Faculty: Jolene Powell
Jolene Powell received her MFA from Boston University and is currently Chair of the Art and Design Department at Marietta College. In 2008 Powell was named a McCoy professor, which is Marietta College’s most prestigious teaching award.
Her work has been exhibited in; Exhibition 280, regional juried exhibition, Huntington Museum of Art, Art 2005, National Juried Exhibition, MPG Gallery, Boston, MA, Photowork ’05, National Juried Exhibition, Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY, Drawing from Perception, National Juried Exhibition, Wright State University, Dayton, OH. She has had many group and solo exhibitions all over the United States.
Artist Statement
The imagination it takes to smell the air in my work elicits specificity to one’s own personal landscape. Most of us have a landscape place where we go in our minds that contain our memories, dreams, and daydreams. Once mentally in that place, remembrance occurs – a remembrance that reminds us all of time passed, of a place that lost its meaning once we removed our dreams from its identity.
What we see, we validate; what we do not see, we ignore or forget. I hope to reconcile the viewer’s attachment with land and consciousness. In consciousness, awareness follows; after awareness, then reconciliation, which leads to a transformation. Once I have shared my memory with the viewer – what I call a remembrance – I have connected the viewer to my place, and myself to theirs. In that connection lies change.
In 1885, Asher B. Durand, in Letter in Landscape Painting, wrote “To the rich merchant and capitalist, and to those whom ever a competency has released from the great world struggle, so far as to allow a little time to rest and reflect in, Landscape Art especially appeals…so as to perceive what it represents; in proportion as it is true and faithful, many a fair vision of forgotten days will animate the canvas, and lead him through the scene: pleasant reminiscences and grateful emotions will spring up at every step, and care and anxiety will retire far behind him…he becomes absorbed in the picture.” In the late nineteenth century, landscape paintings were social commentary, in that their images of nature were a solace to the development of cities and urban life. Paintings became souvenirs of beautiful places. People bought landscapes to escape and to remember. My work is commentary, too: one to remind people of beautiful natural places, to remind people of nature’s fragility, and also to represent society’s tolerance of a spoiled sacred landscape.
Artists of influence
Mark Rothko, J.M.W. Turner, John Walker, Gaston Bachelard, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Ann Hamilton
Sample Work
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