Opening Reception – Moving and Working Through

Join us at the Overlook Gallery for the Opening Reception of Moving and Working Through.

In this exhibit, Yildiz Grodowski, Erin Palazzolo Loparo, and Jennifer Jean Okumura utilize abstraction as a type of movement – a formless form that through the language of gesture, composition, and scale, functions as a way of navigating the world and communicating their experiences within it. With a physicality and embodied practice guiding each artist’s approach, abstraction offers a mode of understanding the world with particular attention toward the bodily, the intuitive, and the mindful.

Whether it be spiritual growth, a connection to place, or radical change following a transformative life event, the works in the exhibit serve as a reminder of the individual and social components that shape the creation of a piece – even if they aren’t immediately visible or concretely represented in the work: Grodowski’s background in dance and focus on improvisation, Palazzolo Loparo’s familial attachments and profession, and Okumura’s personal artistic values and Buddhist-Catholic heritage. Yet even as they’re influenced by the specific details of their lives, they create scenes that feel spacious, wide, and expansive. They take the particular and the significant, and proceed to magnify it up to scale.