By: Izabella Hotz and Destiny Cannon
January 27, 2020
On Friday, January 24, the Sculpture Center opened two new galleries, featuring artists Nate Riccuto and Lisa Walcott. Their collections are named Sitting Flesh (Riccuto) and Sink in (Walcott).
The reception included drinks and snacks, along with a relaxed atmosphere and other artwork.
At their openings, they spoke about their collections and how to interact with them. The first to speak was Riccuto on Sitting Flesh.
Riccuto is a native of Dayton, Ohio, and is the current Instructor of Glass at Ohio State University.
In his words, his collection is for him, “… a way for me to play with materials and space. And I think it means a lot to actually be able to use a gallery space like this and to throw all these things out there… they have all these specific intentions that I put in them but then other people get to walk around and discover things and come up with completely new things.”
The goal of this collection was to create a playful and homemade environment, as well as to make people think about how they interact with the world around them, using curious surfaces and seemingly mobile installations.
His advice for aspiring artists was, “Take personal connection seriously because people will help you if they like you and if you’re generous and sincere with them… and apply two as many things as you can. That’s a really important thing to just make a priority of getting your work out there.”
Walcott is a Holland, Michigan based artist and a graduate from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She used not just stationary art but moving art as well as water installations.
In her own words, her collection is, “… about the composition of everyday life. It’s the mark that maybe your socks make on the floor. Or that your sleeve makes as it falls out of the dresser and reminds you of maybe water falling down. I like to try to imagine sometimes what an object would look like animated and what it would look like in kind of a surreal or imaginary manner, so that’s what I kind of played with in this work.”
She mentioned to us that in this collection, she often attempted to display a mood that is nearly impossible to capture and explore the things that someone may overlook and show it in a fantastical way.
She tries to portray a world where everything you do makes a mark, almost like your entire life is a drawing.
Walcott’s advice to aspiring artists is, “Allow yourself to fail because you learn a lot when you don’t make exactly what you wanted to do or when things don’t work out as you expected. Continue to show up and make the work because it can be easy to give up, but continuing to have an art practice causes good things to happen.”
Overall, these two collections were extremely immersive, with many installations to walk through and ideas that would not necessarily come up without a prompt.
These galleries will be up until March 20, and we recommend visiting them.
THE RETURN OF THE EYE 