Department of Studio Art

In his first solo exhibition at Dartmouth College, multidisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Studio Art Chris Sollars presents The Neighbors, a new body of work inspired by coexistence and inquiry.

Set in rural Vermont, The Neighbors is a multimedia video installation about the non-human inhabitants of the lands around the artist’s home. After over two decades living in San Francisco, California, Sollars moved to Vermont in the fall of 2024. To get to know his new home and neighbors, he has spent the past two years interacting with his surroundings through slow listening and observation, learning them spatially and temporally.  This intentional gathering of information has taken the form of diaristic snapshots taken throughout the seasons, field recordings, the collection of discarded nests and materials, and the placement of wildlife cameras in the open woodland edges of his home, which neighbors a land trust, a national forest, and the Appalachian Trail.

The installation centers on a 4-channel video featuring the four seasons, captured through multiple wildlife cameras. Editing progresses sequentially through the annual seasonal cycle, each season presenting each species' patterns as they emerge. The video is displayed on four 65” screens placed on the ground. Maple and birch log stumps act as seats for viewers to rotate in the 360º installation.  Photographs, snapshots, and camera stills fill the walls, looking at traces and locations. Field-recording audio sculptures interlude the video with voices of icicles melting, Pseudacris crucifer, maybe owls, and the ticking of a clock made of ticks pulled from humans and dogs. A collection of bird nests rest on shipping boxes with labels configured to include species ID, nest type, habitat, and substrate. A site-survey location marker engraved with What’s At Stake? sits in the space with an audio recorder for visitors to add to the loop. A sole vestige of human presence appears in John Deere, a sculpture made out of found objects, including a hunting vest and plastic deer antlers.

For Sollars, to know the now is a way to understand the past and the future. Through his chosen processes of observation, gathering, editing, and juxtaposition, Sollars is composing a personal perception of the site he occupies in the present, to be expanded upon in research and conversations with colleagues and those who have lived in this land before him. The empirical findings incite questions about patterns and behaviors, about the past impacts on the peoples and species of this region, about what has changed and what is changing next.

Public programming will include a gallery talk with the artist, research conversations with Dartmouth faculty, and a live soundtrack performance with Sonic Practice Department alum and local musicians. More info about these events can be found here.

Acknowledgements: 
Many thanks to all the colleagues and students that have been instrumental in the development of this work through cross-discipline conversations:  Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Lydia Jennings, Professor of Geography Justin Mankin, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Theresa Ong, Sonic Practice alum Rae Padula, PHD candidate of Geography Joseph Savage, Sonic Practice graduate student Ziaire Trinidad Sherman, Research Associate of Environmental Studies Martha Torstenson, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Joseph Tumber-Davila, Assistant Professor of Geography Arianna M Varuolo-Clarke, PhD of Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society Alum Miranda Zammarelli. Thank you to Gerald Auten, Tricia Treacy, Dawit Petros and all the SART faculty and staff for their support, Matt Volla for video editing, and Mac Waters for graphics. Special thanks to my partner Rita Sobreiro Souther.

BIO
Chris Sollars is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in Vermont. He has been an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College since 2024 and has previously taught at Mills College, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University. He has earned a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from Bard College. His work has been exhibited at SFMOMA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Parisian Laundry; The New Children's Museum, San Diego; Berkeley Art Museum; Creative Time New York; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art; Southern Exposure; Smack Mellon; Tokyo-San Francisco Art Festival, Tokyo; the Arlanda Stockholm Airport, Sweden. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship (2022), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), SF Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission Grant (2013); Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant (2012); San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant (2007), and Eureka Fellowship Award (2007). He has been in residence at UCross, Wyoming; Gate 27, Istanbul; Recology, SF; and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito. Sollars’s work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Mills College Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, and Miami Art Museum. From 2001 to 2012, Chris Sollars was the founding director of 667 Shotwell, an experimental project space in his then San Francisco home. Since 2017, Sollars has been integrating sonic and percussive elements into his practice, building instruments from debris and developing music projects as artworks.