art – McCormick House.
Her work is featured in New American Paintings #123 and Graphis #355.
Roman was born and raised in California. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz in 2004, and MFA from UCSB in 2014. She maintains a multi-disciplinary practice spanning sculpture, painting, and drawing. She lives on the Central Coast and teaches at local universities.
Roman’s recent projects and exhibits include: Left Coast; Recent Acquisitions of Contemporary Art, group exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Out of the Great Wide Open, group exhibit at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; artist residency and solo exhibit, Passage at UCSB; artist residency at The Squire Foundation, and In the Woods, Perpetual Youth, solo exhibit at Ventura College.