DFAC curator Catherine Bergmann brought them together for this exhibition — she thought the two belonged together, artistically speaking, and I can see it too. The two artists hadn't met each other until they both appeared at DFAC for the artist talk. With these two artists, Bergmann built the exhibition theme around them and their work. Both artists took life as inspiration for these recent works. But here, life is not described in words, as science would give us.
For an artist, life is felt as personal experience and resonance, says Knapp, whose botanical sculptures fill the gallery. Knapp was drawn to the potentiality of seed, which inspired the sculptures seen here. She tells us that these sprouting sculptures are all archetypes. "What's true in nature is true in us," she says. Like these seeds, we as human beings are full of potential.
Surrounding Knapp's sculptures are Feldshue's paintings of amoeba-like creatures. The first thing that stands out in these paintings are the colors. Before she started painting, Feldshue chose a palette of five to eight colors.
The creatures in these Bontanamoeba paintings call to mind the little beasties you see in pond water when you look at it under a microscope… except Feldshue's beasties are more colorful and elaborate. Feldshue Darwin-era scientific illustrations inspired these paintings. The artists took a lot of liberty with their subjects back then, says Feldshue, and the drawings weren't always accurate. Like these scientific illustrations of old, Feldshue's amoeba-like creatures are more creative than accurate, but they are appealing in the eyes of this former biologist.
What I enjoyed most about this exhibition is that the subjects are close enough to real life for you to recognize the artists' intention, yet different enough to shed new light upon what constitutes the essence of life.
This article appears in Oct 4-11, 2018.