The Invisible Dog is pleased to welcome 3walls for Highlights - A Year of Studio Visits: Tatiana Arocha, Julie Harman Dovan, Susan Homer and Stephanie Snider
3walls’ spring pop up features the work of four local artists, Tatiana Arocha, Julie Harman Dovan, Susan Homer and Stephanie Snider. They met these four women, one a mixed media artist and three painters, throughout the past year’s studio visits and were inspired and impressed with their talent. In their mission to present excellent, affordable art to their clients and community, they have learned that studio visits are the heart and soul of their success. Every week they are looking and learning and meeting new people to uncover all our local area has to offer. They always look forward to their studio visits and are excited to share the work of these four women they met this year.
Tatiana Arocha
BAILE DE ESPELATIAS, 2016
Unique UV print on Fisher Textiles Cotton canvas hand-painted with gold acrylic panel
48x38”
Tatiana Arocha grew up in Colombia, where I often journeyed to the rainforests and witnessed lands and lifeways that have been caught in the middle of the eco/genocidal forces of both the drug trade and the US’s War on Drugs. The dizzyingly biodiverse Colombian forest, and the complex social and economic histories that have threatened its existence since the colonists arrived, remained indelibly imprinted in my psyche. And it was from that land and that complexity, that my re-learning began. And out of that learning, my artwork continues to emerge.
My fieldwork is a process of communing with plants that include drawing, rubbing, photographing, preserving, and tracing the bark, seeds, and leaves of the forest. Over time, I have built up an index of forms and textures, a new and personal visual lexicon. These experiences are further enriched through ongoing conversations with indigenous people who have both ancestral and contemporary knowledge of the local ecology. Through witnessing their relationships to the land and their more-than-human kin, I see their cultivation of forests as a process for learning and creating ecosystemic, social, and spiritual relationships across generations and species.
Back in the studio, I use a variety of digital and analog approaches, including drawing, frottage, monoprints, photocopying, and digital painting to create collaged forest portraits, often at a large scale. These texturally detailed and immersive compositions aim to draw the viewer into contemplation with the immense knowledge and web of relationships that the forest holds. I employ a monochrome palette as a metaphor for the endangered natural world. Gold is used for details, acting as glimmering reminders of human avarice and the violent costs of extractive economies.
Recently I have experimented with translating this visual vocabulary into sculptural forms using natural materials sourced from the forest itself and sometimes fabricated with support from local artisans. This has led me to more deeply explore how my art process can advance mutually beneficial intercultural, economical, and ecological exchanges with my collaborators. Furthermore, I am seeking to embrace the ephemerality and natural life cycles of transformation and decay that these materials bring to the work. In the future, I seek to invest ritual and offering into both the process and forms of my art, and in so doing, deepen my investment in and care for the land.
Instagram: @arocha.tatiana
Website: tatianaarocha.com
Julie Harman Dovan
The Pony I Always Wanted, 2022
Oil on linen
49x60”
Julie Harman Dovan Most of my work is about my relationship to my daughters. I use them as my inspiration because I know that time is of the essence, and I want to capture the very moments when they are young and innocent. Painting them gives me a chance to shed light on a rare interlude in the frenzied rush of the mother-daughter relationship. The process also mirrors my own maturation from girlhood into womanhood, and when I complete their portraits, I often feel as though I have given life all over again.
Julie is an emerging artist in Manhattan’s contemporary art scene with studio space in the West Village and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited in group shows such as ‘Eminent Domain’, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY and ‘Made in Chelsea, Group of Ten’, Agora Gallery, New York, NY. Julie has also worked with the artist Paulina Olowska in her studio in Rabka Zdroj, Poland. With a B.A. in Painting at Messiah College, she draws inspiration from painters and photographers alike, including John Singer Sargent, Lucian Freud, Sally Mann, and Julia Margaret Cameron. These artists have influenced her conceptually, specifically Mann’s work with her children in Virginia.
Instagram: @jharmandovan
Website: julieharmandovan.com
Susan Homer
Swallow, Swallow, Flying, Flying, 2019
Oil on canvas
52x40"
Susan Homer My paintings express what I cannot explain in words. Through them, I indulge my love of pattern and material, I create new stories based on old ones, and I imagine what I cannot know.
I have painted birds, flowers, and trees for more than thirty years. Through the process of painting, I hope to conjure a timeless place where traces of real things and events and my state of mind are revealed. I am interested in the realm between the real and the folkloric, between what I see in front of me and what I imagine. Though my paintings are sometimes blunt in their execution, they are nonetheless romantic in their associations.
My big flower paintings are like gardens. They evolve over months, sometimes years, and along the way, they develop minds of their own. I compose the elements initially, but at a certain point in the process, things become a little looser, or at least more democratic. As these same elements command an organization more naturally suited to them, I am forced to answer in ways that are often unexpected. By contrast, each of my small flower paintings and still lifes is deliberate. I establish the composition at the outset, and it rarely veers. But, here, like fugitive guests, the birds—if they appear at all—are unplanned. They enter later and perch if they fit. I experience my work as a threshold between the past and present. At one level, as I finish a piece, it is a record of my past action. At another, the subjects I depict, the birds, flowers, trees, and patterns, are of personal and emotional significance, or records of a different sort. The dishes and linens that inspire me were my grandmother’s; the flowers are from my garden and the books in my library; and the patterned scrims evoke the wallpaper and fabrics that surround me. My paintings, like an old house, contain many levels of memories. They are a source of constancy, and yet the gentle upheavals make them what they are.
Instagram: @susanhomer6285
Website: susanhomer.com
Stephanie Snider
Untitled (dollhouse 3), 2016
Ink, watercolor, gouache, silkscreen, pencil and collage on paper 44x30”
Stephanie Snider's work takes the form of drawings, paintings, and sculptures dealing with pattern, place, and psyche through the lens of fictional architecture, landscape, and design. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has also studied Indian miniature painting independently in Jaipur, India since 2014. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize/Emerging Artist Prize in cooperation with the American Academy in Berlin, and has been a fellow at MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Art Omi. Her work has been shown widely, including multiple exhibitions in New York and Germany. She recently worked on the original art for the upcoming (Spring 2023) Netflix-produced series, Transatlantic, making work inspired by Surrealists such as Max Ernst, André Breton, and Hans Bellmer, including a new version of the Jeu de Marseille tarot that Surrealist refugees created in 1940, as well as work on the title sequence design for the show. She lives and works between Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.
Instagram: @stephaniesnider
Website: stephaniesnider.com
On View
May 22-May 25
Opening Party
Monday, May 22
6-8pm
Admission
Free
Location
51 Bergen St.
Gallery Hours
1–7pm