“Cut-Ups” Exhibition at Cornell College

“Cut-Ups,” an exhibition of mixed media paintings by Ellen Campbell, Neva Sills, Johannah Silva, and Mary Lou Zelazny, will be exhibited at the Peter Paul Luce Gallery at Cornell College, Sunday, Nov. 6 through Sunday, Dec. 4.

An opening reception will be held Sunday, Nov. 6 from 2 to 4 p.m. in McWethy Hall. Ellen Campbell, curator of the exhibition, will give a gallery talk at 3 p.m. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday 2 to 4 p.m.

Ellen Campbell received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Chicago. In this body of work she repeats motifs derived from the natural world, organizing them into patterns that create new relationships through shifts of color, mirroring the tension between the transience of modern life and the endurance of the natural world. Campbell’s willingness to curate this exhibition has been crucial to bringing the work of these four artists together in the Peter Paul Luce Gallery.

Neva Sills received her BFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Iowa. Her work explores the ways in which form and space—as well as ideas and experiences—may be broken into parts and what new meaning arrives in the process of reconstruction.

Johannah Silva received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley, and her MFA in Painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent work has been based on the circular shape/form as a starting point for her paintings and drawings. The circles allude to micro as well as macro forms, cells and atoms as well as planetary bodies.

Mary Lou Zelazny received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zelazny has been making paintings with collage for approximately 30 years. The spontaneity of collage combined with the rigors of painting and drawing create multiple meanings whose sorting and unraveling drives the content. Her subjects are improvisations and it is here where her humor, discomfort, incomprehension, and pleasure can coexist.

Peter Paul Luce Gallery programming is funded through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information contact Sue Coleman, scoleman@cornellcollege.edu or call: 319-895-4491.