Constance Volk behind her painting “bogachiel river” The Xavierite
The Saint Xavier University Gallery hosted Constance Volk’s “Channeling” collection on Sept. 11, which featured artworks that represent pathways of life, along with a flute performance that required the participation of audience members.
Volk, originally from Seattle, came to Chicago to study the flute at DePaul University. Since then, she has called Chicago her home. She first discovered her love in the artworld after finding a career as a piano tuner at Columbia University, where she tuned several hundreds of pianos as a source of extra income.
As a musician, she took interest in the department after wanting to learn more about how to repair the instrument while understanding the mechanics of it. Volk describes tuning as needing constant attention due to the changes of weather affecting the pianos. However, by tuning, would lead to the creative process of creating the artwork presented in the SXU gallery.
“Something about the experience of tuning the strings from out of tune to intune, from waves to pure straight lines just inspired visual imagery that I felt I couldn’t escape,” she says. Volk explains that when she began painting for “Channeling,” she wanted to capture something very specific; this led to Volk failing a series of times before she finally succeeded at achieving her desired painting she was confident with.
The exhibit, “Channeling” comes from a technique Volk created as the foundation of her paintings, by using clay. This process would create channels to form that “allows reactive oil to flow and marble as it cures,” she states. “Reactive oil paint marbles over a multi-day curing process, producing organic networks that appear repetitive, but upon closer inspection, reveal unique subtleties, as the veins in a leaf.”
These “channels” represent the events of our lives that conform into a maze. “The pathways represent the habits our brains develop, the roads we travel daily, and the choices we make along the way,” she says. “My mazes explore the notion that no matter where we are, where we were or where we’re going, whether standing still or repairing on a loop, we can appreciate what exists around us and that we have senses to perceive it.”
Volk’s inspiration for her paintings come from the way the earth conforms in its own natural ways, whether this may take the form of waterfalls or mountains, each having a connection to her paintings. Her muses resemble the artwork she creates, as they include the Devils Tower, Yellowstone National Park, and Olympic National Park. This also includes resembling water features such as Bogachiel River System and the Chicago River System as they “rely on channels formed by nature, whose twists and turns influence the line-work throughout this collection,” Volk mentions.
An audience member, Talia McMullen, a senior at SXU majoring in art, describes Volk’s exhibition and performance. “The different path she creates around the art is informative and subjective. I think that is her entire point because life is informative,” says MucMullen.
During the exhibition,Volk demonstrated a live action flute concert with the creative twist of gaining assistance from audience members to take control of the whole performance by rolling a set of large dice in front of Volk as she would then change the flow and patterns of her flute.
The idea first sparked about 4 or 5 years ago, “I started sketching out ideas which were going to be like, you have a string quartet and you would have an overhead projector with a game board on it, there would be four game pieces on the board that represented each member of the string quartet. The audience could come up and move the game pieces around and it would determine what the players were playing,” Volk explains.
Volk’s “Play Me” demonstrates herself being “trapped within the channel and locked into a space” as she improvises her movements and fluidity of harmonies played on her flute, as the audience controls the performance entirely. Until the audience rolls a dice, Volk remains standing still, however once the die is moved, depending on which color, the performance changes itself.
The two colors, yellow and black of the dice, represent forwardness and backward of motion; once Volk finds herself outside of the “channel,” the performance is officially over.
For years the idea remained in the back of Volk’s mind, waiting to emerge completely in presentation. Although, she says the concept wasn’t a good idea, but rather an intriguing one. “I realized what I would really like is the musicians themselves to be the game pieces and the board to be the size of the room,” she says.
“So once I got that idea, I was really just looking for an opportunity to put the time and resources into building the pathways and I decided to build them for my group, Ensemble Dal Niente’s fundraiser and I built six pathways, which was the birth of this piece.”
The piece is originally named, “Play Us” due to two or more audience members rolling the dice during the performance, however due to Volk’s SXU performance being the only solo version presented, for the first time it was named, “Play Me.”
Volk was invited to present her gallery at SXU by Nathan Peck, Intern Gallery Director, who has been a “inspiration and a colleague” to Volk for decades.
“I really like artists that are working between disciplines like art and music, because in many cases, they are most likely to be operating at the edges of the fridges and I think that’s the most interesting and innovative things happen,” Peck explained
“Connie is a really interesting example of that and the idea that her performance and pictures actually make a lot of sense together is a good example of that,” he says. “ Even though they look nothing like one another.”
When Volk was asked what her favorite art piece was, without hesitation she immediately spoke, “Sensation of Choosing”, her attractiveness to the painting had difficulty wrapping around with words as she adored the minimalists and restrictives of the one colored piece. “I feel like it’s whispering to me in a very comforting way.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to come up with an answer because you want to say why you like something, but really the liking comes first, you are just attracted, and you try to put it into words and you might get lucky and capture it but you might not be able to,” she explained.
Volk’s exhibition will be available at SXU’s gallery until Sept. 27 from Monday–Friday at 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. You can find the link to Volk’s paintings and other artworks here.