Michelle Oosterbaan, who visited the College this week to give an Artist's Talk, likes to think of herself first and foremost as a visual artist. Indeed, Oosterbaan's artistic oeuvre often transcends genre and medium.
Oosterbaan's talk in the VAC Beam classroom on Monday, September 21, was aptly titled "Places on a Map." Cartography and the exploration of space are central to Oosterbaan's artistic vision. She treats space as a found object, "charting its physical and psychic qualities."
Her work centers on the collision of the "strange and supernatural with the familiar." Oosterbaan describes her intricate, fantastical drawings as "little bits of fairy tales, the way I wish life were."
Her aesthetic often extends into "the world of the unseen," as shown in a large scale drawing titled "At the Base of a Tree," which depicts minute DNA helixes wound around animal images collected from National Geographic and from the artist's imagination.
Oosterbaan's work, however, goes far beyond the planar, 2-D surface of drawing. Also integral to her artistic body of work are her large installations concerned with space and color.
"Installations force the viewer to participate because of their scale," she said.
In her "distilling of an empty space," Oosterbaan aims to create a "floating world" where "color can be mobile and auditory." In her "theater of space in another world," "air can be electric or magnetic," and the lines of Dutch Colonial architecture can meet Japanese screens and tiny altarpieces rendered in tape.
According to Oosterbaan, the relationship between remembering and rendering is important in her examination of this otherworld.
"The act of doing informs the story. There's an indescribable knowingness," she said.
Whether speaking about a drawing rendered in colored pencils, or a staircase transformed by the interplay of colors, shapes, and negative space, Oosterbaan sums up her work as "the 'Aha!' moment before life goes on."
Her artwork invites the viewer to pause and appreciate the unexpected relationships and intricacies of life made manifest in her large scale blocks of color or in the delicate line drawing of a rabbit.
Oosterbaan has shown her work at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Museum in Philadelphia, as well as the Drawing Center in New York City. She has also been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies in The Netherlands, France, and Iceland, as well as The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Mass.