Date/Time
Date(s) - August 27, 2025 - December 14, 2025
10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Location
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, University Center for the Arts

Here & Now: Recent Work by the Department of Art & Art History

August 27 – December 14, 2025

Curated by Suzanne Hale and Cecelia Kreider

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Artists Statements

HALEY BATES

I am continually drawn to humble objects that share a background of utility and functional design, and that reside solidly within the domestic sphere. Many objects occupy that space, but the one I consistently return to is the spoon: one of the oldest, most common, and yet most compellingly beautiful objects that humans use on a nearly daily basis. Spoons evoke notions of care, connection, and generosity–an extension of our own cupped palm.

Because these objects are so familiar, any interruption of their design becomes a focal point for deeper interrogation. I challenge the usual assumptions around function and use by amplifying or modifying the qualities that define their utility. These unexpected and incongruous results allow me to explore the metaphorical and poetic possibilities that such objects can contain.

JUSTIN CARNEY

The artwork is from the photographic series, and the disappearing has become. The work questions what it means when one’s memories fade after the death of a loved one and how this forgetting affects a person. and the disappearing has become imagines a future where the rest of my family has passed to explore feelings of disconnection, forgetting, fear, and grief.

By using photography, mono-printing techniques, and erasing with sandpaper, the work embodies the process of forgetting, an invisible process where memories overlap, become obscured, and buried. The gestural act of sanding and painting work to claim this process of forgetting as a necessary part of life rather than harmful.

I share this work to show that lives are knotted together beyond photography and memory. The ones we love never truly leave us and we never truly forget. Form may change but it doesn’t disappear. Death is not the end.

CLAIRE CHIEN

My arts-based research on raising a U.S.-born child as a first-generation Asian immigrant mother began before my daughter’s birth and deepened during pregnancy. I created Multicultural Identity using handmade paper to symbolize her creation. I blended xuan and mau paper from Taiwan with U.S.-made BFK paper as the base for cyanotype printing—linked to her name (晴, “sunny”) and birth month. Rulers in U.S. and Taiwanese units reflect her dual identity and the “rules” she must navigate. Preserving textured fibers blurred the image; a single layer tore during chemical washes. To strengthen it, I added husk of water bamboo and cane bagasse paper from my home county, Nantou. The four images presented reflect challenges in forming multicultural identity—how cultural “textures” blur clarity and fragile foundations may tear. As I contemplate the complexities my daughter will face, I adjust materials—seeking balance, resilience, and strength in layered identity.

JEFF CORNWALL

Curriculum is more than lesson plans or texts. It is a living body. Curriculum derives from the Latin currere which means a running of the course. Thus, curriculum is not simply a course of study, but it is the running itself. Education scholar Ted Aoki suggests that in any course, there are “a multiplicity of curricula, as many as there are …students.” To create these curricular bodies, conventional curricular materials, such as lesson plans, were transformed into pulp and then molded and collaged into these forms. Curriculum materialized as pulp demonstrates its vitality and versatility.

MARK DINEEN

While born in a small city outside of Chicago, Dineen was mostly raised in the agricultural communities of northern Illinois. As the son of a carpenter, craft and construction have long been at the front of his mind. Working in the fields, factories, and construction sites of the Midwest greatly inform his perspective on art and design today. His studio practice explores the plural nature of our material vernacular and its cross sections with craft, manufacturing, domesticity, and landscape. The form of his work varies to include furniture, drawing, painting, sculpture and land art. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally for over a decade. 

SUZANNE FARIS

This work explores strength, resilience, and persistence, and the conviction that, in some way, “persistence” provides a path forward, and being present and standing in your power matters. Each piece has the starting point of a shared female experience, and is designed to acknowledge and honor the connected, and often invisible, trials and triumphs. In different ways, both pieces employ aesthetics of pageantry and activism, and are influenced by the disciplines of sculpture, garment making, and performative work. The combination of lush and textured fabric as well as the inclusion of unapologetic bows and trim is deliberate in its effect to create visibility and celebrate presence.

PAUL FLIPPIN

Masculinity is broken.

Toxic behavior is celebrated, elevated, and elected.

Restrictive definitions – devoid of personal responsibility but awash in dominance – proliferate.

We need work that confronts what it means to come of age in an era defined by so much confusion and contradiction. JAKE, a graphic novel, is my attempt to counteract existing narratives that limit manhood, harming all genders.

JAKE presents a conversation between a stepfather and his teenage son – the vulnerable discussion of relationships and masculinity that we need to have, but so often avoid. Articulating notions of sexuality beyond the mere mechanics, JAKE is a narrative of an adult offering honest, if embarrassed, guidance as these two men attempt to discover a masculinity of kindness.

Because the solution to all the world’s problems is more comic books.

SANAM EMAMI

The concept of the garniture came to Europe from China and became popular in 17th and 18th centuries. Also referred to as “cupboard sets”, these matched sets of pottery were made for the decoration of mantlepieces, kitchen cupboards and other spaces in the home.

The pots in the exhibition are all designed for the space and the scale of the home. They are part of an ongoing exploration of the exchange of ideas and materials between Europe and Asia that emerged along the trading routes of the Silk Road.

DEL HARROW

In my studio practice I work with a variety of materials and processes – clay, wood, concrete, cast metal. While the work always maintains a connection with the long histories of humans directly forming clay and other materials by hand, I’m also interested in the ways the development and innovation of tools and technologies have always been a part of pottery tradition. For the last 10 years – as one thread of my work – I’ve built a series of machines for large scale 3D printing with clay. The vessels in this exhibition are the product of the most recent iteration of that machine.

ELNAZ JAVANI

Piscina is part of the Dwelling Places project series, which examines the tension between belonging and displacement, drawing from personal and collective histories to explore the body’s relationship to place, space, and memory. Through print, embroidery, dyeing, and layered surfaces, the works evoke both shelter and impermanence—structures that hold but also let go. Material manipulations become metaphors for fragility, resilience, and transformation. Rooted in a queer immigrant perspective, Dwelling Places blends storytelling and craft traditions to create intimate, empathetic spaces where viewers can contemplate how home is formed, lost, and reimagined through time and the shifting nature of experience.

MARY-ANN KOKOSKA

Tangled Garden Series

My work stems from my passion for gardening and explores the human management of nature. As primitive landscapes disappear, I am surrounded by replications of them in the form of gardens, specifically my own backyard plot.

Through designing and organizing, weeding and pruning I create my own aesthetic interpretation of nature. This is impacted by my fascination with formal gardens and interest in landscape design.

Here I superimpose a drawing of a traditional formal garden over top a woodland scene in its natural state. The simplicity of structure, clean lines and sense of order are a striking contrast to the complexity, irregular mark making and disorder of the natural landscape.

Although the differences between these two realms are accentuated, they are inevitably one and the same.

CECELIA KREIDER

Sanctum Sui “one’s own sanctuary” envisions the mind as a guarded interior. A veil of gold shields the eyes, concealing and honoring the self within. Sight is surrendered so the gaze can turn inward, toward a private realm untouched by the outside world.

AITOR LAJARIN-ENCINA

My paintings are visual poems that invite viewers to dive into vignettes of existential suspense that aim to trigger philosophical ruminations about life, interpersonal relationships, relationships between objects, and relationships with the environment. At the same time, they aim to invite the viewer to reflect on the history and idiosyncrasy of the pictorial image as it relates to its history and cultural contextualization, its complicated relationship with representation, and its material culture, as minds dive into the iconography and bodies get affected by the sensorial and material agency of the pictorial objects in the exhibition space.

MARIUS LEHENE

Irrigation Channel

Whatever it is we’re made of, it is drying. A contraption guides the vital flow where needed. Where is it needed? The existential question has turned topological… We occur similarly as space, generic. We, the ultimate resource to be optimized, derailed off course (of course!) and evaporating, now rather shallow against the shadow of the apparatus; the only thing that blocks the sun. Where is “we”? Just as impossible to redefine as the chipped, peeling, tired skin of paint; unable to offer immunity to whatever entity it locally and temporarily describes. Such is life. Moreover, it’s not the need that dawns first. Rather, the mirror-image; something – call it sky – needing otherness to form an appearance, however flipped. It’s a re and a de-forming. Forma formans. Cracks reveal that the veneer is glued and moving. They promise, and forever owe, the truth of form.

Pond

Arising first is the ready-made meaning, an image. There is no blue before there is sky. In it we see figures which, retroactively, constitute a background*. Then an entire image emerges as a figure – slowly sinking, scrolling down. Like Indian jute rice bags, backgrounds and figures weave from ancient threads, some of them physiological. Of such segregations, none fair, all seeming is made. And “in such seeming all things are”**. But the background, if describable, is itself an image woven of its own figure ground segregations. And so on; the pyramid of perception has its head up its bottom.

* A “background” is never simply there; it is a decision, albeit subconscious. The German equivalent works better here – Grund (ground, reason, or foundation).

** Wallace Stevens, Description Without Place.

CLARA NULTY

Paperwork

These drawings on used privacy envelopes disclose the private or negligible details of the day to day. The rendered subjects are simultaneously discarded and memorable, just as hard copy envelopes are antiquated and inescapable. This body of work is on-going and growing, just as these envelopes accumulate in my mailbox and wrappers, cans, pills, and pacifiers build my space and reality.

Running on Fumes

I am often tired and multitasking. Between motherhood, teaching, the studio, and the rest of my personal world, I layer the debris of my life onto the surface of my paintings. Absent-minded byproducts of my routine include erased shopping lists, doodles, material scruff. Abstracted into textures, they undermine and reinforce the rendered subject: a factory that both builds and dissolves.

ERIKA OSBORNE

For millennia, the raw and mystic nature of fire shaped the human experience. Paradoxically, as it shaped culture and settled us, we began to push fire away. Today, we rarely cook over open fire or use it to improve our hunting grounds. Instead, we have banished fire – expelling it from not only our homes and fields but from the very forests that need it to survive.

In Forest Pyre/Camp Fire, fire reclaims its rightful place, illuminating both the intimate, human-scale rituals it fosters and the vast, ecological cycles it sustains. Here, flame becomes both healer and catalyst, nurturing life and restoring balance to the forest and to ourselves.

JOHNNY PLASTINI

“Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view?”- Victor Hugo

AJEAN RYAN

An “apparatus” is a kind of tool or instrument that serves a particular purpose.

In this work, bits and pieces of drawings from the past as well as found ephemeras that I am constantly collecting come together to create a landscape of sorts. Architectural, fantastical, and symbolic, the imagery comes together from the past and the present of the moments lived in the studio.

NATHAN CORY SEYMOUR

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others”- Pericles

“These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, action over state, struggle over hope” – Ta-Nehisi Coates

HALEY TAKAHASHI

Presence/ Absence

This piece contemplates how the oversaturation of symbols changes their meaning and impact. The lucky cat (Maneki-Neko) is a widely recognized symbol. Over time the meaning and origin of this symbol has become somewhat warped. Like saying a word repeatedly until it loses meaning, the saturation of lucky cat imagery in America has lost its specific associations and become a general image correlated with all East-Asian cultures. The original form cannot be fully removed from its context; thus, its history changes its meaning. Inspiration for this piece came from melancholy as a Japanese-American who’s access to Japanese culture comes largely from popular culture and reproductions.

Safety Net (Tentative Balance)

Daruma are traditional Japanese talismans of wishing and good luck. The paper mâché dolls depict Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, in a perpetual state of meditation. They start with blank eyes. When a wish is made, one eye is filled in. Once the wish comes true, the second is filled. The ritual is completed by burning the dolls at the end of the year. My abstraction of traditional daruma has only one eye filled, suggesting that a wish has been made but is yet to come true. As ceramics, they have prematurely gone through the fire and are thus suspended in an incomplete state of longing, wishing, and waiting.

This sculptural piece considers how precarious hope can feel. The Daruma is suspended by a thin thread and frail wooden structure, always on the edge of fraying or breaking. The ceramic daruma conveys the weight of the past. They are almost featureless as if the vibrancy of their wishes has been lost to time while their presence remains poignant.

CYANNE TORNATZKY

According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, 2025 is the Year of the Snake. Snake years usually come with big changes, as snakes are known for shedding their skin. Snakes can be beneficial, but they can also be deadly. These two works are part of a series that contemplates a year of tumult and uncertainty – a year that has seemed to evoke more of the snake’s deadly side.

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Free & open to all!

Support for the museum’s exhibitions and programming is generously provided by the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund and the FUNd Endowment at CSU.