Climate and Environmental Sustainability
Cathy Hsiao, Gabrielle Vitollo and Scott Bluedorn
Joining us in April 2022, Cathy, Gabrielle and Scott are part of Fountainhead Residency's inaugural Climate and Environmental Sustainability residency. Each of these artists are considering climate change and its effects within their work; their residency is generously sponsored by Jane Wesman.
Cathy Hsiao
Cathy Hsiao distills the abstract idea of climate change into small, accessible actions that can be applied to an expanded field of ecology that includes connecting the local environments of her kitchen and studio with other, wider geographies. An amalgamation of craft, ancient tradition, and science, her sculpture practice repositions color, ornamentation, and the highly decorative languages of her own and other diasporic cultures as sources of ecological knowledge. In this way, she considers how those most impacted by climate change are those whose visual languages are most lacking in representations of ecology.
Creating low-relief sculptures utilizing plant dyes and mass-produced architectural products like cement and hydrostone, Cathy’s process involves casting the materials in shallow clay and plexiglass molds and using recycled food waste and plants from which she extracts color as dyes. These dyes color the gypsum and cement sculptures she creates, in an iconography culled from her East Asian heritage while referencing forms of pre-modernist architecture. Designed to evoke joy, memory, and empowerment, Cathy’s sculptures embed complex questions regarding what a sustainable environment looks like, and whose aesthetics determine how we see and imagine a shared future ecology. Based in Chicago, she has exhibited variously at the Chicago Cultural Center, the DePaul Art Museum, and Goldfinch Gallery, amongst others, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and will be teaching “Material Ecologies Lab: 靛藍 Indigo on the Meadow” this summer at Ox-Bow School of Art.
Artist Portraits by Jayme Gershen
Gabrielle Vitollo
Gabrielle Vitollo’s painting practice utilizes geological data and Google Earth technology to create abstracted works that hypothesize how human intervention might alter some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Her latest works - born out of an inability to travel during the pandemic - find Gabrielle traversing the globe from her laptop, studiously scrolling from glacial planes to alpine valleys to find images that stand out to her as either peculiar or particularly unique. Building on a legacy of Romanticist landscape paintings, Gabrielle’s take is a modern-day excavation of human activities that ultimately pose an existential threat: How will these landscapes be altered 50, 100, or 1,000 years from now?
Gabrielle’s process involves selecting and screenshotting a satellite image from Google Maps, that she then displays before her while she paints. In the tradition of abstraction, Gabrielle’s brushstrokes are fluid and intuitive, allowing her gut to let her know when a painting is finished. She aspires to mimic the Overview Effect among viewers of her work, a theory that suggests that humans would feel a deeper drive to protect the Earth if they were able to view it from a macro-scale. With a research-based practice that includes a Fulbright scholarship and DAAD fellowship, Gabrielle is a YoungArts alumna and her work has been exhibited at Kunstpunkt, GlogauAIR, and the Friedhofsmuseum in Berlin as well as The Knockdown Center, The Hole, and Brooklyn Expo in New York, among others.
Scott Bluedorn
Working in painting, printmaking, drawing, installation and collage, Scott Bluedorn illustrates how the natural world collides with contemporary human society in both detrimental and beautiful ways. His work considers how technological advancements like industrial manufacturing or mass commercialization contribute to the destruction of our ecosystems and biodiversity. Part of his process involves observing ruins and/or collecting found waste objects from shorelines, and researching how these things wound up abandoned in our natural environment. Intertwining both history and commerce - and finding connections between the two - makes up the basis of his research and ultimate works. Inspired by science, cultural anthropology and nautical tradition, Scott’s work takes shape around visual elements like diagrams, objects and drawings, and references naturalist art by artists like Audubon, Durer or Haeckel in its approach.
Whether drawing materials directly from nature for site-specific installations or creating surrealist-inspired drawings and collages, Scott centers both the simple beauty of nature and the destructive forces altering our world. Based in East Hampton, Scott’s work has been acquired by the Edward Albee Foundation and the Parrish Art Museum, and he previously completed residencies with Shoals Marine Lab and the Nature Conservancy as part of the Andy Warhol Preserve Visual Arts Program.
