The Snite Museum of Art will feature landscape paintings and an evaporation pool by American artist Danae Mattes from August 9 to December 6, 2015.
These beautiful landscapes are the artist’s personal “maps” of time spent within nature, formal equivalents to the experience of moving through the landscape. She combines “materials and methods that are, in themselves, directly extracted from the earth and which interact in ways that are inherent to their physical properties.” That is, the paintings are created from clay, fiber, and pigments, where shapes, patterns, and forms are revealed over time as pigments drain across sloped canvases and as pools of clay and pigment evaporate.
The week of September 7, Mattes will also install an evaporation pool within the gallery with the assistance of Notre Dame Professor of Ceramics Bill Kremer and a few of his students. Liquid clay will be poured into a clay basin on the gallery floor. As the water evaporates from the clay over days and weeks, the various clays used will create distinct cracking and tonal patterns.
A public reception will be held from 2–4 p.m. on Sunday, September 13, to celebrate this and the other fall art exhibitions.
Admission is free; all are welcome.