Susan Napack

WORKING IN WONDER
Walsh Gallery
Seton Hall University
South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ
January 18- February 11, 2011

Gallery Hours: M-Fri 10:30 a.m. – 4:30 pm

Symposium: Modern/Contemporary Art and the Curiosity Cabinet,
Saturday, February 5, 10 a.m. – 5pm
Panel with artists 3:30-4

The group exhibition explores contemporary artwork inspired by the Curiosity Cabinet, a historical era of collecting occurring between 1500 and 1700, and the connection between man-made and natural objects or artificialia and naturalia

http://www.shu.edu/news/article/322675

Proof of Life, mixed media installation, approx: 13' x13'

Dream of Life — digital photo montage, giclée print

Morna's Moods — gloves, foam, velvet, wood, hatpins, 8 panels, 9" x 12" each

Collection, Vinyl wall pocket sleeves, photos and mixed media, including real wishbones - approx 90" by 40"

WIRE CROCHET JEWELRY
available at Michaelian & Kohlberg, 315B Springfield Avenue • Summit, NJ • 908-522-1004
http://michaelian.com/jewelry

STATEMENT

The work of Susan Napack delves into the realm of the deeply personal and the visually entrancing, revealing both an archivist’s mania for order in a chaotic world and her fascination with the infinite possibilities of seeing. At times, her use of collage calls to mind the enigmatic assemblages of Joseph Cornell but without the surrealist overtones; Napack’s evocation of nostalgia is subtle and further complicated by the layering of images and tenses. Nearly every object and every work undergoes an interpretation, often through a reprographic medium, only to be re-shot or scanned or imaged and cast again in yet another new form. We begin to wonder which came first: the hand or the glove, the wishbone or the wish, her grandmother’s pink nightdress or a legacy. Process and concept are inseparable as she plays with her objects, her ideas, her past work, and her past, all the while asking herself: what if?

In Napack’s work, the multiple does not represent sameness or repeatability, but a key that discloses idiosyncrasies and nuance. Likewise, her recurring motifs—wishbones, gloves, reproductive imagery—do not come with an easy explanation as she subverts their conventional message through manual and photographic manipulation. In Morna’s Moods, Napack reclaims the glove (like she does with wishbones) from the domain of fetish and symbolism. The full, exuded shapes recall the artist’s early affinity for Eva Hesse’s anthropomorphic forms; in Napack’s visual vocabulary these foamy, fingered outpourings revel in eccentricity and decay. Collection, with its compounding of three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional reproductions, is at once a complex personal narrative and a marvelous optical profusion housed neatly in hundreds of clear vinyl pockets. In Dream of Life, the story converges in a half-wistful, half-celebratory photo montage whose juxtaposition of both recognizable and mysterious images tells a universal tale of human impulse and the weightiness of being female.

Laura M. Cincotta, 2010

Link for INTERVIEW with Nancy Tobin: http://maplewood.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/west-of-chelsea-susan-napack/

CONTACT: napstudio@me.com