Barbara Yontz, currently an Assistant professor of art at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, New York spent eight years as Associate professor of art at Watkins College or Art in Nashville. Yontz teaches 2, 3 and 4-D studio classes as well as contemporary art and issues in contemporary art and theory. She is an artist and writer, recently signatured in the Fragile Species exhibition at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, included in the Toxic Landscapes exhibit at the Jose Marti National Library in Havana, Cuba, and has exhibited at the Limner Gallery in New York, at the Boston Museum School and the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, New Jersey as well as other exhibitions throughout the U.S. and in Mexico. She has written art criticism and articles on art for publications such as, “Art Papers”, “The Chicago Art Journal” and “InReview” and recently presented papers at the Popular Culture Conference on Unorthodox Teaching Methods in the Arts, and the Southeastern College Art Association Conference on Artists and Action in the Community. An avid researcher, concepts fuel her work especially ones related to embodiment and action, materiality and immateriality. Her most recent experiments are in the area of three and four dimensions…performance, sound and space. Her work is an interrogation of the notion of boundaries as it mediates our notions of both personal and social relations.

The pieces grow out of my own idiosyncratic musings: the subversive and complex possibilities associated with love, the stunted desire and pathos of an indiscernible encounter, or the inevitably futile gesture of attempting to hide the self.  I am interested in the material and psychological consequences of relationships, the paradox of the encounter between two. Because ultimately, it is in the relationship, with all its messiness and tenderness, where meaning is enacted. And it is within relationship where boundaries can be softened.

www.barbarayontz.com