Exclusive installation at Cordata Gallery proudly features work of Western alumna Renee Noelle Cheesman
After winning Juror's Choice Award from the Whatcom Museum last year, BFA Studio Art alumna (2017, with Magna Cum Laude honors) Renee Noelle Cheesman is a proudly featured Bellingham artist at the Cordata Gallery. The exhibition Color and Line: An Exploration by Three NW Artists, is on display until January 25th. This exhibition features rare pieces from the estate of prolific Dutch-American artist Johannes Kunst, over 100 of Bellingham renowned artist David Syre's drawings, and a site-specific installation by Renee Noelle Cheeseman created exclusively for the gallery.
As a painter, installation artist and interdisciplinary artisan, Cheesman does not confine her work to two dimensions. She explores an object's interaction and meaning within the space it resides, being mindful of the architectural qualities, history, and relationship of both the object and the space. In this exhibition, Cheesman uses vivid colors and lines to explore the characteristics of contemporary American culture with inspiration from media, podcasts and conversations about American life. In her exploration, she utilizes new materials, methods and concepts to innovate final forms.
From Cordata Gallery
Cordata Gallery is especially proud to showcase one of Cheesman's rare and captivating site-specific installations, crafted from strands of yarn, string, cloth, incorporated strands of poured highly glossed black paint,and black lava salt. This installation mimics a vessel with a narrow pathway, with the receptacle representing stored knowledge and the strands of paint symbolizing ideas, thoughts, and actions within a higher collective consciousness. The two possible entrances and exits offer an experience designed to challenge the viewer's certainty. One may enter with a fixed belief and exit the same way, or, through reflection, emerge with a transformed perspective. Cheesman views the transformation of a viewer's belief through her art as her ultimate achievement.
The works in this exhibition invite the viewer into Cheesman's deeply personal realm of rooms (diagrams), objects (abstractions), and the self (portraits), uncovering the identity, history, and memories that reside in a space beyond words.
From Renee Noelle Cheesman
My work explores characteristics of a contemporary American culture at its worst, best and average. The projects come from research, media, podcasts and conversations about the American experience which develop into visual articulations of the frivolity, richness and commonalities of modern life. I mine an array of topics around our cultural practice, enigmas, myths, contradictions, and obsessions into multiple bodies of work in paintings, installations, or sculptures. I have found refuge in rejecting traditional norms and methods by exploring new materials and the seeds of new questions by letting the idea dictate the final form or materials. The studio becomes a laboratory and a performance of the questions I am asking and an exploration of playing with new materials and innovation and exploitation.
I am curious of the riddle of these curated spaces and the objects within them in which we dwell in. By expressing the tension between the room (diagram), the object (abstraction) and self (autobiography) I am discovering the identity, history and memories which reside in a realm beyond words. The spaces and the objects whisper and I am listening.
Previous, jury-winning installation by Renee Noelle Cheesman
