Natural Fashion

It is truly wonderful when good friends create something artistically unique that is especially wonderful when it is a collaborative process. Our good friends, Lisa Schulte and Cyndee Howard did just that, right here in Santa Barbara.

Cyndee Howard

light is liquid,
life is liquid, 2010

digital photograph printed on aluminum

48" x
32"

A Certain Slant of Light: New Works by Cyndee Howard and Lisa Schulte is a two-person exhibit exploring the notion of light as a formal as well as thematic medium. The show is curated by Miki Garcia, Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, the exhibition features new works in photography by Howard and neon sculpture by Schulte.
The title is borrowed from a poem by Emily Dickinson that reveals an intimate, yet complex investigation into the nature of light as a spiritual, psychological, and physical theme. Both artists use this theme of light to portray this internal processing of emotions themselves, including angst, love, anger, lust, sweetness and spirituality. They all have titles like growth..and processing...and i cannot escape which allude to the works as vehicles for self-realization and discovery. An interesting medium choice for private explorations of self, as neon and light are usually chosen for public attention grabbing spaces. For this
exhibition, Howard was inspired by the neon works in Schulte's Los Angeles
Studio and thus became the idea for the two-person showing; as stated by Garcia "a
demonstration of the collaborative spirit between two artists, working
together to find similar expressions using their own media."

Lisa Schulte has worked with neon lights for thirty years as an industrial designer and artist. She uses neon to as a "way to tell a story, show the shapes and communicate feelings." The works in this exhibition evolved out of a person struggle to move from a dark period back into the light and to find her voice as an artist. Beginning with an emotion visualized in the form of light she determines whether it is possible to recreate the vision using the medium of neon: gas, glass, and fluorescent powders.

Lisa Schulte

Processing, 2010

16 straight runs of coated blue neon mounted on white aluminum

40" x 72"

Lisa Schulte

Scan, 2010

green neon on green high gloss metal

39" x 60"

Lisa Schulte

Eyes wide Open, 2010

orange neon on orange high gloss metal

21" x 24"

Cyndee Howard is an accomplished photographer who uses her camera as a way to articulate her thoughts and desires. She describes her worldview as two-fold. "the one within, whirling, dashing, jumping from thought to thought or emotion to emotion and then one very still, very quiet and observing everything outside and around me while trying to remain invisible. One is very logical and mathematical, one very lyrical and mystical. Sometimes they meet." She describes the process as an investigation of pushing the limits of shooting light for the sake of light, experimenting with aperture, focal settings, film speeds, camera shake, and other variations.