Flow: Linda Celestian & Linnea Tober

Flow is a joint Friends exhibition featuring artwork by local artists Linda Celestian and Linnea Tober. Together, they accentuate the flow of matter and bring attention to our natural world using contemporary techniques and traditional processes. 

Flow celebrates low and high-tech studio practices, from painting to Photoshop, to express their love and appreciation for the natural world and their relationship to it. Flow comments on the fluidity with which artists navigate media and thought, like ideas forming a river, picking up experiences along the way, eventually leading to a body of artwork. Celestian and Tober use that sense of "flow" to guide them through their creative expressions.

Linda Celestian creates fans of layered color to suggest a floating topology. Her paintings seep into the canvas, moving above and below other layers of paint to deepen the visual plane. Her work is experimental and ever-changing, much like the aquatic nature it's inspired by. Along with her two-dimensional work, Celestian creates hovering sculptures out of silk and wool, challenging gravity and space. These aerial wisps of vibrant color mimic and add dimension to the pools and streams of her paintings bound to the wall. There is no up nor down in her paintings and sculptures, they are unified by a multi-dimensional orientation that challenges traditional viewing experiences. 

Linnea Tober expresses her sensitivities through digital photography manipulation; however, by the end of her process, her style is indistinguishable from a painter's brush. Tober takes photographs in nature and brings the digital files into her studio to undergo a multitude of alterations that distort and morph the original image. Each piece contains a whirlpool of colors, some artifacts of the original image remain visible, but often they are completely recreated landscapes of vivid imagination. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website