Monte Antrim and Linda Kuehne: Remnants
Monte Antrim and Linda Kuehne: Remnants
Wednesday, September 11 — Saturday, October 12, 2024
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, September 11, 5-6pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 11, 6-8pm
The Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University is excited to present Remnants, an exhibition featuring designer, illustrator, and artist Monte Antrim and landscape photographer Linda Kuehne. The exhibition will be held from Wednesday, Sept. 11 to Saturday, Oct. 12. An artist’s talk will take place at the Mueller Gallery on Sept. 11 from 5 to 6 p.m., followed by a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Through their individual observational and creative practices, Monte Antrim and Linda Kuehne both connect their own backgrounds to their encounters with landscapes and architecture to impart specific and pertinent social commentary. Antrim’s sketches and paintings document his awareness and absorption of his milieu through line work and/or brushstrokes that fluctuate between gesture and rigidity, drawing viewers into the essence of a space and that which occupies it. Kuehne’s integration of reflections from glass windows into her shots of a desolate street and its abandoned buildings strengthen their sense of emptiness and neglect, producing a foreboding atmosphere.
Antrim’s work informed by his experience of the city: its cars, buildings, bars and people. In this context, the sketchbook has been central to all aspects of his creative life as his practice of constantly drawing his surroundings has given him skills and confidence to develop and communicate his ideas and designs. While studying architecture, Antrim began his sketchbook process to hone his drawing abilities in the pre-digital era. His drawing practice and the sketchbook itself have remained integral to his professional career as an architectural designer and design visualization consultant for over three decades. Additionally, his paintings, drawings and prints almost always originate in the sketchbook. “The sketchbook process, of course, is important beyond practical considerations. The meditative pleasure of drawing, of engagement with a moment through observing and recording, is an essential part of my daily life, and the sketchbooks remain an archive of my trajectory…” says Antrim.
Kuehne photographs the suburban landscape as a way to understand her impulse to flee what she interprets to be tight constraints of small-town living, based on her personal experiences growing up in a suburb outside of New York City. She has continued to photograph suburbs and cities across America to explore the role that architecture plays in conveying the spirit of a place and the health of a community. Having focused on this subject matter since 2008, Kuehne’s photographs convey the sense of unease of living in a country where infrastructure is often crumbling and suburbs experience problems similar to those of larger cities. “I also want to challenge the view we Americans have of ourselves as living in a country that is always progressing, ever expanding. The reality of these photographs tells a different story”, says Kuehne.
Monte Antrim (b. 1966) grew up on a farm in Indiana. After earning an undergraduate degree in Architecture, he moved to Seattle in 1990 and worked as an architectural designer. In 1998, he moved to New York City and lived there until 2023, working in architecture and design visualization and earning a master’s degree. He currently lives in Indiana and is a Professor of Architecture at Ball State University.
Linda Kuehne is a contemporary American photographer. Her work explores the cultural implications of the human impact on the landscape in suburbs and cities across the United States. She mixes realistic depiction with abstraction as a means to convey her vision in an instinctive, emotional and poetic way. She is interested in the role that the natural landscape and the built environment play in conveying the spirit of a place and the health of a community. She received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Starting out with a dark room in her basement after college and printing silver gelatin prints, she now works digitally. Her work has been exhibited in art galleries and museums, including a two-person show at the Katonah Museum of Art, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, a solo show at Kean University, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and most recently, atwo-person exhibition at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, Connecticut. She lives and works in New York.
Margaret Noel: Faults and Facades
Wednesday, September 11 — Saturday, October 12, 2024
Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, September 11, 5-6pm
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 11, 6-8pm
The Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University is excited to present Faults and Facades, an exhibition featuring the work of artist Margarete Noel. The exhibition will be held from Wednesday, Sept. 18 to Saturday, Oct. 12. An artist’s talk will take place at the Mueller Gallery on Sept. 11 from 5 to 6 p.m., followed by a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Margaret Noel documents the reconstruction of communities affected by disasters, both natural and manmade, in her current series, “Shelter”. Her process begins with initial plein air drawings created on site as communities start to rebuild. These drawings are highly detailed and serve as source material for her encaustic wax paintings that strip the buildings down to simplified architectural shapes, underlining the fragility of the infrastructure that all communities rely upon for shelter and safety. She explains that vulnerability of buildings and infrastructure is especially visible in areas under pressure from repeated climate events and seismic activity, but they can also be rendered suddenly obvious when a familiar building or bridge collapses due to a hidden flaw or neglected maintenance.
In her encaustic pieces, Noel layers molten beeswax, soot, pigment and paper, starting with an underlayer of collage shapes and patterns that suggest transience and instability. This collage layer is built from discarded materials such as old magazines and soot ink, highlighting the resilience of communities as they rebuild, as well as the human tendency to retain and reconstruct instead of discard. Partially obscuring the collage, the solidity and geometry of the waxed encaustic paint strokes depict architectural forms and scaffolding, standing in stark contrast to the movement and jagged edges of the collage layer. She describes glowing colors, seductive surfaces, and distinct edges as evocative of Byzantine enamels and glazes. “I want these to be objects of beauty that [encourage people to] look head-on at uncomfortable truths about the fragility of our infrastructure and our human desire to rebuild the familiar and historic, even when repeated pressure from climate change and geographic faults make these efforts feel ultimately futile,” says Noel.
Noel’s formal reduction and fragmentation of architectural spaces, as well as her unique range of contextually relevant materials, are tailored to address a reality of both tension and optimism in our contemporary moment of profound meteorological and geological change.”
Margaret Noel studied Studio Art and Anthropology at Oberlin College. She then spent several years in Austin, Texas working at a bronze foundry, restoring antique furniture, and interning in paper conservation at Utah’s Harry Ransom Center. Noel earned her M.F.A. in Painting from the New York Studio School and currently splits her time between a studio in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, N.Y. and a position as Department Chair and Professor of Drawing and Painting in the Department of Art & Design at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries, museums, and art fairs in New York, Budapest, San Francisco, Houston, and Seattle, among other locations. It has also been featured in print and online publications, including Hyperallergic, The Hopkins Review and The Painter’s Table. She is represented by Marloe Gallery in Brooklyn.