Notions of Motion

Notions of Motion exhibition featured in Hot Glass / Cool Art by Buckeye Community Arts Network (BCAN), September 2021. In partnership with Destination Toledo, Solheim Cup USA, Gathered Glass, Graphite Design + Build, and the Arts Commission; Toledo, Ohio.

Notions of Motion

September 2nd - October 4th, 2021

Gathered Glass

23 N. Huron Street, Toledo, Ohio 43604

Katrina Niswander + Cyd Gottlieb

The disciplines of both art and athletics require great passion and regular practice if one wishes to hone skill and develop a unique style. In Notions of Motion, Katrina Niswander and Cyd Gottlieb produce works that inherently celebrate the feminine experience, with a particular focus on individual strength and tenacity, while recognizing how unique approaches and talents contribute to success as a team. Through applications of mixed media, both artists create new narratives with each layer of their work. Respectively, Katrina presents a figurative aspect, while Cyd offers representations of mental and physical landscapes through which a person may play. When each artist’s images are placed next to one another, an interesting visual dialogue unfolds. For example, with Katrina’s larger monochromatic oil pastel portraits, we see portraits of smiling and posed female golfers. When these stylized women appear alongside Cyd’s colorful abstract studies, the viewer may feel compelled to dive deeper into the shared experience of these figures and consider the external landscapes that they interact with, as well as the psychological landscapes that exist within. Both artists' bodies of work discuss distinct experiences and changes that occur over time. They explore their personal relationships to history through intentional layering, contrast, color, and texture.

For Katrina Niswander, making art from old photographs is a conversation with and collaboration with the past. Her artwork explores and celebrates this dialogue and invites the viewer to contemplate how we can grow through considering, acknowledging, and learning from the past. Themes of gratitude, growth and experience are central to her practice. Visceral texture is an important element of Katrina’s work. In her oil pastel portraits, the thick creamy nature of the medium provides enough visually tactile interest to satiate her desires. For her photographic pieces, the process is a bit more complex. She works repetitively in layers. With each layer she enlarges the image and converses with the previous composition. The work transforms. This unique repetitive process enlarges, enhances, and celebrates the special subtle textures and fluidity of watercolor and gouache mediums.

Meanwhile, Cyd’s work presents a visual language that considers varying aspects of an introspective healing process, navigating through layers and various media to arrive at a cohesive course for the viewer, offering different entry-points for the eye. Through precise linework and rich bursts of color, she showcases a blend of patterned reactions through an assortment of twists and turns that merge with, and therefore shape, whatever situation comes next. All in all, Cyd’s work functions as an insightful teaching tool that delivers an inclusive pathway forward through cartographic, choreographic imagery.

In this particular show, both artists have included works that were created over the span of the past few years, which can speak to the endurance and persistence that’s required of an individual when engaging in any professional discipline. Within an artistic practice, it is essential to contemplate the slow yet deep impact that each brushstroke may make. Clearly, Katrina Niswander and Cyd Gottlieb know their sport and can effectively speak to the transformative properties that emerge both from and within their shared trajectory, in honor of the women who paved the way before them.