Portfolio: Itty Neuhaus

by Beth E. Wilson, December 21, 2007

They’ve all become subjects of exploration, and jumping-off points for the aesthetic meditations of artist Itty Neuhaus. An associate professor of art at SUNY New Paltz, she engages many different media in her own art, including sculpture, collage, video, performance, and installation work. Her physical/visual artistic production is informed by a broad range of informational and intellectual sources, from glacial geology, botany, and biology to concepts from film editing, philosophy, and history. She picks up key concepts from these disparate fields, merging (or colliding) concepts in a body of work that plays with light and form to create an entirely new mode of expression, an aesthetically palpable way of understanding.

In “Home for Haus,” her latest exhibition, she examines elements of her family’s history (they emigrated to the US in the 1930s), in contrast to the fate of others who stayed behind (especially Adler, who died in the Holocaust, and who designed a desk that still resides in her father’s office). The exhibition is on view at the Stadthaus in her father’s hometown of Ulm, Germany, through January 27. Portfolio: www.ittyneuhaus.com.


—Beth E. Wilson

ITTY NUEHAUS ON HER WORK

See it/say it
I don’t really try to make sense of all the disparate parts of me. As an artist, I feel driven to certain interests—it seems so inexorable, why I go where I go, what my interests are. Sometimes it’s because I’ve got a show (which is always a great motivation), but sometimes I’ll [come up with a concept to] write a grant for something in particular. Right now, I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to pursue more of. It depends on what sort of opportunities I can make happen. I do feel like how it all does fit together, I want to have a common language to express that. It is already there [in the work]. The forms are there, maybe the words will come…today [in this interview]!

Light into mass
A Bigger Container was a series of forms that nested inside each other when it was in the back of my truck, and it expanded out into a giant piece that hung from a crossed the ceiling [at SculptureCenter in Queens]. The biggest form was cast [in paper mache] over a pup tent, so they went from 7’ diameter to peanut-sized. At that time I was thinking of light as the character of the thing, what sort of brought the objects to life. The actual, physical light and shadow interacted, and was what made it happen for the viewer. It also came out of snow, thinking about forming snow, making snow angels. When I was first thinking about the piece, I was making snow structures, snow huts. The way snow melts and changes, it inevitably had to be recorded with something, video or film or something, to show the change. Going from light to video is not much of a leap.