UVA’s Overlook Gallery
175 Washington St., Brighton MA 02135
September 8 – October 13, 2024
Curated by Jessica Hernandez
Exhibit Assistants: Avery Cather, Lexi Liu, Yuriko Ramirez
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 15, 2024 at 2pm
Virtual Artists Talk: Thursday, September 26, 2024 at 6:30pm | Zoom Registration
Exhibit Statement
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.
Indeed, the scale at which Grodowski, Palazzolo Loparo, and Okumura choose to work is one of the most compelling and stunning aspects of the exhibit. By working with larger dimensions, they create compositions that are capacious enough to hold the emotions and ideas that hover over and permeate the work. By choosing a wider scale to work through, they’ve provided an expansive space for us to wade in.
However, despite the resonances in sensibility, comportment, and concept, each artist has a noticeably unique approach to abstraction.
Okumura’s paintings, most of which are from her Nature’s Lure series, rely on heavily blended palettes; a combination of colors and tones that feel thoroughly mixed without contrasting edges. Her refusal of harsh distinctions and definite separation evokes her “main idea of being nowhere and everywhere, waltzing around cultural boundaries…attempting to incorporate conflict, balance, and harmony.” Without a set position for and from which to view the work, her paintings simultaneously generate a sense of being within, looking out, and standing in the midst of, offering an immersive invitation to “[travel] through form and energy.”
Palazzolo Loparo’s works on paper reveal a dynamic approach; one that incorporates careful placement, an openness toward experimentation, and a regard for unrestraint. Merging intention and intuition, her “physical and visceral mark-making” practice manifests as sweeping motions across space, acrylic paint splattered from a distance, and dripping streaks that indicate a temporal aspect in the work – a maneuvering of paper and surface following the application of pigment. Palazzolo Loparo’s piece Infinite Energy is a rich example of her personal and artistic inventiveness, a desire to test out and experiment with materials, marks, limits, and shape.
Interiors and exteriors both translucent and opaque; curves, lines, and edges that are at once defined and subtle; and vague figural forms that haunt and contemplate – these are some of the major features of Grodowski’s work. And when these motifs are read alongside highly emotive titles such as I Tried To Invite You, Why Didn’t You COME IN? and When She Closed Her Eyes, her mixed media paintings raise ideas about relationships and attachment. They also bring to mind the idea of “connections,” which Grodowski notes is “the foundation of [her] art…” Her mixed media work ultimately “communicate[s] the essence of a relationship or place” – the essence of what is or perhaps the essence of what’s been left.
Yildiz Grodowski, Erin Palazzolo Loparo, and Jennifer Jean Okumura offer stunning examples of abstraction’s potential to convey one’s lived experience, doing so in ways that are imaginative, expressive, and capacious.
Artist Statements and Biographies
As a visual artist and a dancer, I find many connections between abstract painting and improvisational dance. Just as I let the music move me from within, I allow my artistic intuition to bring my brush to life.
I make art because I don’t know how to live without creating. The foundation of my art is connections. I aim to communicate the essence of a relationship or place with my visual language. In my art, ideas and expressions are more important than the materials. My goal is to transport the viewer to a place, person or moment in their life. I create abstract paintings with harmonious and brave colors. Using acrylic, mixed media, and collage material, I love exploring with unusual tools for surprising and delightful effects.
My paintings go through three stages. I start by playing with colors and marks, following my intuition, allowing my technical knowledge only here and there. Then comes the ‘ugly stage.’ Nothing seems to be working, the colors and shapes struggle to be saved. It’s tempting to discard the work right here, but I always push through knowing the beauty I can create. This connection to my work brings me to the home stretch.
I will never sign a piece until I’m completely connected with it. Once I am, you will be too.
Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Yildiz Grodowski spent most of her life in the Boston area. These two cultures constantly enrich and inspire her. In her early years, she designed sets for stage performances and residential interiors. If she doesn’t find art, art finds her. As an international award winner, her work is exhibited in solo and group shows, and collected both nationally and internationally. She is a member of multiple art associations.
This mini retrospective showcases an abstract expressionist art process that is spontaneous and therapeutic, a means and experience of active prayer. I enjoy physical and visceral mark-making, moving viewers into reflective interior spaces that are conversational and cathartic. These specific artworks developed during crucial life turning points: confronting my mother’s cancer diagnosis, becoming an art therapist, and recapturing my energy as an artist-mother.
Erin Palazzolo Loparo (b. Tarrytown, NY 1979) is an abstract expressionist and mixed-media artist based out of Andem Art Studios in Brookline, MA. Erin leads art therapy groups at the New Art Center Newton, is resident teaching artist for Public Schools of Brookline’s Early Education Program (BEEP) and creates private art commissions. She has exhibited in numerous shows in NY and the Boston area with work on permanent exhibit at Harvard Medical School. Erin graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude with a B.A. in English and honors thesis in Studio Art from Williams College (2001), MS in Art Therapy from The College of New Rochelle (2005) and earned her ATR (Registered Art Therapist credential) in 2008.
As I created these new works, I was keenly aware that every mark I made was made by one hand–my hand–and that the finished product would live and breathe as part of a world in which we all are tenants and share. An expression is synonymous with Mother Earth, leading to our departure from the stations of life, searching for new noise and passion, and empowering and encouraging change. In this conception, ‘Nature’ is not a source of material for production but the beginning and end of all life and culture. My work is centered around the main idea of being nowhere and everywhere, waltzing around cultural boundaries with beliefs and traveling through form and energy, attempting to incorporate conflict, balance, and harmony to shape the work’s influences, thoughts, and hope for the same thing and shared moment.
In the NOW, provocative in a decorous way, optimistic—these terms characterize me as an Artist. I believe art and its ability to elevate people inspire me daily. As artists, we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. Thus, capturing the moment of today while embracing the past, we, as practicing artists, are in tune with the activity of those who push the envelope to the maximum of what is defined as art. On some level, art is life – my life.
Jennifer grew up in Philadelphia. She attended Syracuse University and received her MFA from Boston University. She has a strong comprehensive knowledge of the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary Art, with diverse and extensive Fine Art experiences as an Operations Manager, Fine Art Consultant, Design Associate, Adjunct Educator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, coFounder of Art Advising Group Invoke Contemporary with Diana Stelin the Founding member of DTR Modern, and currently sits on the board as President and founding Exhibition Chair for National Association of Women Artists, Inc. MA chapter and former The FPAC Board of Directors.