Into Enchantment

Into Enchantment

View the Exhibition: OCTOBER 19, 2026 - DECEMBER 10, 2026

SYKES GALLERY ι BREIDENSTINE HALL - 1st Floor

Exhibition | OCTOBER 19, 2026 - DECEMBER 10, 2026

Reception & Artist Talk | MONDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2026

Reception Time | 5:30 - 7:00pm

Artitst Talk | 6:00pm


Gallery Hours ι  Standard business hours for Sykes Gallery are Monday - Friday from 8:00am-4:00pm. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

The themes and content of much of my work find their origin in the histories, legends, fables, and folklore my mother read to me as a child. I continue to be interested in this kind of storytelling and the way it reveals human attempts to navigate the natural and metaphysical worlds and to express deeper concepts through the use of collective symbols and imagery. Ultimately, I consider my art a kind of world-building effort, whereby I create a miniature universe that relates a story to viewers, each of whom apply their own individual associations and therefore expand the work’s meaning and significance.

For example, “The Company of Wolves” is a nod to the writer Angela Carter and visually retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood, wherein the wolf whose poppy-covered head peeks through green velvet leaves in the front of the work is both the adversary and double of Red, who appears in a collage on the reverse side of the work.

Another work, “Appalachian Giants,” visualizes the notion that the hills forming the West Virginia holler in which my husband and I previously lived are actually sleeping giants obscured by layers of earth. The side windows of the piece are simulated stained glass, like church windows, and serve to give the work a sense of the mystical.

“Specimen from the Iapetus Ocean,” depicts an imagined Paleozoic species of fish from the ancient body of saltwater that still exists far beneath the Appalachian Mountains. The pressure of the fossilization process has turned its eyes and scales to gemstones and its spines and fins to quartz.

In “Jethro & The Mockingbird", the glittery mockingbird above Jethro’s head is meant as his spirit guide and protector, in accordance with the bird’s deeper culturally symbolic meanings.

Finally, “The Cunning Woman of Franklintown” references my own Pennsylvania Dutch heritage and the many folk healers and practitioners of Braucherei or Powwowing. 

What symbols and tools do you recognize in the works on display here, and what do they mean to you?

About the ARTIST

Savannah Schroll Guz’s work is in private collections from NYC to San Diego and has been shown in a variety of cities along the East Coast and in the Midwest. Representing the state of West Virginia, Guz was one of the 36 artists involved in the Her Flag project (www.herflag.com), which has been on view on the facades of both the Clinton Library in Little Rock, AR, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. In 2025, Guz was a West Virginia Creative Network Creative Entrepreneur Fellow. A West Virginia resident for 20 years, from 2006 to 2026, Savannah now lives and creates in the south-central Pennsylvania village close to where she was born. She resides there with her husband Michael and their dogs, Otto and Charlie. You can follow her in her studio on Instagram at @savannahschrollguz or learn more about her at www.savannahschrollguzstudios.com/.