Warner Gallery Features Confluence: An Exhibition of Faculty Works

Millbrook's arts faculty not only use the summer months to rest, work on curriculum, and visit friends and family, they also spend their time making art! 

 

"We make art that comes out of curiosities sparked in our classrooms during the year," said Arts Department Chair Sarah MacWright. "We build skills that were already special talents or build up skills that were weaknesses, and we use the time to think through an idea or to investigate a question."

The culmination of their creative summer efforts is Millbrook's Confluence exhibition, which is held annually in the Warner Gallery. This year's exhibition opened on August 29th and features art from five faculty members: Lauren Duffy, Bill Hardy, Shannon Harris, Leighann Kowalsky, and Sarah MacWright. 

 

Lauren Duffy, who teaches drawing and photography, exhibited a selection of portraits rendered in oil paint. This summer she revisited some of her paintings from 2017, adding salt crystals, electricity, and lace to deepen their stories. This year’s Confluence postcard features a painting Duffy made depicting a colleague reimagined as an ancient Greek character. On its top corner, she cultivated salt crystals into a sparkling triangle.

Abstract paintings on canvas from Bill Hardy are also on exhibit. Mr. Hardy has taught drawing, painting, and art history at Millbrook for over 25 years, and spent some of his summer hours in his home in Kinderhook, NY, painting and working through new as well as long-kept ideas. His finished work explores color, tension between representation and abstraction, and the American landscape.

 

Shannon Harris, who teaches ceramics and sculpture has a series of wheel-thrown and slip-cast forms on exhibit. These ceramic pieces come from two different processes but are connected by both shape and inspiration. Following Harris’ interest in flora, especially in fruit, plants, and seeds, these vessels spring from natural and artificial source material. Their shapes hint to traditional porcelain vases of China, mass-produced fruit juice bottles and produce pulled straight from the earth.

 

Dance Instructor Leighann Kowalsky has examples of her summer choreography, directing, and filmmaking on exhibit. The video piece on view in the gallery is titled Corridors. Filmed in Kingston, NY, this work features the dancing and acrobatics of Nicki Miller, a frequent collaborator of Kowalsky’s, and the work connects to a new course, Circus Arts, which is being offeried for the first time this fall.

Arts Department Chair and Photography Instructor Sarah MacWright is exhibiting a series of portraits of faculty, and this is her fourth year creating and exhibiting faculty portraits. For the past two years she has shown portraits in dyads, exploring and celebrating friendships, family connections and even the rapport between a zookeeper and her alpaca!