Practice Highlights

Contingent Upon

Ridley Gallery, Sierra College, 2019

Heart + Mind + Action + Together = Healing and Thriving =, a wall installation of machine embroidery on fabric stretched on panels, is a call to contemplation and action.

Uncontrollable Beauty

AXIS Gallery, Sacramento, 2016

Cheselyn Amato’s first solo show at AXIS Gallery, Uncontrollable Beauty, is an interdisciplinary circumstance designed as a context for the experience of enchantment, wonderment, awe, and delight in the face of ever-present uncertainty.

Seder Plate Old Story New Works

Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, 2009

Light as a metaphor for the soul is central to Cheselyn Amato’s installation of six screen mesh discs fitted with spectral radiant film to create an aura of radiant and colorful light punctuated by the shadows of incised marks, objects laid on the surfaces and flat silhouettes.

New Authentics

Spertus Museum, Chicago, 2008

Cheselyn Amato’s work, exhibited in The New Authentics, also removes charged imagery from a specific context in order to explore its meaning.

Big Issues – Time’s Up

JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, 2018

Cheselyn Amato speaks to justice and injustice in paired works in which narratives are constructed of silhouetted images that tell the story of tribulation on the one hand and the possibility of resilience and triumph on the other.

Swag With Love

AXIS Gallery, Sacramento, 2016

How amazing that sublimity, awe, wonder and delight are embodied in every infinitesimal frame that we choose to see. The frame – like a snapshot or moving image still – captures an instant that does not otherwise exist.

Ner Tamid Reinventing Ritual

Spertus Museum Chicago 2005, the Jewish Museum New York 2009 and the Contemporary Jewish Museum San Francisco 2010

The ner tamid (eternal light), a perpetually illuminated lamp, hovers directly above the ark in every synagogue to symbolize the presence of God. In previous times the source of the light was burning oil, but today gas, electricity, or solar power may generate light.

Manna Redemption

Betty Rymer Gallery, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002

The Manna Redemption is a visual testament to the striving for holiness as well as an invitation to being and becoming receptive.

Love Life Codex

AXIS Gallery, Sacramento, 2017

A re-presentation of three decades of her visual work cast in the light of what she has learned about All That Is.

Nitzavim

Women of the Book, International Contemporary Visual Torah Project, Jerusalem Biennale, Israel, 2015

Parashat Nitzavim speaks to me about God’s love for us and about our opportunity to reflect this love. “The [Torah] is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.” (Deuteronomy 30:14)

Flower Garden

Regional Round-Up, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis, 2008

Cheselyn Amato calls her sculptures flowers: they are the simplest conjoining of elements—chin-high thin bamboo and pipe fittings stems and colorful balls of found fabric for blossoms.

The Calling

Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA, 1984

The Calling is a multimedia installation in which drawing, 3D elements, projected images and sound are combined. A herd of life-size rams made of poultry netting are gather; they are waiting.

Cheselyn Amato is an interdisciplinary visual artist, experiential designer, sanctity-imbued space/place designer, and a sound and spoken-text improvisational performer committed to the celebration and healing of self, others, humanity, the world, and the cosmos.
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