2020 Arts Faculty Digital Showcase

Kimberly Witham

Archival Pigment Print On Hahnemuhle Rag Paper

“My work is strongly influenced by natural history dioramas, cabinets of curiosity, still life painting and other manifestations of humankind’s attempt to categorize, comprehend and ultimately control the natural world. All of my photographs are informed by my studies in art history and my love of nature. I am an avid gardener, wanderer, and collector of bones, shells, seed pods and other ephemera. My images are a very personal meditation on beauty, fecundity, fragility and the inevitable march of time. The visual language of these images is borrowed from classical Dutch still life painting. In these paintings flowers, fruit and flesh are represented in varying states of ripeness and decay. These paintings serve as both a celebration of beauty and a reminder of the inevitability of death. They are simultaneously seductive and grotesque. The materials used in my images are all culled from my surroundings. The flowers and vegetables are from my garden. The animals and birds are all road kill found close to my New Jersey home. The fleeting nature of my subject matter requires me to work only with what is available on any given day.”

Wendy Tumminello

Photographic Arts

“What fascinates me about surrealistic photography, in particular, is that it can draw you out of your everyday existence and make you question the environment in which you live. I have often used my own surrealistic compositions as a way to express how I am feeling and the state of the world around me. I will composite photographic portraits, backgrounds, and textures to call attention to things that many of us overlook or perhaps take for granted. My goal is to draw the viewer into the image and question the meaning. The photographs in my series are representational of both feelings and emotions we have toward the devastation we are wreaking on our world as we speak. We live in a society where pandemic rages, the polar ice caps are melting, and plastics litter our landfills and oceans at 300 million tons a year. I believe to represent crises; photographs do not always have to be literal, but rather evoke a feeling; to mold a larger idea into a single frame. My images on the crises can be haunted and dark, but at the same time evoke hope through the use of lighting and textures. My compositions normally start out as a single portrait on a white background or green screen. The goal is to then transform the portrait through the stroke of a brush, adding texture and light. I play with tones, and build upon textures to fade our current world into one we can no longer recognize.”

Jennifer Manzella

Multiple Woodblock Print

The images I make are the result of my observation within an environment or a place. Places I’ve lived, the places I visit, the places I have traveled to and the places I romanticize. Often I will contrast cityscapes against natural settings in layered compositions or combine abandoned industrial structures with old trailers, houses, and cars to create imagined dwellings.

This particular series of multiple wood block prints represent the human desire to reconstruct the environment, especially in cities. These altered urban landscapes are evidence of the actions to transform, destroy, and exploit what was there before. Colorful overlapping silhouettes form inverted skylines depict remnants of industry and architecture on waterways, inspired by the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers in Philadelphia. The use of color is derivative of 19th century traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e prints especially those of Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige.

Robert Burger, MFA

Photoshop Digital Painting

“I believe the artist/designer has many responsibilities, one of which is to bring beauty and order into the world. Another responsibility is to communicate ideas and tell stories in a concise and appealing visual manner. As an artist/designer through my work I seek to evoke an intellectual response while at the same time being entertaining. When I encounter anything that is well designed or a great work of art it conveys to me a joyful and sensual experience. This is something that I strive to incorporate into my own work. It is also the task of the artist/ designer to envision things in a new way, to open new doors to visualization and to show people new possibilities. I draw creative inspiration from many sources – from museums and travel to music and books. Surrealism has always been a major influence on my work. The current series that I am working on, of animals playing musical instruments, was initially inspired by listening to the music of banjo player Bela Fleck. The image of an alligator playing a banjo popped into my head and I chose to bring this idea to life in a painting. While working on this first painting, I decided to develop the musical animals concept into a series of paintings starting with a solo musician, followed by a duo, trio, quartet, quintet and finally a sextet, which will be the last painting in the series. I also write and record my own music so this series of paintings was especially fulfilling. Throughout the years my work constantly changes and evolves. I have moved through various styles and mediums in my years of artistic creation. Once I feel that I have exhausted the possibilities of a particular approach or have just gotten a bit bored with it, I choose to take a new direction that excites me and poses new challenges, conceptually and technically. I need to keep myself interested and also feel like I am having fun. After all, creating art is my idea of fun and there is nothing like the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment when a work of art is completed. In my role as an educator I see my responsibility to be to teach my students the skills and give them the knowledge that they will need to succeed in their endeavors. I also seek to inspire them and to instill in them the same passion and appreciation for art and design that I possess.”

Daniel Wilkinson

Gouache on Paper

My fascination is with the abstract potential of moving water. The patterns it creates as it flows, it’s many layers: the bottom, the mid-depth, the surface lines of flow, and the reflection of the surroundings. The moving water bends and utterly transforms the forms it reflects. Looking down from above, often getting quite close, is an exciting and disorienting viewpoint. The flowing water, on reflection, changes or re-presents the things it reflects, just as a painting interprets the world to the viewer. In this way, subject matter, artist, and the painting have a role in representation. I’m trying to just paint what I see, and it ends up automatically abstract.

Karl Carter

Glass

Caren Friedman

Intaglio

My work is inspired by the natural world. In this series of rock studies, I used printmaking as an extension of the drawing process, a way of articulating and describing the texture, surface and form of these treasured objects. For me, collecting, arranging, drawing, and printing these weather-worn stones is a form of meditation.

Chris Todd

Mixed Media

Val Sivilli

Oil on Canvas

An untamed feral nature lives just beneath the surface of the human animal. People collect animals. We collect them in zoos, in our homes, in our stories, in our popular culture. We transform them into digestible versions of what they truly are. We try to humanize them. We observe animals in endless documentaries. We enslaved them to perform in the Circus. We infuse them with human traits through our movies, animations and literature. We give them language skills, put clothing on them. We use them as symbols possessing mystical powers. We associate them with religious piety. We interact with them in our myths and fairy tales. We attempt to domesticate them. The CAT FIGHT paintings capture the moment when stillness becomes intention. Observing animal behavior through the eyes of a human is a great signifier. Those are absolutely crazy moments of deadly growls and vicious attacks. A power-play between cats is a subtle yet terrifying game of who is protecting who and why. This intimidation and submission flips and flops back and forth. It is like a game, yet it is also not. The domination and the submission and the fear and the tomfoolery. Those stressful moments that almost appear to be taunts, flirts and then attacks. These images are screen shots taken from YouTube videos that people record and upload and then watch. They are unseemly, terrifying and sometimes deadly. I never am able to watch it through to a really violent end. It’s the taunting and teasing and intimidation that interests me most. The Feral lies just beneath the surface of the Human Animal. In this case, the composition and the color make a violence civilized.

Susan Hagen

Carved Linden, Oils, Colored Pencil, Wood

My current project, “Citizens,” is a series of works that celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of ordinary people who make up the fabric of urban life in Philadelphia. I make small-scale portraits in wood of my neighbors and fellow citizens, and my goal in this series is to capture a moment in time and create portraits that capture each person’s individuality with the dignity that they deserve. So far I have worked with utility workers, marathon runners, community gardeners, police officers, sports fans, homeless people, skaters, street festival participants, and trick-or-treaters, as well as Philadelphia Mayor, Jim Kenney. Inspired by the current political climate in the city, many of my recent portraits have featured activists, artists and protestors.

Deborah Riccardi

Oil Painting, Digital Photography

I study Nature and Art intensively as an Artist and as an Educator. Painting is the way I communicate my visual expressions by recording experiences by using light and color. Because Nature is constantly changing as I am working, my images tend to be immediate reactions to the environment. In the warmer months I go outdoors to record these experiences. When it gets colder I move indoors to work on larger works focusing on figurative works that integrate the environment. When I work in the Mission field, I record these experiences with my camera. Sometimes I sketch in graphite or paint watercolors making tangible visual records that are a way of researching and discovery for me.