By Jennifer Junghans

Featuring distinctive work from seven artists over the age of 60, the art exhibit “View from the Hill” is showing at Axis Gallery on S Street in Sacramento through Sunday, Dec. 1.   

Curator Joanne Tepper Saffren, whose work is also featured in the show, left it up to the artists to interpret the exhibit’s theme that unites them as older creatives.

“I really want to highlight these other artists whose work is magnificent and really shows what it means to live a creative life and be at this point where we have the freedom to sort of choose what we’re doing,” says Tepper Saffren.

At the age of 64, after a career of graphic design and an invariable desire to return to fine arts, she graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Master in Fine Arts. She’s noticed a fairly profound change in her own work over time.

“I feel freedom that comes with age. Really, I am so engaged in the experimental process. That’s my love more than anything, is sort of just playing and experimenting and having fun,” says Tepper Saffren.  

For example, her anthrotype print, “Ephemeral Beauty” made by experimenting with beetroot paint on silk after exposing it to the sun for 10 days, reveals a photograph of one of Folsom’s heritage trees, representing life, generosity and resiliency. Littered around the base of the tree are broken limbs and branches — yet it still grows, she says. The print itself is ephemeral. In two months, it’ll fade and be gone.

For Tepper Saffren, her collective work is how she processes life. She leaves the interpretation to the viewer but hopes it’s experiential.  

Two of her three chairs on display are made from trees that washed ashore at Folsom Lake during California’s last major drought when millions of trees died. It broke her heart and she wanted to extend the generous nature of trees — they give us breath and absorb our toxic waste, she says.

At the show’s reception, it brought her great joy to see people sitting in the chairs, talking and relaxing. “I think that also comes with age … you just want to be generous and comforting and accepting,” says Tepper Saffren.

As Susan Silvester was preparing for the show, she was surprised to find a pencil drawing she’d made of stuffed animals on a couch when she was 15, which she included in her exhibit. She was struck to see the same thread in her work over the decades to present day, echoing her love of animals and nature, and the universal human yearning to understand our place in the natural world, she says.

“I like to do children that connect with nature and I’m trying to raise awareness that our animals and we are the same, symbiotic creatures, and all stewards of this earth … We are connected to them. We’re not that different.”

But looking beyond the whimsical characters in her work — created from felted wool, ceramic sculptures, ceramic tiles with lithography and digital paintings — reveals a deeper, unsettling feeling that conveys the lack of respect and understanding society has toward animals and nature.    

Fiber artist and art activist Jennifer Kim Sohn uses her work to bring awareness to environmental and social justice issues.

When she was raising her children, her art had a lot to do with being a parent and her personal life. “At this point … my personal concerns now encompass what kind of world am I leaving behind for my boys?” Kim Sohn says.

She displays a collection of eight deformed frogs made from cotton remnants in bottles after disfigured frogs in Minnesota, representing the impact of pesticides from conventional agriculture on the natural world. Her second piece features sewing machines wrapped in textiles alongside portraits, representing child labor in the textile industry. And her tower of clothing represents the exploitation of the fast fashion labor force.

“I’m trying to get people to realize that even if we’re just one in 7 billion people, our actions do have an impact,” she says.

Roma Devanbu chose to think about the view from where she is now in life. For her, that meant looking forward as well as back, and she reflects that dichotomy in her exhibited work.

Her collection of six acrylic paintings, “Domestic Mudras” documents her struggle to find beauty and meaning in the banality of endless household tasks as she raised her children that she always wanted. 

“I think I was really struggling with resentment … It wasn’t what I imagined I would be doing. I’m a feminist. I didn’t think I’d be spending that much time doing housework and not getting into the studio as much as I wanted to,” Devanbu says.

Before she had children, she spent a year in India studying art history where mudras — sacred, symbolic hand gestures in Hindu and Buddhist art — express a range of meanings in religious and spiritual practices. As she did her housework, she noticed her perspective was of looking at her own hands doing these activities. She wondered if she could view her hands doing the tasks through an enlightened perspective, as mudras.  

In conversation with her mudras is her piece “Feet Up,” drawn with semi-acrylic, graphite and color sticks on paper that she created just for this show to represent where she is today.

“One thing that’s different now is that I have a lot more balance in my life. I’m not fighting the housework the way I used to and I do give myself permission to put my feet up more,” she says. “Instead of hands, this time it’s feet, sitting in my backyard enjoying the view.”

The “View from the Hill” exhibit also features the works of Steve Briscoe, Richard Gilles and Mattie Parfitt. Briscoe’s featured work is made from various materials and represents “part self-portrait, cultural commentary and poetic gesture.” Gilles’ photographs spotlight objects commonly viewed but often unseen, and Parfitt’s collection of 96 individual collages each made from a single playing card that symbolizes the variety of each day, “like a randomly chosen card.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.