Exhibition Opening Reception for Symphonia: Dialogues of Landscape, Ritual and Resilience

Joanne Aono

Artist Bio: Joanne Aono is a visual artist, curator, and holistic farmer. Her research-based drawings, paintings, and installations address identity, immigration, and the environment. Her solo exhibitions include Boundary (Chicago, IL), Mosnart (Chicago, IL), Lee Dulgar Gallery (South Holland, IN), and Geneva Center for the Arts (Geneva, IL). She has been included in two-person and group exhibitions at the Illinois State Museum (Chicago, Springfield, and Lockport), Firecat Projects (Chicago), Terrain Biennial, Rockford Art Museum, and O’Connor Art Gallery, Dominican University. Aono has received several Chicago DCASE grants, an Illinois Arts Council grant, and an Artist Run Chicago HPAC grant. Her art has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, and The Huffington Post. Aono directs the alternative art project, Cultivator’s Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects, and serves on the exhibition committee of the Riverside Arts Center. She maintains a studio at Bray Grove Farm in north central Illinois. 

Artist Statement: As an artist and farmer, my interest in nature, combined with research and reflection into the cultural importance of food sovereignty for all communities along with our own species’ historical dependence upon the earth for survival, has informed much of my recent work. Using materials normally associated with the cultivation of vegetable crops, my large drawings on sheer agricultural fabric and the small panel drawings of plant imagery, represent foods foraged and plants cultivated for harvest. They fade into the negative space, reflecting impermanence, the passage of time, and the circle of life. The care of the earth—its animals, plants, air, water, soil, and minerals—is essential for the holistic sustenance of all.

Artist Website: https://joanneaono.com/home.html

Karen Azarnia

Artist Bio: Karen Azarnia is an artist, educator, and independent curator. Born in Miami, FL she currently lives and works in Chicago. She has exhibited nationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Alma Art and Interiors (Chicago, IL), Riverside Arts Center (Riverside, IL), Olivet Nazarene University, (Bourbonnais, IL), Geneva Center for the Arts (Geneva, IL), and Governor’s State University (University Park, IL). Azarnia is a grant recipient from the Illinois Arts Council, Chicago DCASE, and the 3Arts Foundation. Her work has been included in publications including Hyperallergic, the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, and The Huffington Post. She received an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. Azarnia currently teaches in the department of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was recently awarded the Nick and Keven Wilder Award for excellence in teaching.

Artist Statement: My work operates at the intersection of domestic and natural environments. Through painting I explore notions of time, home, memory, and natural life cycles. At once embracing and pushing against art historical tradition, the work operates in the play between abstraction and representation. My recent Verdant series is meant to be lush and generous—to inspire renewal, resilience, and evoke pleasure—as an act of generosity and care towards the viewer.

The longer I engage with the Verdant series, the more I have come to realize that the work is about the rhythms we experience in life that become woven together into complex threads: the passing of time and the seasons, the rhythms of human experience—both our daily activities and annual life cycles—and the way these become reflected and embodied through the act of painting. For me, these things are all inextricably linked. Like the meditative act of painting, they are full of complexity, often contain paradox and contradiction, and at the same time hold the potential to locate wonder.

Artist Website: https://www.karenazarnia.com/

Jon Seals

Artist Bio: Jon Seals is a multifaceted artist, educator, and curator with over eighteen years of experience in the fields of art history, painting, drawing, curating, and teaching. He holds an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music where he studied the intersections of religion and visual culture, and an M.F.A. in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, where he developed his conceptual and technical skills as a painter. As the department chair, galleries director, and professor of art and digital media at Olivet Nazarene University, he leads the academic and administrative functions of the department, oversees the exhibition programming of the Victorian House Gallery and other campus venues, and teaches courses in studio art. His own artwork, essays, and reviews have been published and exhibited in various magazines and galleries across the country. His artistic practice is driven by his passion for exploring the ways in which identity relates to memory, loss, and redemption in visual culture.

Artist Statement: I create mixed-media works using materials harvested from bodies of water and land in environments undergoing significant ecological alterations. These locations include the Gulf of Mexico along Tampa Bay in Florida and the Kankakee River south of Chicago, Illinois, where, until just over a century ago, an Everglades-like wetland stretched as far as Florida’s. My artworks develop through processes such as pouring, dipping, and combining hand-drawn and painted elements, utilizing the materials I collect and engaging directly with the soil, water, and plant life. The materials I use are sourced from the two states where I live, located in very different regions of the United States. By employing site-specific soil, sand, and water, I seek to listen to, and echo, the wounds and witness of the earth, exploring how the environment influences my artistic voice. While my training has equipped me with techniques to manipulate these materials, I’ve found that a lighter touch, allowing more of the earth’s influence, yields more intriguing results. Early in my practice, unable to achieve the control I desired, I dipped paper into a mix of water from Florida’s Gulf Coast and soil materials from Illinois. The outcome, where clean paper meets soiled and wet paper, resembles the roll of an ocean wave against the sky, merging my two homes into one. While this is my interpretation, shaped through attentive listening to the materials, it represents a symbiotic relationship where the materials’ voice is also influenced by my temporal and spatial presence.

In the summer of 2023, I integrated traditional watercolor paints with water collected from the Gulf of Mexico, Tampa Bay, and regional freshwater lakes. Painting en plein air with water sourced on-site has deepened my connection and intimacy with both land and sea. Since 2023, I have developed an interlocking series of 2.5-inch circles cut from the discarded margins of larger paintings created on Arches watercolor paper using water from the Gulf of Mexico and the Kankakee River. These smaller compositions inspire larger paintings, which will become features in new works. This cycle will repeat as I am challenged and inspired by both the larger paintings and the smaller compositions found along the edges beyond the matboard and framed boundaries. 

Artist Website: www.jonsealsart.com

Michelle Wasson

Artist Bio: Michelle Wasson is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Chicago, IL. Her work has recently been included in exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center, Elmhurst Art Museum, Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX), Riverside Art Center, and Brand Library Art Center (Glendale, CA). She is the recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants and a City of Chicago DCASE grant. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Bad at Sports podcast, Newcity, and Hyperallergic. She has served as faculty at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College, Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2016 she co-founded the artist-run exhibition space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago. Wasson received her M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

Artist Statement: My paintings offer a sensual refuge from reality. Created intuitively from memory and imagination, layers of color and light portray surreal planes. Flowing between landscape, still life, and the figurative, my canvases reflect our shared humanity in the natural world. In glowing scenes, divine vessels spring forth life and evoke mother nature’s power to create and destroy and create yet again.

Artist Website: michellewasson.com