The opening reception for Katherine Sandoz’s new show at Laney Contemporary on Friday, April 5 is sure to be a well-attended, not-to-be-missed art “happening” in Savannah. The cerebral artist is known for delving deeply into her subject matter and this exhibition, entitled water ways, is no exception.
Sandoz (American, b.1969) graduated Mount Holyoke College with a BA in French and a BA in international relations in 1991. After serving in the U.S. Army Reserves and embarking on an early career as an advertising account planner, she relocated to Savannah, earning her MFA in illustration at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 1997. She worked at SCAD as a professor of illustration from 1997-2005 and attained an MFA in painting in 2005.
Since then, there has been a plethora of solo and group exhibitions and innovative projects. A longtime public arts advocate, she recently created collaborative large-scale public art murals at the Enmarket Arena and at Second Harvest Food Bank; She was the featured fine artist at the 2021 Thomasville Wildlife Arts Festival in Thomasville GA; In the last two years, Laney Contemporary, Spalding Nix Fine Art, and Moffit McKinley Cancer Center have produced exhibitions of her paintings; She was represented by Laney at the 2023 Future Fair in Chelsea, NY; Most Savannahians will remember her mural and soaring, light-catching aerial sculptural installation entitled Katniss, commissioned by Telfair Museum’s local art program, #art912, and installed in the Jepson Center in 2019.
Having just finished up a series of paintings about Hawaii, Sandoz recalls that friends kept sending her images of lotuses that they thought she’d like. During a recent studio visit organized through Telfair Contemporaries’ (she has an exquisite barnlike studio behind her Vernonburg home), she confessed she was hesitant to embrace lotus as it felt a bit like painting roses or sunflowers – hadn’t it been done to death? Wasn’t it a bit of a cliché? But being Sandoz, she embarked on a disciplined and thorough research into the flower – learning about its history, ecology, use as food, medicine, and symbol throughout varying eras and cultures. And she studied The Lotus Sutra, a revered final teaching of Buddhist scripture, which suggests that earthbound individuals may reach enlightenment in their lifetime.
“I rely on research, a conceptual framework and storytelling while working with beautiful and meaningful materials,” the profoundly thoughtful artist states on her website. Almost two years in the making, all the references, behind-the-scenes photographs, drawings, and writings have resulted in two sets of works about the lotus: 22 paintings in a ‘marga’ series (in Sanskrit ‘marga’ means ‘path toward’ or a ‘way of reaching’) and 22 paintings in an ‘upaya’ series (in Sanskrit ‘upaya’ means ‘efficient ways’ or ‘strategy’). Sandoz explains the titles of the works are taken from the 22 archetypes of the tarot and the 22 faculties contained in Buddhism’s ancient Abhidharma texts.
She says the work uses a lot of the “DNA” from her 2014 tahoe hybrids series in that she is as equally interested in what is going on under the surface of the water as she is in what’s happening above it. At nightfall, a lotus closes and goes beneath the surface and at dawn it climbs above. Emerging from the underworld into the light, it symbolizes transcendence and rebirth in many cultures.
When we consider Sandoz’s greater body of work, water runs through it in every way. Painting with water-based paints, she has historically studied and depicted aquatic plants, marshes, barrier islands, and water-filled worlds. “Hidden in ditches and ponds of the coastal empire and low country, we find lotus popping up from late spring to summer,” the artist says. A resolute “ditch gazer,” she watches the season in these smaller waterways that connect to the larger tidal bodies that regulate and define our geography. In 2022, she presented her first abstractions with a series called tombolo. 22 years later, she is still featuring aquatic plants, looking to them and to the water ways in which they thrive to educate and instruct us on models for “right living” or “pono” – a word and concept she painted in 2021 and 2022 in her Maui-inspired series.
When the artist was profiled in The Bitter Southerner by her friend and fellow Savannahian Harrison Scott Key in 2019, the writer seemed slightly befuddled by the fact that her paintings are so beautiful. In Key’s typical tongue-in-cheek style, he says he learned from his artist friends that to call work “pretty” is “like saying the ham has turned.” But her work IS pretty. Seeming like gentle layers of tissue paper, transparency and opacity meld, bleed, drip, and overlap.
The curator and artist Kristy B. Edwards had similar thoughts when she wrote about Sandoz’s selection as one of four invitees to the prestigious Emerging National IX exhibition at the Macon Museum of Art and Sciences in 2021: “Sandoz’s work is easy on the eye. There are no jarring or dissonant elements, and there is not frenetic disorganized color or lines. I wouldn’t say they are “controlled” in a way that indicates the feeling of tightness, but rather they sit on the edge of paradox; strong yet gentle, organized yet abstracted, close yet far. Each painting has that beauty, that reminder of the landscape like a window outward. There is something deeper behind them all, though, and they are not just attractive works. They have a soul.”
And so, the work in water ways is often pretty, but always deeply soulful. Employing varying consistencies of paint to create numerous watery layers, the artist makes us wonder if we are looking at leaves, at pods, or at flowers. Her piece (marga) nothingness/mu is both ethereal and abstracted – a lotus above the murky depths? My favorites are those that employ striking, Fauvist slashes of bright yellow. (marga) the tower captivates with its seeming simplicity of bold brush strokes laid down over multiple veils of thoughtfully applied paint. The flower is deconstructed to such a point that we are not exactly sure what we see.
Laney Contemporary explains it best: “Sandoz uses water as both a setting and a tool. Each image consists of water-soaked layers of acrylic paint and fibrous planes which mirrors the composition of the aquatic plant itself…The Lotus Sutra teachings, and the paintings they inspire, hint at what we see and what we don’t see. They watery ways of the resilient lotus, flowering and seeding at once, point to the mystery, depth, and beauty embedded within nature and us.”
It is always exciting to see how Laney Contemporary and the artist will incorporate the upstairs mirrored gallery space; all I can reveal is that there will be lotus-themed, three-dimensional work on display - so be sure to come to the opening reception on Friday, April 5 from 6-8:30pm to see for yourself! The exhibit water ways hangs March 29 through June 1 at the gallery located at 1810 Mills B. Lane Blvd.
Additionally, Sandoz will give a gallery talk during the run of show, and by the end of April some of the paintings will be installed in the lobby of the Eastern Wharf’s Thompson Savannah. More information will be posted on www.laneycontemporary.com and on Instagram @laneycontemporary. Sandoz’s website is www.katherinesandoz.com and her Instagram is @katherinesandoz.
