Defining a Moment: an independent project from Fellow Erica Mohan

7 January 2015

Girls’ Club presents Defining a Moment, an independent project created by Fall 2014 fellow Erica Mohan. Defining a Moment is a multi-part video blog series exploring the stories of select artists’ decisions to pursue an artistic profession and the moments that sparked their transformation. Artists were selected from the private collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, founders of Girls’ Club, with a focus on local artists.

Defining a Moment shares an intimate glimpse of artists’ personal struggles, discoveries, philosophies and fears involved with being a practicing artist in today’s society.

About Erica Mohan

Erica Mohan was born in Toronto, Ontario, CA. She obtained a BFA from Florida Atlantic University and went on to hold Girls' Club first fellowship position in Fall 2015. She is an oil painter whose interests revolve around her experience with martial arts and its application in everyday life.

Follow the hashtag #DefiningaMoment on social media platforms for the latest interviews and updates.

Part One Part Two

Part One

features Girls’ Club collection artists Jane Hart, Virginia Fifield, Carol Prusa, Lisa Sanditz, Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, Tara Penick and AdrienneRose Gionta

Published January 2015.

Jane Hart / TJ Ahearn

"..artwork was a way to kind of make sense of what was going on.."

artist website

Virginia Fifield

"..it offered a degree of problem solving and that always really interested me.."

artist website

Carol Prusa

"..it would be like the hardest thing I could choose to follow, and it made me feel so alive.."

artist website

Lisa Sanditz

"As long as I can remember, I liked to make things, turning bags of bobbles and panty hose into knock-off Cabbage Patch dolls, fashioning cardboard records and a record player out of old boxes or making life size people out of old tennis ball cans. There was never an 'Ah-ha,' moment, just a steady series of material play.

"Some early highlights include, winning a coloring contest sponsored by a local grocery store by showcasing early collage skills and including glitter and cotton balls as textural elements in the otherwise standard black-outline coloring book image. This got me tickets to Six Flags or a Cardinals’ game, I can’t remember. Later in high school, painting clumsy sets for Roger and Hammerstein classics first challenged my own experience with scale as these sets crept across the dusty auditorium.

"All the while I sopped up art in local museums. I was aware of curious connections between Oceanic art and Cubism, saturated by Matisse’s colors and intimidated by the German Expressionists powerful colors, narratives and gestalt.

"In college I studied art, of course. I graduated and made art. I had no back-up plan. Painting was and is the only plan. Crappy and great jobs and art sales have supported this over the years.

"Scale came back a round in a number of ways. I spent many foggy California days painting murals in San Francisco and also submitting a proposal to The Guinness Book of World Records to make the world’s largest pair of underwear. The proposal was rejected and the panties never made- a shelved project for later days.

"The last ten years have been the most focused and dedicated on art making and specifically painting. I have played around with materials including, paper, ceramics, and most ferociously painting in both acrylic and oil. Tiny triumphs and giant failures occur on a daily basis in the studio.

"The defining moment happens on a daily basis, when I see a bright red Cardinal pop against a dusty dry winter landscape, see neon-vinyl scraps in a landfill in China or observe a mis-shapen tree cut to accommodate a power line in front of my house. These moments become interior in my mind and body and are then churned and unleashed in the studio. At times yielding fantastic creations and at others monuments of personal dissatisfaction and failure."

artist website

Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez

"..it's not about what you do and get paid for, it's about the path you lay out for yourself.."

artist website

Tara Penick

"..at least for me if not for anybody else, this is what I was meant to do.."

artist website

AdrienneRose Gionta

"..now I'm going to see what happens, I'm just going to take the chance.."

artist website

Part Two

features Girls' Club Collection artists Samantha Salzinger, Francie Bishop Good, Sarah Michelle Rupert, Carolyn Swiszcz, Michelle Weinberg, Peter Symons and Leah Brown

Published January 2016.

Samantha Salzinger

"..there's something blissful and happy about the act of doing it.."

artist website

Francie Bishop Good

"..you're going to get up to bat even if you strike out, because it's a passion that you love.."

artist website

Sarah Michelle Rupert

"..I found this weird space that just fit and it felt awesome.."

artist website

Carolyn Swiszcz

"There hasn't been one 'defining moment' that made me want to be an artist; there have been a series of experiences and people who have helped develop the desire (always with me) to make things. One of my most profound influences was a couple who collected art. My father, a machinist, maintenance man, and creative problem solver, was their handyman for over two decades. They lived in an architecturally significant mid-century home that could have been (and probably was) featured in magazines and coffee table books. My parents and I frequently house-sat for them. I loved spending time there, not just for the pool, but because I found so many spaces for my imagination: a rose garden, a goldfish pond, a balcony, reading nooks. I remember watching the morning fog clear as the sculptures out on the lawn were revealed.

"Their collection of paintings, sculptures, and books was my first museum. Their art sometimes perplexed and unsettled my parents. 'Wait until you see THIS new thing!' my father would say about a new purchase. It's not as if I came from a home without a sense of aesthetics, but my mother's taste is traditional: brass candlesticks, watercolor landscapes, flowered wallpaper, nautical touches from our New England seaside city. My other home, as I came to think of it, had work that was challenging, unconventionally beautiful, large. Two works that I found most memorable were by Red Grooms. Their content wasn't as shocking to me as their form. One was a colorful paper mâché sculpture in an upstairs bedroom; it was a good 5 feet tall and seemed to tumble off the wall. Another was an arrangement of figures from one of Grooms' animations, mounted on a wooden staircase, that took up about as much room as pinball machine. There was, of course, nothing remotely like this in the house where I grew up. Seeing this work gave me a desire to make ambitious things out of real material like metal, wood, clay and oil paint - not just the fussy little tempera paints and crayons that I had access to.

"This house was also remarkably free of the detritus I was used to seeing elsewhere: TV trays, stuffed animals, photo albums, knick-knacks, throw rugs, tissue boxes, seasonal decorations. I can think of few details that were not carefully considered, and often those seemed to be admitted as a compromise for comfort or technology. The silverware, patio furniture, light fixtures, and even the houseplants were from another better-designed planet than the one I normally lived on, and I loved visiting this planet and daydreaming.

"I can't quite pin down what I gained by my exposure to the world that this couple created but I will try. Maybe being in their home on a regular basis, over the course of many years, in different seasons and different light, enabled me to develop an ongoing relationship with art and architecture that can't be gained by seeing similar (or even superior) work on a few museum trips. Their choices, the way work was placed and rotated, the catalogs they brought back from their travels, taught me that art could be the focus of a home and a life."

artist website