Icons of Absence : Icons of Presence

On Friday, April 9, from 6 to 9 p.m., the Cincinnati Arts Association's Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts will premiere three new exhibitions linked to our interaction and response to landscape and nature: Icons of Absence : Icons of Presence, the expressive and lush oil paintings of Dana Saulnier that merge landscape and figurative elements in an evocative dialogue; a natural response, the exquisitely and intuitively executed black and white sumi ink paintings of Nancy Fletcher Cassell that tap the unconscious mind and intuitive responses to nature; and sticky wicket, a site-specific installation by Andrew Loughnane that playfully subverts the lawn game of croquet through the examination of social conventions and competitive instincts.

Dana Saulnier (Miami University, Oxford, Oh.), paints large evocative canvases that resonate with traditional treatments of the figure in landscape while complicating such readings through their forceful ambiguity and fluid contradictions. Icons of Absence : Icons of Presence continues this exploration through a recent series of large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper completed in the last three years. Saulnier’s dialogue, dense with emotion, gesture and language, bears witness to lost relationships—to nature, to religious iconography, to history—with results that beguile the eye while troubling the spirit. Saulnier’s paintings successfully fuse landscape and figurative elements in a tumultuous climax of color and form.

Dana Saulnier earned a bachelor of fine arts in painting from the University of Cincinnati in 1988 graduating summa cum laude. In 1991 he received a master of fine arts in painting from Cornell University. Since graduating, he has developed an extensive regional and national exhibition history. He currently serves as associate professor of painting and drawing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.