The diverse personalities that exist at Stony Brook were seen on Thursday at the reception of the 2014 Satellite art exhibition, which will remain in the SAC Art Gallery until Oct. 2.
Chris Vivas curated the exhibit. He is a Stony Brook alumus who now teaches art at St. Joseph’s College. Vivas said the plan for the gallery was to incorporate a component of Stony Brook into the art.
“Thus the name Satellite,” he said. “Because everybody in the show revolved around the school in some way or another.”
Last year’s show consisted of only Stony Brook alumni. However, this year the decision was made to open the show to faculty and students as well because, according to Janice Costanzo, coordinator of the Craft Center and Student Art Gallery, it has become difficult to contact alumni.
The decision to allow the show to be open to all of Stony Brook’s community seemed to be the right move. The medium sized, white-walled SAC art gallery was filled with a diverse mix of arts, from clothing design, to paintings, photographs, sculptures and even a digital medium.
“It was just exactly what I was looking for,” Vivas said. “Everything was just nailed down, it came out really well.”
According to the art students who were involved in the show, they heard the news of the exhibition through emails sent to them as well as word of mouth. They then needed to send their art to Vivas in hopes they would be picked to be in the gallery.
Vivas said he was very impressed with the caliber of the art that he received, but of course could not pick every artist who sent him work. The outcome consisted of a diverse mix of faculty, alumni and current students.
One Stony Brook alumna who brought something different to the table was Sarah Kain, now a special education teacher in the city. She graduated Stony Brook in 2000 after returning to school and was proud to show off her dresses, which she designs and sells.
Kain explained how thrilled she was to be able to be a featured artist in the gallery. She said she has been sewing and making dresses for 28 years and freelance designing helped her raise her son. Her unique use of different patterned fabrics and styles spread out among a few mannequins, as well as the dress she wore, caught the attention of many attendees.
One of the other eye-capturing pieces of art in the gallery was a digital medium projected onto the white wall. The black and white video focused on a needle and thread being pulled from a mouth and then a close shot of the needle dangling in the air.
The artist, Catherine Katsafouros, is a graduate student here at Stony Brook and is working towards her MFA in studio arts.
“My body of work in general is about internalization of emotional trauma,” she explained. “So how emotional abuse kind of becomes part of the body and the mind so I would like to kind of bring together psychology and clinical anatomical kind of reference.”
A different form of art seen at the exhibition was the work of Julia Tomasello, who is an art major in her junior year at Stony Brook. Tomasello’s art consisted of figures, in the form of two sculptures and one woodcut picture.
“It’s really diverse, a lot of different people and a lot of different age groups,” Tomasello said about the turnout of the exhibition. “It’s a good sampling of the school.”
The SAC art gallery usually puts on three to four shows a semester, according to Costanzo.
“Art is in our history, this is our culture and it is constantly evolving and developing, so why let go of the past,” she said when talking about the importance of students being able to express themselves through art.
Though many students strolled in by the site of free food, others found themselves drawn in by the art.
“I was on my way to go home, but a piece of work caught my eye as I was walking by and I thought it was stunning so I decided to come in,” Morgan Macklin, a junior applied mathematics and statistics major, said.
