The two artists responsible for the Wildling Museum’s dreamy window installations earlier this year have paired up once again to co-curate a new exhibit at the same venue.
After getting the green light to organize a group show, co-curators Nicole Strasburg and Holli Harmon began discussing which contemporary artists they each hoped to showcase.
“We started making a wish list of who we would want to include,” said Strasburg, whose own artwork is also on display in the show, alongside 10 other featured artists: Scott Chatenever, Lynn Hanson, Dorothy Churchill-Johnson, Karen Kitchel, Maria Rendon, John Robertson, Sommer Roman, Carol Saindon, Catherine Eaton Skinner, and Libby Smith.
While the exhibit displays a wide range of media—with its artists working in diverse concentrations, including ceramic, encaustic, mixed media, found natural materials, painting, and sculpture—one trend that ties the featured artworks together is that each piece explores an element of nature in some way or another.
“Our intention was to include different media in order to keep the viewers engaged and not overwhelmed, in addition to creating a flow through the museum,” Strasburg said, commenting on the layout of the exhibit, located on the museum’s first floor. “The works move from realism to abstraction, linear to organic. All of them differ in ways of approaching nature, but all hold the thread of closely looking and exploring nature at length through repetition.”
For Harmon, the exhibit—appropriately titled Bio/Mass: Contemporary Meditations on Nature—works as an invitation for viewers to meditate on their own surroundings while engaging with each featured artist’s interpretation of the world around them.
In assembling these idiosyncratic recordings or reflections of nature, the exhibit also invites guests to ponder the relationship between any individual artwork and the surroundings of its creator.
“As artists, we are also creators. We are regularly receiving the impetus to make something from what we see, feel, and think,” Harmon said. I think the natural world is fueled by this same energy that flows through the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, and death.”
Strasburg also expressed her philosophy on the relationship between art and nature.
“There are so many different ways of approaching nature, and equally as many ways of making art. How are art and nature connected? We are nature. We are animals in the greater whole, I think so often we forget that,” Strasburg said. “Making art for me is always reminding myself that I have just a small part, and through the exploration of the work, I can find myself and my place.
“If what I do brings joy and offers that peace to another, then I’m doing my job well,” she added. “I think art and nature share the quality of healing through self-awareness and understanding.”
It’s only fitting that the Wildling Museum of Art and Nature would showcase an exhibit exploring two topics inherent to its name, especially in celebration of its first reopening of the year to the public last month (with new temporary walk-in hours every weekend, set to be expanded over time). The group show premiered in mid-April and is scheduled to remain on display through Sept. 5.
When comparing and contrasting the exhibit’s featured artworks, whether it’s Smith’s ceramic bird sculptures or Hanson’s mixed-media installation, both curators noted that it’s difficult for them to decide which pieces are their personal favorites.
“That’s hard to answer, because each artist’s body of work really engages me and inspires me to look more closely,” Harmon said.
Strasburg agreed and added that one of the reasons she adores the exhibit as a whole is how well “all the work speaks, but in different languages, each artist with a different voice that is celebrating nature.”
“For me one of the signs of a good exhibit is when I leave the museum and want to go home and make art,” Strasburg said. “This show has that quality.”
Give Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood a sign at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 6-13, 2021.
