"Sticks and Stones" at Heights Arts
I'm excited to be stretching out from my space this month AND showing a completely new body of work as part of a group show at Heights Arts. Based on sketches and taking their inspiration from the subject matter as materials, these new photograms are actually more drawings and printmaking than photography.
Sticks and Stones opens June 15 at Heights Arts and is on view through July 29. This summer exhibition showcases the amazing relationship between artist and nature. Contributors include Andy Curlowe, Ryan Dewey, Jeanetta Ho, Kevin Kautenburger, Steven Mastroianni, Freeland Southard, and Olga Ziemska.
Curator Bill Schubert described his thought process behind the exhibition’s title: “Humankind’s relationship with sticks and stones is fundamental. Sticks and stones were our first tools, our first weapons, and the materials we built our first dwellings of. All over the world and for thousands of years, people have been using stones to grind grain into flour and then baking their bread over burning sticks. The history of art also begins with sticks and stones. The first known drawings were drawn on the stone walls of the Lascaux caves (1700–1500 BC)…The giant heads of Easter Island (1200–1499). The great totem poles of the native North Americans (1700s to present). And eventually the work of the Land Artists and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970)… sticks and stones are the stuff of art. These seven great regional artists demonstrate that eternal truth.”
Read the full review in CAN Journal
"...Mastroinanni’s examples, titled “Roll,” “Rock,” “March,” and “Cold Snap,” look like phosphorescent trails, or they could be constellations, flaring against deep darkness. The marks we see are actual light-imprints of little sticks and stones. Mastroianni’s tachistic trails evoke age-old traditions of trace-leaving and mark-making, but considered from a larger perspective, they’re also about the impossible flare of identity as it burns against the darkness of time, about the strangeness of our journey." -Douglas Max Utter, CAN Journal
"Roll" 20x24 Silver gelatin print