Press

Transcendence
Lakeville Journal, 2025
by Natalia Zukerman

Argazzi Art in Lakeville will open “Transcendence,” a two-artist exhibition showcasing new works by Kathy Moss and Suzanne Onodera on Saturday, Oct. 11. The show brings together two accomplished painters whose practices, while distinct, both explore the sublime and ineffable through nature-based abstraction and symbolic form.

This will be the only major show of the year at Argazzi, lending “Transcendence” a heightened poignancy as the gallery prepares for an uncertain transition. With the building soon to be listed for sale, and programming for 2026 yet undecided, this exhibition may represent the culmination of a chapter in the gallery’s storied history under founder Judith Singelis.

Originally from California and now based in upstate New York, Suzanne Onodera bridges abstraction and realism in richly layered paintings that capture the complexity and chaos of the natural world. Her compositions offer “a sublime floating world, simultaneously chaotic and unsettled, exalted and sublime,” she writes in her artist’s statement. Her brushstrokes are lush, gestural and physical, evoking landscapes not as they are, but as they are felt.

Kathy Moss, known for her stark and symbolic botanical forms, brings eight new contemplative and minimalist pieces to “Transcendence.” Her work uses silhouetted flowers, seed pods, and organic shapes as archetypes, what she calls “a poetic depiction of the internal self.” Presented in glistening oil and chalk on luminous surfaces, Moss’s paintings investigate dualities: beauty and darkness, fragility and power, concept and representation.

“She doesn’t usually do that pink,” said Singelis, pointing to one of Moss’s larger canvases in the show. “Kathy is really well known for the rosebuds and trees and there’s a fragility to her work, but these are very graphic, very solid.”

Installed in the light-filled rooms of Argazzi Art, with fall foliage just beyond the windows, “Transcendence” is a meditation on impermanence — of nature, of personal and artistic transformation, and perhaps of the space that houses it.

“The physical part is really hard,” said Singelis, reflecting on the work that goes into preparing and hanging an exhibit. “It took me three weeks to put this show together and there I am up on a ladder, just this morning. It’s not easy,” she continued.

There are the physical demands of curation but there is also the interdependent relationship between gallery and artist in an ever-changing and inconsistent art world. “Curating isn’t just about hanging art,” said Singelis, who said that she would love to find a successor, someone with whom she could share the vision and passion for Argazzi. “They have to really want to do this,” she said. “They have to have a passion for it, because it’s not easy.”

And so “Transcendence” is not only a remarkable pairing of two wonderful artists, it is also a moment of reflection for the gallery itself. As Argazzi Art contemplates its next chapter, this show reaffirms what has made it such a beloved and enduring presence: a commitment to beauty, depth and meaningful artistic relationships.

“Transcendence” opens on Oct. 11 with a reception from 3 to 5 p.m. The show will be on view until December 1, 2025.

Fresh Paint
Corners Gallery, 2017
by Arthur Whitman

Fresh paint is coming to Ithaca — and so is the Fresh Paint exhibition.

Corners Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fresh Paint, will feature new pieces from local artists John McLaughlin, Tim Merrick, Suzanne Onodera, Barbara Page and Stan Taft. And for a couple of them, their works explore new mediums and styles.

Onodera, an artist who typically works with oil paints, dabbles in watercolors for her latest pieces. Though there is one oil on canvas painting, the rest are watercolors inspired by the landscape of Wyoming. During the month of May, Onodera was a fellow at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. Many of her works capture the landscape of Brushcreek, a 30,000-acre working ranch at the base of the Medicine Bow National Forest in southern Wyoming.

“You have all day to make art, and [watercolors] dry fast,” Onodera said. “I was able to get a lot of ideas out in a short time, and I went through a lot of paper — it was a little scary. But watercolors are a really immediate expression, and I enjoy the challenge of that.”

Something else new for Onodera are her panorama shots. Swirls of clouds on wide, short papers give the viewer an illusion of floating.

Unlike Onodera, Merrick doesn’t have one distinct medium. He’s done work in sculpting, printmaking and other forms, but his latest works are oil on canvas. Inspired by patterned books from the 1800s, architectural patterns for houses and buildings and ancient Roman culture, Merrick layered oils on canvas to give the impression of patterned panels.

“People talk about [these paintings] as being abstract, but really they’re as realistic as possible,” Merrick said. “I really like the paintings are ones that acknowledge what they are. You’re removing that illusion that it’s something else.”

Merrick’s paintings, rustic and textured, hang near Onodera’s soft and dreamy landscapes. While their inspirations and styles don’t align, both collections go beyond the boundaries of what is “realistic.” Their works challenge reality and how reality is perceived by others.

Onodera’s panoramas and landscapes, while drawing inspiration from the landscapes of Wyoming, are actually reinterpreted versions of what she saw during her fellowship. She tried sitting in front of the creek and painting what she saw, she said, but what she painted didn’t get properly filtered through her artistic lens. She set back to her studio, image in mind, and painted something that she felt — not just saw.

“I wonder if people are becoming conditioned now to think of art as blurring the lines between the human touch and the machine touch,” Onodera said. “We want repetition and we want manufactured art — something that’s multiples and can be reproduced fairly quickly that’s clean and perfect — but really that’s so far from what people really want, which is the sense of the human touch.”

The human touch in Merrick’s paintings presents itself through different filters and passions. Merrick works across different areas, weaving his job as a construction worker, his knowledge of art history and his love for ancient Roman culture and mythology into his paintings. While these areas are an odd combination, they are undoubtedly Merrick: even the mistakes.

“I really like the mistakes and the attempt to make things perfect because if you make the perfect painting, why paint?” he said. “It’s not about that, it’s about the working process for the future. I never know when the endpoint is going to be when I work.”

Both of the artists’ works capture the human experience: be it through what they see or what they love. They’re not afraid to be human, and they’re bold enough to challenge what it means to be an artist.

“That is one of the hardest things about making art: you can do things, but you really need that time to process what you’ve done before you move on to the next one,” Merrick said. “Successful paintings are produced by figuring out a working process.”

The Landscape of Dreams: Corners Gallery showcasing some compelling work
Stan Taft and Suzanne Onodera
Corners Gallery, Ithaca Times, 2016
by Arthur Whitman

Two-person exhibits in Ithaca are often ad-hoc pairings. As such, it’s always encouraging to see two artists, strong in their own right, whose works elucidate each other’s through meaningful similarities and differences. Such is the case with the current “Summer Show” at Corners Galley in Cayuga Heights (it’s up through the end of August). Curated by gallery owner Ariel Bullion Ecklund, it features oil landscapes by local painters Suzanne Onodera and Stan Taft.

Onodera is a well-established artist, with gallery representation in California, Arizona, and Vermont as well as with Corners. “The Wild and the Deep,” her 2014 solo show at Corners, was a tour de force.

Her canvas and panel oils, often large, are abstracted landscapes: contemporary versions of the Romantics’ sublime vistas. While the classical European landscape offers the viewer places to stand, Onodera’s imaginary scenes transmute solid masses into ghostly liquescence. Her use of amorphous fogs and glazes, subtly accented with more visible brushwork, has been characteristic.

Onodera’s work here though has evolved, with her brushstrokes becoming thicker and heavier, with emphatically expressionist blocks of color standing out more against the thinly painted backgrounds.

A diptych on two upright canvases, Traversing the Steep Ravine is the largest piece here and the most overtly ambitious. Patches of acidic green—accented in bright yellow-orange and shadowed in black—help make it legible as a “landscape” but any sense of here-and-there is necessarily slippery. As in other pieces of hers here, a mountain seems to rise in the distance. Both the sky above and the river that winds its way down to our feet are in pale, softly brushed colors.

And Other Observations, a smaller near-square piece on panel, is just as compelling. The brushwork is brusque and broken while the palette combines the ethereal and the earthy.

Stan Taft, a longtime professor of art at Cornell, has had two previous solo shows at Corners. His exhibit last year, “Tree + Landscape,” showed off something of his eclectic range as a painter. The “tree” series featured black silhouettes against fields of flatly painted, often lurid color. Subtler—and easier to digest—were his landscapes, regional scenes of nature and countryside carefully observed and transcribed with both precision and verve.

For the current exhibit, Taft has continued in the latter mode. His panel paintings here have a remarkable sense of clarity and luminosity with a subtle painterliness inflecting a typically crisp delineation of receding areas of land and water. Skies are often smooth and their light infuses the whole scene. Cayuga Lake is often visible in the distance. An orange underlayer often peeks through the paint application.

Lansingville Road, a larger panel piece, is particularly striking. A smoothly painted pale blue sky—tinged with yellow—spills down more than half way while a distant hillside in impressionistic pale purples stretches down nearly to the bottom edge. The foreground is defined by a copse of trees, silhouetted in black and rising to touch the sky near the center. These have been accented in a faint blue, suggesting not so much highlighting as haunting. Taft likes to play with the idea of a foreground plane—here as elsewhere, the bottom edge sports a flat band, which on closer inspection, turns out to be a roof.

White Barn is a jaunty winter scene on small panel, memorable for the crisply defined miniature building that anchors its lower right corner.

Although not evident from the focused selection here, Taft’s wide-ranging body of work is interesting as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism: two cultural world-views apparently no longer on speaking terms. His most basic stylistic approach is in the tradition of a sort of modernist realism—in addition to the great French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, it recalls the careful, rigorously empirical work of the 20th century British painter William Coldstream and his followers. But there’s also another side to his work: an idiosyncratic eclecticism of style and subject matter as well as an—often literally—oblique approach to narrative.

That I tend to be skeptical of such approaches is well known—still, it might be interesting to see some of this more “difficult” work outside the campus setting.

A Wild Cry: Add Onodera to the List of Ithaca’s Best Painters
Corners Gallery, 2014
Ithaca Times
by Arthur Whitman

A Californian turned Ithacan, Suzanne Onodera is one of our best painters. Her oils, often large, echo the romantic and tonalist painters of the 19th century in pushing landscape away from concrete depiction and toward abstraction. The word that usually comes up in discussing her work is “atmospheric.” Rich explorations of texture as form, she builds up layers of thin and sometimes-thickened color—stains, fogs, and accenting brushstrokes—that evoke places imagined or seen through the veil of memory.

In addition to the Corners Gallery in Ithaca, Onodera is represented by galleries in California, Arizona, and Vermont. The artist had her first local solo show in 2012 at the Community Arts Partnership’s ArtSpace. She has been in the occasional local group show: most memorably, “Landscape and Memory” in 2010, curated by local artist Tim Merrick (now her husband) for the Tompkins Country Public Library. Last year, she was part of “Galerie Magnifique,” a pop-up exhibition curated by Corners owner Ariel Bullion Ecklund in a temporary space near her Cayuga Heights frame-shop and gallery. Still, my sense is that she has yet to fully “arrive” as a local artist—that is, until now.

Up this month (through Oct. 4) in Corners’ recently renovated and expanded space, Onodera’s solo exhibition “The Wild and the Deep” is imposingly rich in its collective grandeur. The show upholds the gallery’s emerging reputation for high standards in showing both local and non-local artists. The work includes oils on canvas, paper, and wood panel.

Although the show has been several years in the planning, all of the work was finished in 2014. “It takes me so long to make a painting,” Onodera explained to me before her recent opening. “Although I’m working on several at once, it takes me a long time to get to a point where it’s done. So, knowing that, three years is about right, even though the last eight months, you’re just like every day in the studio. And then it totally changes. There’s a certain point where you’re just like … everything that you did last year totally doesn’t fit into the show.”

The Corners’ front room does multiple duties as a display and consultation space for other gallery artists and for the framing business. It holds a scattering of Onodera’s smaller pieces.

A corner—just to your right as you step in—holds two small but striking paintings. An upswept gray cloud and hefty turquoise sea spotted with black enact a brooding drama in the square-shaped Ocean Deep. Unusual for this show in its color and skinny upright format, Waking Tiepolo evokes the Italian Rococo artist’s gravity-defying multi-figure paintings in its delicate tones—red-purple, fleshy pale pink, baby blue—and roiling brushwork.

A row of upright pieces on unframed sheets of paper have been clipped to a prominent wall. (There is a contemporary vogue for informal displays of artwork.) Beneath the Shadow of Night and The Pull of Oblivion pull their painterly theatrics around hazily lit central voids. The Wild Cry of Involuntary Things is particularly gorgeous with its agitated brushiness and fiery cloudscape.

Recently acquired and renovated as a dedicated gallery over this past winter, the Corners’ back room holds the bulk and the focus of Onodera’s show. It’s an impressive selection. (All pieces are on canvas unless otherwise mentioned.)

Onodera is deeply invested in her signature approach, one that conceals its exploratory range behind a striking consistency. In this regard, it is welcome to see three smaller Koi paintings: scenes of pink-orange carp immersed in shadowy waters, swimming eloquently in both unison and counterpoint. (Koi #2 appears in stately black frame; oddly everything else here is unframed.)

I asked Onodera if these paintings—with their echoes of the late 19th century European craze for japonisme—were intended to recall her own Japanese heritage. Unsure, she explained simply that she had been looking through photographs of Japanese gardens and had become fascinated by “the little fishies.”

“Koi are magical,” she said. “I love the color. I was drawn to them mostly, originally for their color…you know, how they emerge out of the dark.” Indeed, these lively creatures seem to emerge—to move or even grow—from the color, from the material of the paint.

An animating tension between hazy, layered tints of color—reminiscent of the late 19th century tonalist painters like James Whistler and George Inness—and areas where the trace of her brush is more pronounced characterizes Onodera’s work. You can feel the difference: the paradoxically diffuse but weighty quality of her skies and voids versus the palpably gestural movement and tension that traces from her hand. Her laborious building up of these qualities results in work that has a symphonic depth and complexity.

According to Onodera, her work has changed in the last year. “The markmaking is more gestural,” she explained to me—“I think it’s an evolution.” Indeed, this is particularly evident in several pieces here—most strikingly so in a pair of large canvases that hint at the abstract expressionism of artists such as Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston.

Another large piece, On the Deluge and its Depiction pushes the expressionism to a point of willful coarseness that challenges the eloquence and facility that I associate with Onodera’s style. It is not an entirely satisfying piece but it is an interesting departure. The piece has an unexpected symmetry: a tentative clearing in the sky meets a what might be a river, forming a rightward pointing “V” converging where one might expect to find a horizon line.

Certain Refuge pairs a particularly pale, hazy sky—it is almost uncomfortable to look at—with a landscape of pale greens, painted in demonstrative patches of relatively thick paint. A river curls from the foreground, leading the viewer into the distance. It seems to absorb the color and light of the sky but also to hold it off, as if to keep it from smothering everything.

In the Low Country we glimpse rusty clouds sweeping down against pale purple-blue sky—towards what might be a lagoon, ghostly olive green water surrounded by shadowed red-brown earth.

Although a narrow gap separates the two adjacent panels in From the Fire, the scene is otherwise continuous: smeary red-purple clouds held up by pale blue sky and a earthscape of amber scorched with purple-black. Onodera’s world-view is so soft; the jolt of the straight edges adds something to the work. A relatively straight-ahead landscape, Approaching Thunder, shows a vaguely pyramid-like upswept cloud, seemingly pulling away from the dark earth below. Many of Onodera’s pieces conflate sky and earth, above and below—but not so here.

A visit to view “The Wild and the Deep” is like taking part in a rich but carefully proportioned meal—filled with a fiercely intelligent sensuality and well-conceived variety. It is a must see for those with a serious interest in painting.

Corners Gallery has had a string of fine exhibitions this year. Not only that but Ecklund’s discernment in representing and selling local and non-local artists is most impressive. (Onodera, with her gallery representations in several states, is in a way both.) The Ithaca-area roster also features painters Barbara Page and Stan Taft, as well as mixed media artists Minna Resnick and Ruth Sproul, both known for their printmaking. From around the country, the list includes the surrealist painter-collagist John McLaughlin, experimental photographer Elise Nicol, and the scientifically inspired printmaker Rosalyn Richards—all of them among the more interesting artists to show their work in Ithaca in recent years.

The Finger Lakes is Ripe with Landscape Painters
Ithaca Times, 2014
by Arthur Whitman

Landscape painting is an established and familiar genre just about everywhere. It is particularly strong here in Ithaca—with the city’s undeniably scenic and pastoral settings and perhaps with its local-first and environmental ethos. And while the genre can lend itself to cliché, at its best, it can be a taking off point for a range of investigation that seems unlikely to exhaust itself any time soon.

Here are six of my favorite landscape artists from Ithaca and a bit beyond. Two have current or upcoming solo shows. Others can be seen at the State of the Art Gallery—Ithaca’s major cooperative for fine artists—or on the upcoming Greater Ithaca Art Trail.

(Open by schedule year around, The Art Trail hosts its annual Open Studio weekends in the fall. The upcoming events are on Oct. 11, 12, 18, and 19 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. The “trail” consists of 42 artists with studios in Ithaca and several neighboring communities. See www.arttrail.com, pick up a brochure, or call the Community Arts Partnership at 607-273-5072 for more information.)

Using his minivan as a mobile studio, Carlton Manzano (www.carltonmanzano.net) paints regional scenes with a rough energy that recalls the Ashcan School realists of a century ago—only he substitutes natural and rural environments for their New York City ones. His sense of touch and texture is delightful and his attention to the changing of the seasons and to the less-than-sightly aspects of rural and small town communities is distinctive.

A similar combination of quotidian scene-setting and painterly freeplay characterizes the work of Ithaca turned Brooklyn artist Neil Berger (www.neilberger.com). Due to his long association with the Ink Shop—Ithaca’s cooperative printmaking studio and print gallery—Berger is best known locally for his black and white monotypes. He is also a highly capable and inventive oil painter. His style in both ink and paint combines weighty evocation of concrete locations with a varied and virtuosic flurry of painterly marks. He is known for his landscapes, which explore a wide range of natural and urban settings. He is also an able portraitist and is known to incorporate human figures into his landscapes—something of a rarity in local art.

Berger is having a show in October at the Frame Shop downtown with a “First Friday” opening on Oct. 3.

Done with painstakingly layered oil paint on both canvas and paper, Suzanne Onodera’s (sonodera.com/) rich work is poised between the palpable and the ethereal. Although often described as abstract, they owe more to the romantic and tonalist landscape artists of the 19th century than to just about anybody from the 20th. Her work distills the genre to its fundamentals: hazily lit atmosphere; suggestions of clouds, smoke, and fire; implied horizons; earth, foliage, and water.

Her solo show “The Wild and the Deep” is up this month (through Oct. 4) at the Corners Gallery in Cayuga Heights. There will be a reception on Sept. 12 from 5:30 to 8 p.m.

Of her show the Californian turned Ithacan artist says in a statement: “Recently I relocated to the Northeast where the lush and changing land continues to influence my practice in ways I am still unsure. And although I am inspired by land, place and nature, all of my imagery is invented. It is detached from any historical or specific link to time or place. Ultimately, this work is about transcendental beauty and connectivity between humans and nature, and to the self and the sublime.”