Three artists at CR
In the Floyd Bettiga Art Gallery at College of the Redwoods, we all knew what artist Laura Corsiglia meant when she said, “there are so many problems in the world.” These days such a phrase is a dime a dozen but standing there watching the rain come down onto the concrete, feeling no objection or confusion bubble into being at the suggestion that the world we live in could be, perhaps at best, problematic, there was a refreshing sense of understanding that seemed to wash over the room. For one reason or another, everyone in the gallery was led to gather in this place — to be threaded together for a moment in time. This is one of the many powers of art. As curator and CR professor Gabrielle Gopinath suggests: a reimagining of the word “materialism” harkening back to its philosophical origins could mean “a big picture model of everything connected together.” A Different World is Possible, exhibiting at the campus through Oct. 3, is this dynamism incarnate.
This exhibit sees the works of Laura Corsiglia, Kit Davenport and Jason Marak come together to delight us in a dissolution of boundaries between worlds — where the obscure becomes familiar and the familiar becomes strange. While these artists and their work are quite different, they are, to Gopinath, “different fish going down the same river.” This curator’s rapport with the artwork, as well as her recognition of the threads that connect them, is what has brought the show to the Floyd Bettiga Art Gallery. These artists have set down roots in Humboldt County, each with their own history of migratory patterns that have informed their story and work.
Corsiglia, who was led to Humboldt Bay by birds, entreats us to discover animality existing in natural chaos. “We are animals,” she says, and reckoning with this invites the viewer — or anyone — to access what is real in the world experienced through the cognition of animals, cells or particles. Her use of vibrant paint and ink on paper teases at landscapes without taking these forms for granted. Inked over these colors can be found hybrid creatures of Corsiglia’s own design, invoking a variety of organisms, including humans. Her work often cascades across the page in immense detail that, for me, is reminiscent of Song Xu’s 16th century landscape paintings in their deliberate busyness and the tendency of her forms to rise and fall on the paper like the ghost of mountains, as can be observed in her piece “Building Blocks of Life.” The way her work becomes an uncanny reminder of earthly forms is a thread that continues in the work of Davenport.
“Language is sensory and elusive,” Davenport says with the kind of warmth and humility housed in the heart of a veteran artist. Even to describe her work in sculpture and painting is to accept that words are fickle. Her process in ceramics starts in a sketchbook, where paint and colored pencil bring to life something organismal. Then the ceramic process begins, during which the drawing and the sculpture talk to each other. Her ceramic works are characterized by a flowing energy and invoke images of experimental alchemic instruments — yet very alive. Long aortic tendrils in “For Zuzu” appear as though exchanging liquid in some natural process. Their stillness is captured mid-breath, their smoothness is flesh-like. In observing them, they become a reminder of the body: that every organism and non-organism is embodied. In this exhibit, there are no hard lines between worlds.
In Marak’s work, he lets A and B exist together: where flesh, bone and plant intersect as one contiguous, energetic whole. (Full disclosure: Marak is the spouse of the Journal’s managing editor.) Marak appears committed to a specific system of hatched texture that invokes DNA or threads of matter itself. I can’t shake the feeling of observing something familiar in the alien of “FloraFauna 1.” Flowers and fists implicating each other reach up from the earth and seem to hang in staunch defiance of … something. Marak is inspired by vertical forms, which is recurrent across his work in the exhibit. In addition to being a visual artist, he is a writer, and at times these mediums intersect. He quotes poet William Carlos Williams stating, “a poem is a small or large machine made of words,” and this is to say that every piece of a poem (or any type of art) is applied for a purpose. He says, “the elements are there, but it’s a matter of perception and access to it.”
Gopinath describes a “marvelousness” that draws these artists together. The “marvelous” is a concept in Surrealist art that describes the strangeness of contradictions in the “real” world falling away into something closer to acceptance. Indeed, there is a strangeness in believing to see mountains or veins in what is vegetal or vaporized, but it all fits together into a picture of threads that can hold the weight of all these things. Perhaps what the exhibit seeks to show us is this nonbinary quality and how we are all pulled into it.
The exhibit A Different World is Possible is at the Floyd Bettiga Art Gallery, located in Building 100 of the Creative Arts Complex on the College of the Redwoods’ main campus, through Oct. 3. It is open to the public from noon to 3 p.m. on Mondays and from noon to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays.
Sasha Senal (she/they) is a writer, environmental educator and aspiring farmer. She can be found exploring Humboldt forests (not unlike her home redwoods on the Sonoma Coast) and considering Black eco-feminism.
This article appears in Burger Week 2025.