Nota Bene
Nota Bene highlights artists who add their individual narratives through their creative process, changing the context by which they create how the audience visualizes their work. The diverse backgrounds of these artists are reflected in their captivating success stories. From emigration and relationships to consumerism and individuality, the show focuses on the artists' passions.
Dana Oldfather celebrates the process of painting and the oddity of human experience with a focus on femininity and motherhood. In Oldfather's work, fantasy and obligation charge and bind domestic environments, giving memories new form. Color and form create joyful moments and frenetic marks remind us of the effort and strain it takes to bring those moments about.
Claudia Jowitt creates eccentric textured paintings that are manipulated with a variety of cake-icing sets, spatulas, and other kitchen implements. Jowitt's process upends traditional concepts of femininity as she challenges the history of craft versus serious art and their respective gendered narratives through kitchen tools.
Mohamad Khayata's artworks are the result of five years of displacement, working around the concept of migration, memory, and identity. His work is a tribute to displaced people; mothers and workers, and to their daily life stories that, far from familiar surroundings, are filled with effort, hope, and serene melancholy. Khayata's work is a resounding call for transformation and unity within his home country of Syria.
Eva Larsson's figurative ceramic sculptures explore societal standards and social hierarchy versus the liberation and courage of the individual. Her sculptures interact as a mediation of social interaction and place the individual within the context of a greater social and historical composite.
Agnieszka Pilat's portraits of machines act as both memorial and celebration. Having emigrated from Poland to America, she believes that 'the greatness of American is the greatness of its industry.' Her unique perspective on the American attitude to technology finds form in her celebration of machines through heroic, aristocratic portraits. Her work pays tribute to industry while confronting humanity's fear approaching automation.
