ANDREA FERRIGNO / LYNETTE LOMBARD
THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS

APRIL 19 - MAY 31, 2024

EVENTS

ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
Friday, May 17, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm 
Wege Gallery 

GALLERY TALK
Saturday, May 18, 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Wege Gallery

The Wege Gallery is proud to present the work of Andrea Ferrigno and Lynette Lombard in THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS. The exhibition highlights the relationship between the two colleagues and their works and pays tribute to Lombard who recently passed in November 2023.  

In Ferrigno’s ephemeral oil paintings, she considers the visual languages used by systems of science and mathematics to describe and decode the natural world. Through exploring various dichotomies that emerge in the work—stillness and motion, matter and energy, and experience and information—Ferrigno emphasizes the importance of an unfolding and undulating process. The ever-shifting lines, shapes, and forms in her work become synonymous with the process of their own discovery, allowing the work to exist simultaneously between what is real as evidence and what is real as lived experience.  

Lynette Lombard’s oil paintings in the exhibition span several years and represent a fraction of the artist’s inquiries into painting. Often tied to specific locations she frequented and lived—Southern Spain and western Illinois—the works fuse layers of time and place. Lombard’s paintings, “informed by the feeling of walking a terrain and working in all kinds of weather” reveal the dramatic range in which the artist worked and thrived. The physicality of the painted layers in Lombard’s works affirm her responsiveness to the spaces surrounding her and for us indicate the beautiful complexity of a fleeting moment.  

Throughout the exhibition, the two artists’ works are in conversation about the many things they discussed together in their studios. Guided by a mix of intuition and a desire to address their subjects with the appropriate gravity, both Lombard and Ferrigno move freely throughout, ardently modeling “serious play” for their students and viewers of their work. THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS draws its name from Richard Siken’s poem and recounts for Ferrigno the ongoing dialogue between she and Lombard about art, painting, and teaching at Knox College in Galesburg, IL.  

THE WAY THE LIGHT REFLECTS 
Richard Siken 

The paint doesn’t move the way the light reflects, 
so what’s there to be faithful to? I am faithful 
to you, darling. I say it to the paint. The bird floats 
in the unfinished sky with nothing to hold it. 
The man stands, the day shines. His insides and 
his outsides kept apart with an imaginary line— 
thick and rude and imaginary because there is 
no separation, fallacy of the local body, paint 
on paint. I have my body and you have yours. 
Believe it if you can. Negative space is silly. 
When you bang on the wall you have to remember 
you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead, 
yell at yourself. Some people don’t understand 
anything. They see the man but not the light, 
they see the field but not the varnish. There is no 
light in the paint, so how can you argue with them? 
They are probably right anyway. I paint in his face 
and I paint it out again. There is a question 
I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what? 

 From War of the Foxes, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2015.