OPENING: Karen Donnellan explores the process of creation

While so much of our world is focused on completion – finishing a task, meeting a deadline, checking another item off the to-do list – artist Karen Donnellan is much more interested in this cycle of creation than the end results. In her first solo exhibition entitled “Essentia,” Donnellan’s creations ask us to focus upon and appreciate not her finished products, but upon the way these products were made.

Donnellan’s first solo exhibition opens this August in the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College. As Donnellan shares in a recent interview with GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, she has not yet crafted all of the works that will be on display, but the ones that are done have only been seen at Bullseye, where she recently completely her MFA. She will finish the rest of the pieces over the summer.

In inviting audiences to look more closely at the beauty of process, Donnellan’s exhibited work will revolve around the physical circle itself: an unending loop, a shape of wholeness. Influenced greatly by the energy therapy called Reiki, Donnellan believes there is the ability to heal and find peace within the unity of the circle, a contentment we very often neglect in our busy, goal-driven lives. Several of the works on display (including the one in the photo above) were created from wave patterns of healing frequencies, such as ancient Gregorian chants that have been scientifically proven to regenerate cells.

Donnellan’s background in Reiki has also made her more receptive to different materials and their respective different qualities. Iron, for example, as a dense and heavy material, does not respond to human hands in the same way that glass, fluid and transparent, does. This process of working with the material itself harkens back to the title of her exhibition, “Essentia” – rather than shaping her materials into something far from their origins, Donnellan desires to capture their foundation.

The exhibition space has not yet been arranged, but Donnellan envisions a space in which both her art pieces and her process videos will be on display. Whatever the details of the arrangement might be, she wishes for her audience to inhabit a peaceful space that captures the “essence of Zen meditation.”

The exhibition will open on August 10^th and will remain open until January 27^th, 2013.

— Anna Tatelman