Kaleidoscope. A World of Color at the Gallery at Reinstein|Ross

Artist list

Donna D’Aquino, Steffi Götze, Tia Kramer, Michal Lando, Lindsay Locatelli, Gaetano Pesce

This year’s exhibition presents jewelry in a broad spectrum of colors and made from a wide variety of materials and techniques, including enamel, resin, polymer clay, paper, and nylon mesh. Happily pushing the boundaries of bodily adornment, the artists in Kaleidoscope approach jewelry as miniature wearable sculptures, not surprising since many of them have come to the field with a background in architecture, performance art, and sculpture.

The majority of the contemporary jewelry in Kaleidoscope was created specifically for the exhibition. This show will also mark the US debut of German artist Steffi Götze.

About the Artists:
Tia Kramer is an installation, sound, and adornment artist who has been integrating handmade paper into her work for the last ten years. Her distinctive paper jewelry emerged first as miniature three-dimensional models for a large permanent sculpture installed at Macalester College in 2003. Originally from Iowa, she studied studio art at Macalester College. In 2005, she began integrating her sculptural objects into video, sound, installation and performance projects while at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her jewelry business took root unexpectedly. Entranced by the artistic potential and environmental poignancy of the vast white expanses at the bottom of the world, she began a job with the United States Antarctic Program. During two Austral summers from 2006-2008, she honed her jewelry craft while creating adornments by headlamp, on her lap, and in little hallway nooks on Ross Island, Antarctica. In February 2008, she relocated to Seattle. Inspired by man’s relationships to the natural and architectural environment, she creates jewelry objects that make visible our interactions with structure and movement. Her adornments are performative sculptures for one’s ears, architecture for the body. She looks closely at our often -unnoticed everyday lives: telephone wires suspended amidst tall evergreens, the negative space stretching between two neighboring skyscrapers. Using cold-form fabrication, she builds organic and geometric wire forms that pare down these environments to simple line modules. These non-soldered jewelry structures move independent of one another, dancing on the ears, neck and wrists of the wearer. Like leaves on a tree limb her adornments punctuate the wearer’s movement and expression.

Donna D’Aquino was born in Newburgh, New York. She received her BS in Design from The State University College of New York at Buffalo in 1989; and her MFA from Kent State University in 2000. She has taught at Kent State University, The Mary Schiller Myers School of Art at the University of Akron and The University of Toledo; all in Ohio. In the fall of 2003, D’Aquino decided to stop teaching and focus on being a studio metalsmith. She works in a variety of metals, materials and styles. Her jewelry is hand-fabricated using sterling silver, 18kt gold and steel. It is primarily inspired by drawing and architecture. D’Aquino’s work can be seen in over 25 books and magazines and at many of the finest contemporary Craft Shows and Galleries throughout the United States. She has won numerous awards including an individual Ohio Arts Council Grant and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the American Craft Council. In 2007 she was selected to be included in both the traveling show and the book that accompanied the “Craft in America, Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects”, series done for PBS. Her work was recently donated to the permanent collection of The Charles A. Wustum Museum in Racine, Wisconsin. She also has work in the permanent collection of the Museum for Contemporary Crafts in Portland, Oregon. Her work has recently been featured in Vogue Italia and W magazine. She resides in Bethel, Maine, where she maintains a full-time studio.

Steffi Götze resides in Berlin, Germany. In 2013 she graduated with a degree in Enamel Art and Silversmithing from the School of Applied Art and Design in Seville, Spain. Since completing her course work, she has been invited to participate in numerous prestigious jewelry fairs and competitions, including Talente at the Sonderschau Internationale Handwerksmesse München in 2016. Through contemporary jewelry Götze sees herself as being able to tell stories, ask questions, and spark conversations. Her jewelry is made from silver and enamel on copper. The artist is constantly searching for shapes, colors, lines, surfaces, and textures to express the contrasting concepts or the space in between and their influence on each other. Within her work Götze often experiments with the melting point of enamel resulting in contrasting surfaces.

Michal Lando is a self-taught, Brooklyn based artist who began making jewelry after falling in love with nylon mesh, a supple, dramatic and incredibly lightweight material that was once used as a purely structural element in hats and clothing. Her latest pieces are based on a kind of controlled unraveling. The skeletal forms are constructed using a technique she developed by carefully applying heat to shape and structure the material into new forms, and the result is ethereal, delicate and otherworldly pieces. It is the tension between solid structure and fragility that continues to interest her as she explores new ways of working with the material. She was recently chosen to participate in the 30th Annual “Materials: Hard + Soft” Exhibition at the Denton Arts Council, Denton TX as well as “Makers 2016” at the Brooklyn Metal Works, Brooklyn NY. Lando’s work has been featured in the publication Contemporary Fiber, by Ashley Rooney & Anne Lee, Schiffer Publishing.

Lindsay Locatelli began as a graphic design major at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She then shifted from working on paper to constructing semi-functional objects. After changing her major to furniture design, Locatelli went on to graduate with a BFA in 2009. Since then, Locatelli has focused on creating objects that can both be observed and worn on the body. Locatelli describes her work as dynamic, bright, and bold. Her use of color and forms come from imagery of scaffolding cactus’s, panoramic blue skies, vast deserts, and blackened rocky ridges. The results of these inspirations are colorful pieces of wearable art. The artist creates each component of her work by hand, from the forged silver elements to the hand-built clay forms. Pairing with an emphasis on polymer clay, this medium allows her to work more intuitively. Locatelli considers the sculpting and carving process a part of the “sketching” phase. The final stages of fabrication involves experimenting with new surface techniques and applying many layers of color.

Gaetano Pesce was born in 1939, in La Spezia, Italy but has resided in New York City since 1980. Over the course of his prolific career, Pesce has become an iconic architect and designer. He taught for 28 years at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg and has lectured at cultural institutes and universities around the world. His multidisciplinary designs have been included in the permanent collections of MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, as well as other museums in Japan, Portugal, and Finland. His architectural, urban planning, exhibition, and interior design work is characterized by the bold use of color and revolutionary materials. Pesce’s interest in revolutionary materials and processes led to continuous innovations in language, formal results, and production modes. Among the most popular of Pesce’s exhibitions are the legendary Italy: The New Domestic Landscape shown at MoMA in 1972, the 1975 retrospective at the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts entitled Le future est peut-être passé, another retrospective entitled Gaetano Pesce: ltemps des questions shown at the Centre Pompidou in 1996, Gaetano Pesce: il rumore del tempo held at the Triennale of Milan in 2005, and the most recent Il Tempo della Diversitá at MAXXI in Rome in 2014.  Pesce has received many awards, including the "Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design" in 1993, the "Architektur & Wohnen Designer of the Year" in 2006, and the "Lawrence J. Israel Prize" awarded by the Fashion Institute of Technology of New York in 2009.