Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College Presents “Humor Me”
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (March 10, 2022) —The Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents “Humor Me,” an exhibition of work by Betsy Brandt, Kiah Celeste, Amy Cutler, David Greenberger, and Nina Katchadourian, March 24 through April 25. An opening reception will take place from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, March 24.
Curated by Skidmore Teaching Professor and Schick Gallery Assistant Director Trish Lyell, works on view include drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and video. The humor in question may be subtle, overt, and even contradictory, arousing a lingering curiosity in the viewer.
Betsy Brandt’s paintings flood the eye with color and tease with loopy rounded shapes and puckish gestures. References to nature abound and confound — inexplicable mounds swell against the confines of the paper, bulbous shapes sprout prickers or curly tendrils. Brandt grew up in Queensbury, New York, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Philadelphia College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her art has been exhibited in museums and galleries since 1987; one of her first well-known pieces is “Adirondackland,” a 1998 collaborative installation with Susie Brandt shown at Art in General in New York City.
After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography in 2016, Kiah Celeste now focuses on three-dimensional work, using recycled industrial objects and building them into abstract forms. Their stability is reliant on the interdependency of the objects, rather than joining methods such as gluing or welding. Celeste’s areas of interest include social stigmas and conditioning, racism, and gentrification. Within the seriousness of these issues, Celeste’s work is often buoyant, offering juxtapositions both unexpected and apropos. She has shown work at KMAC Museum in Louisville, Kentucky; Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, Kentucky; and Swivel Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, among other venues. Celeste currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.
Amy Cutler is known for her enigmatic illustrations of women performing strange, cryptic tasks: carrying goats on their backs in “Above the Fjord,” or sewing stripes onto tigers in “Tiger Mending.” Rendered with exquisite detail and reminiscent of Persian miniatures, her narratives are unexplained, the white backgrounds providing little context. The fantasy worlds she creates are both humorous and foreboding. Cutler’s works have been shown at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, among other national and international venues, and are held in numerous public and private collections. She is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York.
David Greenberger is an artist and writer best known for his Duplex Planet series of zines, comic books, and spoken-word performances. His 9×11-inch colored pencil drawings are often text-based and explore personal philosophies, popular culture, and accidental poetics. Each drawing follows specific compositional limitations; over the past decade, he has amassed thousands of drawings grouped into idiosyncratic categories such as “Spaghetti,” “Haircut Commemorative Drawings Priced the Same as my Age,” and “Band Names Popular among Twelve-year-old Boys.” Along with comic books, Greenberger’s work has been adapted into short films and one-act plays, and his essays and performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio. Greenberger lives and works in upstate New York.
An interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects, Nina Katchadourian’s choice of materials and medium is often the byproduct of chance or self-imposed rules. Katchadourian says she’s “very fond of situations where things go slightly awry.” Her portfolio includes such categories as “uninvited collaborations with nature,” and “confusing animals.” “Humor Me”presents her video “Endurance” and a selection from her series of “Lavatory Self-portraits in the Flemish Style,” which she photographed entirely in airplane bathrooms. Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1, among other national and international venues. Katchadourian is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and by Pace Gallery in New York City.
Schick Gallery events are free and open to the public. Please visit www.skidmore.edu/schick for updated information on related events.
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