Virtual Artist

By: Andrew Yuan

A newsletter, a journey along a muddy trail and a bleached coral reef complex in Roatan, Honduras. Last Thursday, the Lamont Gallery organized a virtual artist panel featuring alumni Dustan Knight '76, Brittany Otto '08 and Wendi Yan '18. Each using different materials and techniques, these artists explored their experience and emotions with the environment.

“Mud” 48 x 48” mixed media on canvas, 2021 - Dustan Knight

It was a fresh spring day in March when Knight stepped upon a small mud puddle as she walked out from her house. A snowpile stood before her, silently dripping as it melted under the evasive rays of sunlight amid the sinking mist. Beneath the broken leaves that scattered across the muddied surface, inconspicuous worms, once submerged under the mud, squirmed from the ground and crawled towards the dew-covered grass lawn. But amid the livelihood, the unanimous dwells on. A vague and unspoken eeriness that almost resembles a decaying death, plagues its way over the painting, over the scene, over this very mud puddle.

In the foreground of the painting, Knight experimented with white and wide strokes of paint that resembles the delicacy of the snow. The sprinkling of the paint across the canvas symbolizes the slow and almost draining process of melting. Observing closely, one could see scraps of cardboard on the painting that subtly blended into the scene.

“There is a certain vitality attached to this painting, there are things growing from the ground but dead things are also scattered here and there,” Knight said. “You can feel it in the muddy ground and the heat of the sun is coming down. It’s warm enough so that you can put your coat on and walk outside.”

With the drips of murky paint across the canvas, Knight perfectly combines the decaying of life concealed by the mud. She demonstrates her control over the paint, constantly lifting up her canvas for the paint to slide down and then tilting it up to prevent the paint from dilating the entire artwork.

In Knight’s paintings, you can never detect a certain object, or a definite person. The blurred line between abstraction, the wild mixture of colors in the midground and the thin traces of black paint that eventually leads to nowhere all embody Knight’s artistic value.

“For my art, it's not all about representation, it's about just conveying that emotional experience onto your painting in the way that you put the paint down,” Knight said about her artistic style. “The way that you react to the paint and the material recreates the similar experience.”

Two Degrees, 18x24" and 6.5" deep, allowing for 20 layers of paper - Brittany Otto

A school of fish gently lifts you up from the ocean floor, forming a stair-like spire that carries you through the lucid ocean.You stand between the giant coral reefs that waved along the ocean current. You gasp with amazement: the seaweed, the fierce whale shark defending her babies, the mountains, stark against the glimmer of sunlight filtering in from high above the surface of the ocean. Below you, sharks and seaweed intermingle on the ocean floor. Using carefully carved layers of white paper as her median, artist Brittany Otto shows a small figure in the mid ground interacting with the huge whale above.

“It is just white paper. And then once you get the backlight on it and you're in the dark, it transforms into something else and you see elements that you didn't see before,” Otto explained. “That's what I play a lot with the lighting and with vellum to create these patterns that are cast are creating all these things that you don't necessarily think of.”

Growing up on a farm, Otto has been in touch with environmentalism her whole life. Drawing inspiration from that, she uses art as her form as social commentary. When you turn off the lights, all the elements of the piece are the same color, a purposeful choice made by Otto representative of the coral bleaching marine animals undergo.

“There's like endless limitless things that you could do with any number of materials. And for me, when I realized, paper cutting is something that is detailed and I love detail. I can still do things with color, but within a really interesting boundary,” Otto said.

09/09/2020-09/15/2020

Yan breathed in the fresh air of Inner Mongolia, creased the outer fringes of the flour dumpling wrapper and chewed on the crispy sea buckthorns.

12/25/2020-12/31/2020

After roaming the gloomy streets of London delicately cloaked by a thin mist, Yan sat down in her dark room, allowing her thoughts to sink into 80+ pages of journal. Inhaling in peace, she waited for her friends to pop up on the tiny Zoom screen during her last week in London.

2/3/2021-2/16/2021

Deprived of her senses and tumbling through the tank like a silk scarf in a giant washing machine, Yan fell asleep while resting in her floatation tank at the Float Lab in downtown Los Angeles. In the following week, she meandered with her friends along the Venice Beach at sunset and visited the Hollywood Cemetery on the windy morning of Valentine’s Day.

2/17/2021-3/08/2021

Cacti, a wooden hut embedded in valleys of cypress and boundless deserts, and Spanish graffiti spontaneously sprayed across the stained windows and faded beige stucco walls. This was her resort, Yan knew.

Oaxaca, Mexico

While streaming her 3D and 4D VR videos on the Youtube Recommendations, Yan looked out from her window and explored this surrealist retreat–a small Mexican town sitting on top of the lush hills–that became her first artist residency.

Over her past gap year, Yan explored her artistic identities and values during the depressing COVID pandemic. With the opportunity of exploring the destinations she long craved to visit, Yan documented those memories in a weekly newsletter compilation named “Wendi’s Amazing Gap Year.” In these newsletters, Yan included a short journal section and several photographs, occasionally with her own artworks, that documented her emotional experiences in the past week(s).

“It was a natural thing that as I started out the gap year, I wanted to share my experience online. I was also driven by pure laziness with updating my life with other people. I just didn’t want to repeat the same experience to different people every single time. Then maybe when people ask me about my gap year, I share my experience online and accessible to people. That’s how it started.” Yan explained.

As a new media artist, Yan loved experimenting with new, bold mediums of art, such as VR, game design and architecture. In her past few years’ experience as an artist, Yan’s creativity had always been embodied in her artwork, including this gap year collection.

“I posted on Facebook and announced that I’m starting a gap year newsletter where I’ll email my updates weekly. I told my friends to subscribe if they want to. All of a sudden, there were approximately 70 people who commented or just messaged me. I was stunned. What the heck is going on?” Yan continued. “Now the newsletter has exactly 200 subscribers, which is crazy to me. I just wanted to share these resources, explore my thinking and experiment with my voice.”