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Press Releases - Current Exhibitions
HOW SOON IS NOW: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection
SEPTEMBER 8 – MAY 11, 2010//
Greencastle, IN, September 2009 — A selection of works in a wide range of media and forms that highlight the diverse formal, material and conceptual approaches to art-making and the perpetually shifting nature of contemporary art.
This exhibition may be visited through September 8, 2009, and is free and open to the public.
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Tuesday - Friday: 10 am - 4pm
Sataurday: 11 am - 5pm; and closed Sundays. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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SONJA HINRICHSEN
NOVEMBER 4 – DECEMBER 11, 2009//
Greencastle, IN, November 2009 — Sonja Hinrichsen's multi-media installations map the cultural, social and historical aspects of natural, urban and industrial environments.
This exhibition may be visited through November 4, 2009, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistWednesday, November 4, 4:00-6:00 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Tuesday - Friday: 10 am - 4pm
Sataurday: 11 am - 5pm; and closed Sundays. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
* * * Top of Sonja Hinrischsen PR | Top of Page * * *
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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Press Releases - Past Exhibitions
MELISSA POKORNY: ULTRA
January 28 – March 1, 2009Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January, 2009 — Melissa Pokorny: Ultra, a solo exhibition of the work of artist Melissa Pokorny, will open at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on January 28, and will be on view through March 1, 2009.
Melissa Pokorny’s idiosyncratic sculptural works wryly explore the delicate and transient relationships between the natural and the artificial, order and chaos, and high art and kitsch. As she admits, she is fascinated with the "thingness" of things and the improbable relationships they can have to each other. In her “homemade cultural probes,” resin dogs, songbirds, and ersatz rocaille décor gathered from hobby stores, Internet collectible sites, and estate sales are arranged with digitally rendered, photo-collaged architectural elements that elicit memories of spaces. The artist culls, collects and repurposes these found objects and images of remembered spaces, placing them in a close conversation that suggests kitschy symbolism and whimsically mythic associations.
Using the strategies of still-life composition and tableau vivant painting, Pokorny's assemblages explore the arbitrary, the inappropriate, and the accidental, while evoking a wry sense of melancholy. By using overtly artificial means to represent space, coupled with uncanny realistic animal figurines and casts, she questions our estrangement from, and subsequent longing for connection to the natural world, and the resulting substitution of the real by the fake.
Pokorny received an M.F.A. in Studio Practice from the University of California, Davis, in 1988. Her work has been shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City, and is in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Orange County Museum of Art. She lives, works, and teaches in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
This exhibition may be visited through March 1, 2009, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Talk by the artistFriday, February 20, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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[RE]WIND 4.0: CONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART
January 26 – May 10, 2009Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January, 2009 — [re]wind 4.0: Contemporary Video Art, 2000-2009, the first in a series of four exhibitions that survey the history of contemporary video art from its beginnings in the 1960s through the current day, opened at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on January 28, and will be on view through May 10, 2009.
Over the past four decades, video has played an increasingly central role in artistic production throughout the world, and has proven to be one of the most challenging and innovative of contemporary art forms. Artists emerging from the revolutionary ferment of the 1960s – a time when the boundaries separating “traditional” art practices were becoming blurred – were quick to explore the potential of portable video technology, the first new moving image format to emerge since the invention of film. The 1970s was defined by work that was more personal and political, a time when video changed from a raw, performance-based medium to a vehicle of psychological and imaginative play.
When an array of special effects was introduced in the 1980s, there emerged a new painterly tendency that was built on early experiments with image processing that were pioneered by artists during the 1960s. Images became layered, surreal and the focus shifted to the tactile and mesmeric qualities of abstraction and surface patterning. During the 1990s, video art broke through into the mainstream of the museum and gallery system, taking up a central position as the twentieth century came to a close.
This series of four exhibitions – presented in reverse chronological order – will survey the various tendencies and movements that make up the story of video art, from its beginnings in the 1960s as an unwieldy, one-take, black-and-white recording medium, to an infinitely flexible means of social, political and personal documentation. The first exhibition in the series, [re]wind 4.0: Contemporary Video Art, 2000-2009, explores the increasingly hybridic nature of the medium during the first decade of the twenty-first century, a time when artists are producing works that combine video with film, computer art, graphics, animation, virtual reality, and a wide range of other digital applications. [re]wind 4.0 features exceptional video works by a global roster of artists that demonstrate the influence that video art has had on artistic practice over the past four decades, and testifies to the pivotal role and ubiquitous presence that the medium has in the contemporary global art world.
The artists featured in the exhibition include Nevin Aladag (Beriln), Carlos Amorales (Mexico City), Lars Arrhenius (Sweden), David Claerbout (Brussels/Berlin), Joan Jonas (New York), William Kentridge (South Africa), Julia Meltzer and David Thorne (Los Angeles), Oliver Michaels (New York), and Pipilotti Rist (Zurich).
This exhibition may be visited through May 10, 2009, and is free and open to the public.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
September 19 – December 12, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, August 2008 — Experimental Geography, an exhibition of contemporary artworks that explores the intersection of geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, will premiere at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on September 19, 2008 and will run through December 12, 2008.
Experimental Geography presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 18 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States.
Geography can involve the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer — an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer — is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.
The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running the evacuation route of Boston. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s topography becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.
The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Ilana Halperin melds immediate physical and personal actions with geologic contexts; she offers poetic conflations of differing fields of interest. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, the work re-familiarizes the viewer with the overlooked American landscape, including man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains, and other details drawn from everyday experience.
Artists In the Exhibition: Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), kanarninka (Catherine D’lgnazio), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker (project organizer), Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen.
Experimental Geography is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The guest curator for the exhibition is Nato Thompson. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the iCI Advocates and the iCI Partners, Gerrit L. and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson. Its presentation at DePauw University has been generously funded by the Richard D. and Barbara Dixon Harrison Exhibition Fund.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and Melville House Publishing. The catalogue includes essays by curator Nato Thompson, art historian Jeffrey Kastner, and artist Trevor Paglen; artist’s statements; and brief texts on forms of artistic practice.
Nato Thompson is a curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.
Founded in 1975, iCI is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through traveling exhibitions and other activities that reach a diverse national and international audience. Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators, iCI develops innovative traveling exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues and other educational materials, to introduce and document challenging new work in all mediums by younger as well as more established artists from the United States and abroad.
This exhibition may be visited through December 12, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception and talk by curator Nato ThompsonFriday October 3, 6-8pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
* * * Top of Experimental Geography PR | Top of Page * * *
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
* * * Top of Experimental Geography PR | Top of Page * * *
FELIPE DULZAIDES: NOTHING HAPPENS, TWICE
JANUARY 30 – MARCH 2, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, October 2008 — Felipe Dulzaides: Nothing Happens Twice, a solo exhibition by Cuban-born visual and performing artist Felipe Dulzaides, will be on view on at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from October 8 through November 9, 2008.
Felipe Dulzaides creates interdisciplinary works that are poetic responses to the fleeting and contingent circumstances and quirks of everyday life. His artistic output varies from video and photography, to installations and public art projects. His photographs document his interventions in the everyday landscape, while his intimate videos document personal actions that set up simple situations. All of his work is action-based and uses, as he states, “a situation or a context as a frame and a container.” Staging of a proof – an archive of what seems impossible – is a recurrent theme throughout his work. His multicultural experience (Cuba/U.S. and immigrant/artist), and the gap between the two contexts where his works operate, compels Dulzaides to play with his positioning within an unstable and displaced cultural landscape.
Dulzaides is recognized as one of the strongest voices of the new generation of post-conceptual artists working in the Western United States. He uses a variety of media and strategies to engage the senses and the minds of his viewers, often creating encounters with a sometimes unsuspecting non-art audience by placement of his works in the public sphere. Mixing and manipulating performance, sound, sculpture and the theater of the body, he creates hybrid and personal compositions and works that have been described as “poetry in motion.”
Felipe Dulzaides was born in Cuba in 1965 to a family of musicians and poets. His work spans installation, video, photography and public art. He earned a BFA in Theater from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Havana (1989), and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute (2001). His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centro Cultural de España in Havana, Cuba; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, among others. He was selected to participate in the 2008 Gwanju Biennale in South Korea, and is the recipient of a Cintas Fellowship (2001) and received a Creative Work Fund award (2004-05). He is currently based in San Francisco, where he is a visiting faculty member in the New Genres Department of the San Francisco Art Institute.
In addition to his solo exhibition at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center, an outdoor art installation – a double-sided billboard located on U.S. 40 and titled All That We’ve Been Missing – commissioned by DePauw University will be on public view from September 20 through November 19, 2008. Located on U.S. 40, one-half mile west of U.S. 231 S, just outside of Greencastle, Indiana, the imagery on the billboards explores the real and metaphorical borders that separate the United States and Cuba, and directly reflect the theme of the 2008 DePauw ArtsFest, a campus-wide celebration of the creative, visual and performing arts: Art and Borders.
This exhibition may be visited through November 9, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistWednesday, October 8, 4:00-6:00 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
September 19 – December 12, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, August 2008 — Experimental Geography, an exhibition of contemporary artworks that explores the intersection of geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, will premiere at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on September 19, 2008 and will run through December 12, 2008.
Experimental Geography presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 18 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States.
Geography can involve the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer — an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer — is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.
The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running the evacuation route of Boston. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s topography becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.
The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Ilana Halperin melds immediate physical and personal actions with geologic contexts; she offers poetic conflations of differing fields of interest. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, the work re-familiarizes the viewer with the overlooked American landscape, including man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains, and other details drawn from everyday experience.
Artists In the Exhibition: Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), kanarninka (Catherine D’lgnazio), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker (project organizer), Alex Villar, and Yin Xiuzhen.
Experimental Geography is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The guest curator for the exhibition is Nato Thompson. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the iCI Advocates and the iCI Partners, Gerrit L. and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson. Its presentation at DePauw University has been generously funded by the Richard D. and Barbara Dixon Harrison Exhibition Fund.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and Melville House Publishing. The catalogue includes essays by curator Nato Thompson, art historian Jeffrey Kastner, and artist Trevor Paglen; artist’s statements; and brief texts on forms of artistic practice.
Nato Thompson is a curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Mike Nelson: A Psychic Vacuum. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.
Founded in 1975, iCI is a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the understanding and appreciation of contemporary art through traveling exhibitions and other activities that reach a diverse national and international audience. Collaborating with a wide range of eminent curators, iCI develops innovative traveling exhibitions, accompanied by catalogues and other educational materials, to introduce and document challenging new work in all mediums by younger as well as more established artists from the United States and abroad.
This exhibition may be visited through December 12, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
* * * Top of Experimental Geography PR | Top of Page * * *
SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception and talk by curator Nato ThompsonFriday October 3, 6-8pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
* * * Top of Experimental Geography PR | Top of Page * * *
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
* * * Top of Experimental Geography PR | Top of Page * * *
FELIPE DULZAIDES: NOTHING HAPPENS, TWICE
JANUARY 30 – MARCH 2, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, October 2008 — Felipe Dulzaides: Nothing Happens Twice, a solo exhibition by Cuban-born visual and performing artist Felipe Dulzaides, will be on view on at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from October 8 through November 9, 2008.
Felipe Dulzaides creates interdisciplinary works that are poetic responses to the fleeting and contingent circumstances and quirks of everyday life. His artistic output varies from video and photography, to installations and public art projects. His photographs document his interventions in the everyday landscape, while his intimate videos document personal actions that set up simple situations. All of his work is action-based and uses, as he states, “a situation or a context as a frame and a container.” Staging of a proof – an archive of what seems impossible – is a recurrent theme throughout his work. His multicultural experience (Cuba/U.S. and immigrant/artist), and the gap between the two contexts where his works operate, compels Dulzaides to play with his positioning within an unstable and displaced cultural landscape.
Dulzaides is recognized as one of the strongest voices of the new generation of post-conceptual artists working in the Western United States. He uses a variety of media and strategies to engage the senses and the minds of his viewers, often creating encounters with a sometimes unsuspecting non-art audience by placement of his works in the public sphere. Mixing and manipulating performance, sound, sculpture and the theater of the body, he creates hybrid and personal compositions and works that have been described as “poetry in motion.”
Felipe Dulzaides was born in Cuba in 1965 to a family of musicians and poets. His work spans installation, video, photography and public art. He earned a BFA in Theater from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Havana (1989), and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute (2001). His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centro Cultural de España in Havana, Cuba; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany, among others. He was selected to participate in the 2008 Gwanju Biennale in South Korea, and is the recipient of a Cintas Fellowship (2001) and received a Creative Work Fund award (2004-05). He is currently based in San Francisco, where he is a visiting faculty member in the New Genres Department of the San Francisco Art Institute.
In addition to his solo exhibition at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center, an outdoor art installation – a double-sided billboard located on U.S. 40 and titled All That We’ve Been Missing – commissioned by DePauw University will be on public view from September 20 through November 19, 2008. Located on U.S. 40, one-half mile west of U.S. 231 S, just outside of Greencastle, Indiana, the imagery on the billboards explores the real and metaphorical borders that separate the United States and Cuba, and directly reflect the theme of the 2008 DePauw ArtsFest, a campus-wide celebration of the creative, visual and performing arts: Art and Borders.
This exhibition may be visited through November 9, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
* * * Top of Felipe Dulzaides PR | Top of Page * * *
SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistWednesday, October 8, 4:00-6:00 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
* * * Top of Felipe Dulzaides PR | Top of Page * * *
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
* * * Top of Felipe Dulzaides PR | Top of Page * * *
LIFE AFTER DEATH: NEW LEIPZIG PAINTINGS FROM THE RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION
March 19 – May 18, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, March 2008 — Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection, an exhibition that presents the foremost U.S. collection of paintings from the New Leipzig School will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from March 19 through May 18, 2008.
In December 2000, a group of five young German artists, all recent graduates of the prestigious Leipzig Art Academy, organized a small exhibition of their works in Leipzig. Unsurprisingly, the exhibition attracted no notice from the international contemporary art community. From that humble beginning, the “New Leipzig School” has expanded to a dozen artists and has grown to be an international phenomenon – its painters making work that has museums and collectors in its thrall.
These painters breathe new life into the East German tradition of social realist figure painting with enigmatic narratives and surrealist overtones. The New Leipzig School is the 21st century’s first bona fide artistic phenomenon. In addition to their affiliation with the Leipzig Art Academy, the New Leipzig School painters share stylistic concerns, which are shaped in part by the tradition of the school and East German social realism more generally. A strange surrealism and a discordant palette pervade their interiors, cityscapes, and landscapes, which are often populated by disaffected figures. A general feeling of world-weariness and ennui speaks to the East German political situation – these are depictions of places and people that are not prepared to integrate into the brand-new optimistic West. Unready to face the new, they are nostalgic for the old, but more from habit than any affection.
The Leipzig Academy, founded in 1764, is one of the oldest art schools in Germany. It is highly regarded for its tradition of figure painting, which, before the reunification of Germany in 1989/90, was bound to state-mandated “social-realist” painting. While academies in the West eschewed figurative painting, and sometimes painting itself, in favor of abstraction and work in new media, the Leipzig Academy produced some of East Germany’s most highly regarded figure painters.
The undeniable buzz that surrounds the New Leipzig School is due in part to the enthusiasm that collectors Mera and Don Rubell have shown for their work. Always bellwethers, the Rubells first visited Liga, the Leipzig gallery that these artists maintained between March 2002 and April 2004, in its inaugural year. They began acquiring their work immediately and have continued to support many of the artists.
Housed in a nondescript 45,000-square-foot Miami warehouse that once served as a Drug Enforcement Administration storage facility, the Rubell Family Art Collection features some of the edgiest and most important contemporary work of the last 40 years. The collection, which contains 6000 pieces by celebrated artists including Keith Haring, Peter Halley, Damien Hirst, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman, is a representation of every major influence in contemporary art over the last three decades. It includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, installation, and videos.
Minimalism, neo-expressionism, neo-geo, photography, and identity politics are the art movements best exemplified by the body of work the Rubells — father Don, mother Mera, and children Jennifer and Jason have lovingly assembled by seeking out the small studios of emerging but undiscovered artists in the U.S., Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Life After Death is co-curated by Mark Coetzee, director of the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, and Laura Steward Heon, director and curator of SITE Santa Fe. Its presentation at DePauw has been made possible by the generous support of Neal Abraham, Donna Wiley, and an anonymous donor.
This exhibition may be visited through May 18, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
The gallery talk by Mera Rubell, art collector, has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
* * * Top of Life After Death PR | Top of Page * * *
ZOE STRAUSS: WORKS IN PROGRESS
MARCH 12 – APRIL 13, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, March 2008 — Zoe Strauss: Works in Progress, an exhibition featuring the photographic work of Philadelphia-based artist Zoe Strauss, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from March 12 through April 13, 2008.
Born in Philadelphia, Strauss was given a camera for her 30th birthday and started taking pictures of life in the city’s marginal neighborhoods. She is a photo-based installation artist who uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Out in the streets, Strauss typically photographs whatever strikes her interest, paying particular attention to the overlooked (or purposefully avoided) details of life.
The first member of her working-class Philadelphia family to graduate from high school, Strauss is deeply connected to her roots and her surroundings. Her photographs of shuttered buildings, empty parking lots and vacant meeting halls illuminate her South Philly neighborhood’s grim character. A photographer of the social landscape, her intimate portraits capture the dignified resignation of its residents. Strauss says her work is “a narrative about the beauty and difficulty of everyday life." Her candid, powerful street portraits have been described by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as “not without tenderness, but their harsh, unblinking force is a bit like a punch in the face. They show us what most Americans don’t want to see.”
Strauss’s work is striking. In the tradition of Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and Nan Goldin, she gets into the world of her subjects. She is interested in “how we move around with the choices we are presented with,” specifically those with limited choices. “What do we opt to do,” she asks, “and how does chance play into that? How does luck and other circumstances move us in a variety of directions…” These questions resonate in her photographs, candid, emotionally rich, completely empathetic and unsentimental.
An avid blogger and involved citizen, Strauss recently completed a film project with a group of eight at-risk youth titled “If You Break The Skin”. As the New Yorker points out: “This is not America the Beautiful, and Strauss wants us to know it as intimately as she does.”
In 1995, Strauss started the Philadelphia Public Art Project, a one-woman organization whose mission is to give the citizens of Philadelphia access to art in their everyday lives. Strauss’s photographic work culminates in a yearly “Under I-95” show, which takes place beneath the Interstate highway in South Philadelphia. She displays her photographs on concrete pillars under the highway and sells photocopied prints of her work for $5 each. Strauss now calls the Philadelphia Public Art Project an “epic narrative” of her own neighborhood. “When I started shooting, it was as if somewhere hidden in my head I had been waiting for this,” she says.
In 2002, Strauss received a Seedling Award in photography from the Leeway Foundation. In 2005, she received a Pew Fellowship. In 2006, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial; that same year she also mounted a solo exhibition, "Ramp Project: Zoe Strauss" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In 2007 Strauss was named a USA Gund Fellow by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. Her work is included in the Philadelphia Museum of Art permanent collection. Zoe Strauss lives and works in Philadelphia.
This exhibition may be visited through March 2, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artist March 12, 2008, 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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DAVID HERROLD: A RETROSPECTIVE
JANUARY 30 – MARCH 2, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January 2008 — David Herrold: A Retrospective Exhibition, a show that surveys the artistic production of DePauw University Professor of Art David Herrold between the years of 1972-2008, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from January 30 through March 2, 2008.
The work produced by David Herrold during his 36-year career as an artist has been both inventive and diverse. Although primarily a ceramist, Herrold has also worked extensively with digital media. In 1972 Herrold accepted a teaching position at DePauw University, replacing the widely admired Richard Peeler. During the 1970s he adopted low-temperature firing techniques using talc body clay and metallic lusters, creating ceramic works with a Pop sensibility and sculptural basis. After using these techniques of most of the decade, Herrold gradually migrated back to working with stoneware and porcelain, for what he felt was their more “dignified” character.
During the 1980s, Herrold temporarily abandoned clay and instead began working with new media inspired by the personal computer revolution of the decade. While on sabbatical in 1986, he developed a way to transfer computer images to 16 mm movie film, convert them to video, and add a soundtrack. The result was computer animation, which he continued to experiment with. Herrold’s skill and interest in the still image also led him to use the computer as a photography editing device, which he adopted as a means of creating digital photo composites Herrold returned to clay during the 1990s, but began working with a new, hybridic process that fused the traditionally handmade with new technology. In 2002 he created a machine he dubbed the “Slip Jet Printer,” a hand-operated, three-dimensional clay printing device that allowed him to produce richly textured clay forms with complex symmetries that would be difficult to create by hand.
David Herrold received his M.F.A. from Wichita State University in 1972 and a B.S.E. from Emporia State University, Kansas in 1967. From 1968 to 1970 he served as curator for the Wichita Art Museum Mobile Gallery in Wichita, Kansas. He has taught in the Department of Art at DePauw University since 1972, and will retire from this position in 2008. He is represented by the Ruschman Gallery in Indianapolis, Indiana.
This exhibition may be visited through March 2, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistJanuary 30, 2008, 4 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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JEFF SCHMUKI: PATTERN RECOGNITION
JANUARY 30 – MARCH 2, 2008Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January 2008 — Jeff Schmuki: Pattern Recognition, an exhibition featuring sculptural ceramic works and installations that explore the relationship between cartography, documentary, memory and the natural/manmade landscape, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from January 30 through March 2, 2008.
If the essence of the natural landscape could be contained within a smaller three-dimensional form, how would it look? Often when man tries to contain the physical landscape there is a loss of its fundamental nature within the restrictions of the two-dimensional – maps, photographs, paintings. Jeff Schmuki’s work creates representations of the land, but goes beyond the flat surface into a realm beyond the common.
Jeff Schmuki produces simple and repetitive geometric forms in order to construct his ceramic sculptures and installations. His work is strongly reminiscent of forms and patterns found in the natural landscape, and with titles such as Plats and Elevations, the essence of cartography is examined within Schmuki’s work as well. Through the use of repeated forms he creates multiple layers that interact with light and perspective; the abstract organic quality of these forms create something uncommon and unique out of that which is familiar – the land. Schmuki says, “by translating my experience of the landscape into a sculptural understanding, place becomes space, and the experiential becomes conceptual.”
Jeff Schmuki received his B.F.A. in Studio Art from Northern Arizona University in 1993 and his M.F.A. in Ceramics from Alfred University’s New York State College of Ceramics in 1998. Since then he has had several teaching and residency appointments, and has exhibited throughout the United States. His work is part of a number of collections, including the Smithsonian Institution; the Arizona State University Ceramic Research Center in Tempe, Arizona; Shepparton Art Gallery in Victoria, Australia; and the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi.
In 2005 Schmuki received an honorable mention at the 3rd International World Ceramic Biennale (CEBIKO) in South Korea. He has also been the recipient of a number of grants from prestigious institutions, including the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. He is currently visiting Associate Professor of Ceramics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he lives and works.
This exhibition may be visited through March 2, 2008, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistFebruary 6, 2008, 4 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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[DNASAB]: //TECHNO_ETIC
AUGUST 23 - SEPTEMBER 23, 2007Events| Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, August 2007 — [dNASAb]: // techno_etic, an exhibition that visualizes the possible aesthetics of wireless data and the fetishization of technology, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from August 24 through September 23, 2007.
What do we really know about all those jumbles of invisible frequencies, waveforms, and continuous analog frenzies of data feeds? They are propelled at us daily from Blackberry farms, hotspot communities, and our satellite-saturated heavens above. If visible, what would every teenager's cell phone conversation in a 12-block radius resemble? Would there be individual forms, color bands, or even a collective composite of teenage angst?
New York artist [dNASAb] explores these possibilities with new works in photography, drawing, painting, and assemblage sculpture. Informed by the integration of art installation, sound, and technology, [dNASAb]'s new work is richly intricate and visually stunning, each piece suggesting a "visual network" formed from explosions of mass techno-pod communication graffiti. In [dNASAb]'s haunting and ethereal photographic works, the artist transforms his Brooklyn studio into a "visual network" installation by photographing his large-scale paintings juxtaposed with his synthetic- biomorphic sculptures. In several of his photographic works, the artist expands the photograph by further layering painted representations of intertwined communicative paths and data nodes, creating a composition of infinite dimensions.
[dNASAb] received a BFA in Sculpture and in Mixed Media from Florida State University in 1994. He was selected by Cindy Sherman, Jack Pierson, and Adam Fuss for Unframed First Look 2004, a juried salon for emerging artists "whose work will be galvanizing the art world in the months and years to come" at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. In March 2005, the artist was a winner in The Los Angeles Center For Digital Art's international competition for photography and digital artists. He has exhibited and has collaborated extensively in new media art installations, interactive multimedia projects, and art performance in New York and internationally since 1997. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
This exhibition may be visited through September 23, 2007, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with gallery talk by the artist
Thursday August 23, 2007, 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street<
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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JEN LIU: An Innocent Revolution
AUGUST 29 – DECEMBER 7, 2007Events |
Jen Liu examines culture and politics through a patchwork of pop models - including rock music, narrative tropes and digital graphics - creating utopian worlds where aspects of the real are intensified through allegory and mass media aesthetics.
This exhibition may be visited through December 7, 2007, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistWednesday, August 29, 2007, 4 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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BEYOND GREEN: TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE ART
SEPTEMBER 14 – DECEMBER 2, 2007Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, September 2007 — Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, an exhibition exploring the ways that sustainable design philosophy resonates in the work of an emerging generation of international artists, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from September 14 through December 2, 2007.
Sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life through an approach that balances environmental, social, and aesthetic concerns. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, examines some of the ways in which contemporary artists are exploring a socially and environmentally conscientious – in other words, sustainable – way of living and working. This emerging strategy emphasizes the responsible and equitable use of resources and links environmental and social justice. By doing so, it moves past a prior generation of more narrowly eco-centered or “green” approaches to architecture and industrial design. Enacted around the world in large and small ways by architects and designers, as well as, a growing numbers of activists, corporations, policymakers, Beyond Green ventures in to the fertile new zone of sustainability in the arena of contemporary art.
Environmental issues have been addressed in works of art since at least the 1970s, and many of those earlier works might be retrospectively labeled as sustainable art. However, the projects in this exhibition offer a counterpoint to those more established and historical forms. The artists included in Beyond Green all came of age during the late 1980s and 1990s, and their work draws to varying degrees on two key strands of recent art: the productive overlap between art and design, and the development of new modes of critical art practice. Whereas many of their predecessors worked within specific sites or imagined massively-scaled interventions, the artists in Beyond Green draw on the visual languages of design and on new relational, process-based modes of art-making to create portable, human-scaled works of art that emphasize the ways that environmental concerns are inextricably linked to other social relationships.
By embedding environmental concerns within larger ethical and aesthetic explorations, the projects presented in Beyond Green make use of the discursive power of art in order to engage public and social dimensions of contemporary life, in turn building paths to new forms of practice that go “beyond green.”
Participating Artists: Allora & Calzadilla, Free Soil (Amy Franceschini, Myriel Milicevic, Nis Rømer), JAM (Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks), Learning Group (Brett Bloom, Julio Castro, Rikke Luther, and Cecelia Wendt), Brennan McGaffey with Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer), Nils Norman, People Powered, Dan Peterman, Marjetica Potrc, Michael Rakowitz, Frances Whitehead, WochenKlausur, Andrea Zittel.
Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art is a traveling exhibition co-organized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, and by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Smith. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue are made possible in part by the Smart Family Foundation; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; and iCI Exhibition Partners Kenneth S. Kuchin, and Gerrit and Sydie Lansing. Additional support is provided by the Arts Planning Council, the Environmental Studies Program, and the Green Campus Initiative, University of Chicago. Its presentation at DePauw University has been generously funded by the Richard D. and Barbara Dixon Harrison Exhibition Fund.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated 160-page book, published by the Smart Museum of Art and iCI and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. It includes a foreword by Anthony Hirschel, Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art, and Judith Olch Richards, executive director of iCI; essays by curator Stephanie Smith and design historian Victor Margolin; interviews and statements from exhibiting artists, and information on each of the artists; and their works.
This exhibition may be visited through December 2, 2007, and is free and open to the public.
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Please call 765.658.4336 for more information* * * Top of Beyond Green PR | Top of Page * * *
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street<
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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DAVID HEVEL: BABES IN THE WOODS
OCTOBER 3 – NOVEMBER 4, 2007Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, October 2007 — David Hevel: Babes in the Woods, an exhibition featuring over-the-top, ribald sculptures and installations that employ taxidermy forms, props and craft and borrow their titles from celebrity tabloids, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from October 3 through November 4, 2007.
Imagine if you will: In some parallel universe, a black hole crashes into a teenage girl’s bedroom – sucking up her exploding jewelry box and stacks of In Style and Us magazines, whipping her stuffed animals and makeup collection into its center – then magically it all spews gently down. The baubles and fur have reconstituted, like Jeff Goldblum and that fly. Paris Hilton has been transformed into a blind spider monkey aloft a cloud of fake cotton fluff that drips with gaudy faux-jewels, glittering gold butterflies and Christmas ornaments. Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears – in the guise of scantily clad, scrappy dogs – battle it out backstage at the Grammy’s, atop a sickening, Baroque mound of fake plants, fur and fruit. And, Katie Holmes as a fierce, teeth-baring mandrill that opens its mouth in a silent scream as she gives birth to Baby Suri, atop a tangled pile of blood-red, beaded Valentine hearts. Welcome to David Hevel’s world.
Bay Area artist David Hevel creates densely packed, obsessively crafted, and wickedly humorous sculptures – using taxidermy forms, props and craft supplies – that borrow their titles from celebrity tabloids and slyly comment on the overly accessorized jungle that is Hollywood. The psychedelic frenzy of his installations successfully match the whacked-out way in which the famous fling themselves about in order to transmit their glamour, so we can give them back awe and devotion.
Superficiality aside, Hevel’s work is aptly framed within the context of what French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud has termed “postproduction” – a contemporary art practice in which artists reproduce, re-purpose, or re-mix available cultural products in a process referred to as ‘cultural recycling’. Similar to hip-hop artists sampling previously created music or splicing together clips of video, postproduction is a strategy in which visual artists synthesize disparate artifacts from our lives in order to create fresh, open-ended narratives – effectively assembling the toolbox of history in a new context.
Through its appropriation of the strategy of “postproduction” – specifically its conflation of the mid-American aesthetics of taxidermy and fake floral arrangements with the gossip, glamour, and glitz of Hollywood royalty – Hevel’s work reveals the absurdity of American consumerism, the global economy, and the chaos of mass media.
David Hevel received his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco in 2002, and his work has been widely exhibited in a number of contemporary art venues in Toronto, New York, Miami, andSan Francisco. He currently lives and works in the Bay Area. He is represented by the Heather Marx Gallery, San Francisco.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artistWednesday, October 3, 2007, 4 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street<
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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ALYSON SHOTZ: TOPOLOGIES
MARCH 14 – APRIL 15, 2007Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, March 2007 — Alyson Shotz: Topologies, an exhibition featuring recent work by New York-based artist Alyson Shotz, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from March 14 through April 15, 2007.
Alyson Shotz is known internationally for works of art that address space, light and perception. Her interest in environmental issues and topology – a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometric forms that remain constant despite transformation – is also evident in her artworks. For Shotz, topology is a point of departure that allows her to think about shape and form and to envision natural surroundings as abstract “objects” – tangible works that invite the viewer to step through her looking glass into the invisible world.
The natural world is a source of beauty and wonder – as well as doubt and inquiry – for Alyson Shotz. Her art touches on scientific concepts and makes evident the not-so-foreign relationship between science and art. Like the perpetually changing state of the natural world, Shotz’s sculptures and prints are mutable: changeability is central to her artistic interests.
The recent work of Alyson Shotz explores space and how we perceive it. By synthesizing mathematical models of the environment with the dynamic use of reflective and digitized forms, Shotz’s conceptual aesthetic offers us a fresh perspective on a world we thought we knew. Her work floods the invisible with detail and light and creates new ways of observing and mapping our surroundings, revealing how active participation in this process can heighten our perception of a complex world.Shotz holds an MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle (1991) and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island (1987).
Her work has been exhibited at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, Texas; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Harvard University; the High Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art. She is represented by the Derek Eller Gallery in New York City.
Alyson Shotz: Topologies has been organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University.
This exhibition may be visited through April 15, 2007, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street<
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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THE LOGIC OF PLACE: YUKI NAKAMURA
January 31 – March 4, 2007Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January 2007 — The Logic of Place: Yuki Nakamura, an exhibition featuring recent work by Seattle-based artist Yuki Nakamura, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from January 31 through March 4, 2007.
Raised on the southern Japanese island of Shikoku – where a very strong sense of regional identity was instilled by the island’s geography and its isolated relationship to the rest of Japan – Yuki Nakamura creates sculptural installations – with ceramics as her primary medium – that emphasize the relationship between subject, object and place. One of the recurring themes in Nakamura’s work is the concept of how islands represent boundaries. For the artist, the boundary between land and water is anintensely powerful metaphor for articulating cultural identity. As the artist states: “I am interested in maps, especially islands: there exists a very clear boundarybetween land and water. This strict separation is an intensely powerful metaphor for articulating identity and cultural inclusiveness. I question the tenuous relationship between two worlds: the internal world of one’s self, and the external world of cultural façade.”
The internalized sense of separation resulting from the geographic isolation of her past is evident in her work, where Nakamura relates to the world and its surroundings as parts of a spatial puzzle.
Yuki Nakamura received her BFA from Joshibi University of Art and Design in Tokyo in 1994, and her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1997. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle, and has also carried out residencies in Johnson, Vermont, Novara, Italy and La Napoule, France. Her work has been widely exhibited at a wide range of venues in the United States, Europe, Asia and Canada.
Nakamura is also a member of SOIL, a notable artist-run gallery in Seattle, Washington, a space known as a site for curatorial and artistic collaboration and experimentation.
This exhibition may be visited through March 4, 2007, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Wednesday, January 31, 2007, 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4822 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
* * * Top of Yuki Nakamura PR | Top of Page * * *
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-6556
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PAST IN REVERSE: CONTEMPORARY ART OF EAST ASIA
AUGUST 23 – DECEMBER 8, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, August 2006 — Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, an exhibition exploring the innovative ways contemporary artists in East Asia create work that fuses cultural histories and ancient techniques with new technologies, opens at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on August 23, 2006.
In recent years, East Asia has become a particularly vital and increasingly influential player in the global economic and political arenas. Concurrently, cultural and artistic innovations from this geographic area, though still new to many Western audiences, are a recognized force with the international art scene. Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia brings together the work of twenty-two established and emerging artists and artists' groups from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, and provides a rich overview of the innovative and remarkable work coming out of this region.
The exhibition's premise is borrowed from a common practice shared by the artists – namely, using the past to map the future. Ranging in age from their twenties to their fifties, and working with both traditional materials and new technologies, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and digital media, the artists in Past in Reverse represent the region's tremendous contemporary import and deep cultural complexity.
Asserting the interrelated cultural identities of East and West, Past in Reverse relates art to current geo-political conditions and reflects the emergence of East Asia as an ascendant player in the global economic and political arena. The works in the exhibition collectively shape fresh readings of contemporary society by extending or redefining both traditional and modernist visual languages. This process of self-evaluation and discovery, as well as experimentation with new technologies, has yielded a host of innovative and challenging solutions, as well as practices that rely on the seduction of historical reference and its ability to propel us towards the future.
Participating artists include: Ryoko Aoki, Yiso Bahc, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Flyingcity Urbanism Research Group, Hiroshi Fuji, G8 Public Relations and Art Consultation Corporation, Hung Yi, Hee-Jeong Jang, Soun-Gui Kim, Kim Young Jin, Leung Mee Ping, Michael Lin, Mitsushima Takayuki, Shao Yinong and Muchen, Wilson Shieh, Tadasu Takamine, Wang Jianwei, Wang Qinsong, Yang Fudong, Yangjiang Calligraphy Group, and Shizuka Yokomizo.
This exhibition was organized by the San Diego Museum of Art with major support provided by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. Its presentation at DePauw has been generously funded by Richard D. and Barbara Dixon Harrison, Friend, '56.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Thursday, October 26, 4:00 pm
Gallery talk by Betti-Sue Hertz, Curator of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum of Art
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4822 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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PANGAEA'S Blanket: DIANA AL-HADID
OCTOBER 4 – NOVEMBER 5, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, September 2006 — Pangaea’s Blanket: Diana Al Hadid, a room-sized, mixed media installation created by the New York-based artist, will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from October 4 through November 5, 2006.
Born in Syria and currently based in Brooklyn, New York, Diana Al-Hadid uses fiberglass planes, or “membranes,” to create large-scale installations that outline and organize space and create the appearance of fragile landscapes. These large-scale installations function as imaginary places that refer to architecture, set design, and the baroque, and depict a variety of forms and geological events that suggest the expansion and formation of geological time. While they are suggestive of slowly evolving landmasses, they also allude to highly ornate and fragile interior spaces and gratuitously opulent environments, which the viewer can often traverse.
In Pangaea’s Blanket, a room-sized installation commissioned for DePauw University’s Richard E. Peeler Art Center, Al Hadid will create a hovering blanket of undulating, white “membranes” in the shape of Pangaea, the supercontinent that is said to have existed during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, before the process of plate tectonics separated each of the component continents into their current configuration.
Al-Hadid’s installations have been described as alternate universes spurred by the substances and histories of this world, but misinterpreting those points of reference and acting as examples from the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which purports that, in addition to the world we are aware of directly, there are many other similar worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time. As the artist states: “My installations are propositions for an imaginary world. They are places that have a sense of believability without recognition and rely on their own internal logic. If I can’t have an inherent contradiction, I’ll take an apparent one.”
Diana Al Hadid received her MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005. Recently she participated in the Bronx Museum’s Artists-in-the-Marketplace program, and was the artist-in-residence at the Sculpture Space Residency in Utica, New York. Al-Hadid’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Keith Talent Gallery (London); the Kim Foster Gallery (New York); Skylab (Cleveland); the Bronx Museum (New York); Vox Populi (Philadelphia); and the Arlington Arts Center (Washington, D.C.). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Cleveland Free Times and The Washington Post. Al-Hadid currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Wednesday, October 4, 2006, 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4822 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Tuesday-Friday 10 am 4 pm; Saturday 11 am - 5 pm; and Sunday 1 5 pm. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Kaytie Johnson, Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-6556
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LIGHT POLLUTION: ERIC SALL
AUGUST 23 – SEPTEMBER 24, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, August 2006 — Light Pollution: Eric Sall features the large-scale, non-representational paintings of Eric Sall. The exhibition will be on view at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University from August 23 through September 24, 2006.
Drawing from the history of art and painting's lexicon of marks, Eric Sall creates large-scale, non-representational paintings that allude to figuration while remaining immersed in the abstract nature of paint. By adopting the strategy of presenting a figure – or protagonist – over an ambiguously rendered background, Sall alludes to the tradition of representational painting without depicting any discernable forms.
Characterized by a sense of visual gravity in which gestural marks, flat shapes, impastoed dollops, and textured washes coalesce into clustered forms on the surface of the canvas, Sall's paintings engage free association and instinct. Sall's work is informed by personal as much as it is by experience the history of art - drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources including magazine advertisements, film, commercial logos, and events from his youth. As he states, his paintings can be influenced by "a memory of the Northern Lights at 3:00 a.m. on a secluded dirt road in the middle of South Dakota to an image of a brand name jacket in a magazine that I desired. It is just as likely that I would associate graphic marks to designer logos as I would associate a washy field of color to a Midwest sky." Despite their seemingly schizophrenic nature, his divergent interests are processed and played out with cohesion and savvy in his paintings.
Eric Sall is a recent graduate of Viginia Commonwealth University's prestigious painting program. His work has been exhibited at ATM Gallery, NYC; Alona Kagan Gallery, NYC; ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Joseph Nease Gallery, Kansas City, MO; and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. He is the recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship Program Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program Award and a Charlotte Street Fund Award. His work is in the collections of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM.
This exhibition may be visited through September 24, 2006, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Wednesday, September 6, 2006, 4 – 5:30 pm
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4822 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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CHUCK RAMIREZ: DEEPLY SUPERFICIAL
FEBRUARY 1 – MARCH 5, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January 2006 — A solo exhibition of photographs by San Antonio-based artist Chuck Ramirez opens at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on February 1, 2006.
Working primarily with large-scale photography, Chuck Ramirez's oeuvre includes prints and sculptural installations that are charged with metaphors of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion. Using typography and digital imaging technology, his work deconstructs the media world by isolating and recontextualizing familiar objects and texts as a means of exploring the human condition. Always personally relevant and charged, Ramirez's photographs and installations explore cultural identity, mortality, physicality and consumerism. Photo-based, graphically direct and multileveled, his work also references the mixed blessings of identity-oriented, ethnic art.
Ramirez's work is particularly effective in its synthesis of personal history and narrative with pressing social issues. Drawing from personal and popular imagery – his grandmother's kitchen, his artist friends, and Brady Bunch graphics – he uses the familiar to explore how social issues impact his individual life. While earlier work investigated the complexity of Latino identity and visibility, queer politics and the AIDS crisis (Ramirez is an HIV+ gay male), in his more recent work, Ramirez resurrects waste — photographing such things as filled garbage bags, dying flowers, and battered, empty piñatas — reflecting on the fleeting nature of human existence while imposing the will to survive.
Ramirez has shown extensively throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. Solo and group exhibitions include the Bronx Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; El Portal del Arte Contemporáneo (ARCO) Madrid; Centro de la Imagen and Galeria O Lamm, Mexico City; Galeries Khadrberlin, Berlin; Arlington Museum of Contemporary Art, TX; Center of the Visual Arts, Denver; the Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria, Austin, TX; the Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; and the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NY. He was selected for an ArtPace residency in 2001 by Jerome Sans, an independent curator and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He currently resides in San Antonio.
This exhibition may be visited through March 5, 2006, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Wedneasday, February 15, 2006, 4 – 6 pm
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Please call 765.658.4336 for more information
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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2006 FACULTY EXHIBITION
MARCH 15 - APRIL 16, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, March 2006 — DePauw University's 2006 Faculty Exhibition highlights the work of DePauw University's studio art faculty. From ceramic vessels to figurative painting to conceptual sculpture, a wide range of media and ideas will be on display.
Participating faculty includes:
- David Herrold (Ceramics)
- Robert Kingsley (Painting/Drawing)
- Lori Miles (Sculpture)
- Susan Mullally (Photography)
- Forrest Solis (Painting/Drawing)
DePauw's faculty has exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as the WWW Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; The Dairy Barn, Athens, OH; Lankershim Art Gallery, North Hollywood, CA; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NB; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Erickson/Elins Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Presso Lo Studio, Italy.
This exhibition may be visited through April 16, 2006, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Wednesday, March 15, 2006, 4 – 6 pm
Opening reception with talks by the artists
Visual Arts Gallery
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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VINCENT VALDEZ: STATIONS
FEBRUARY 1 – APRIL 30, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, January 2006 - A solo exhibition of large-scale, charcoal drawings by San Antonio-based artist Vincent Valdez opens at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on February 1, 2006.
In this exhibition, Texas-based artist Vincent Valdez uses the Passion story as the basis for a series of large-scale charcoal drawings that recast Christ as a boxer and the crucifixion as a boxing match. Embracing the dark themes of manhood and spirituality, Valdez transforms the Passion into a rite of passage, and a boy's struggle to grow into manhood by confronting his own fears. "I was thinking of the concept of a tragic hero," says Valdez. "He was this young male who was struggling in every aspect of the world and his life. I never intended it to have anything to do with Christ as a religious image or Christ as an icon." Instead, Valdez' boxer becomes the everyman, our stand-in for the Christ figure, as he takes our beatings in the ring.
In order to create the technically correct and richly detailed images in the series, Valdez studied boxing illustrations, including those made by sketch artists in 17th-century Britain, the photographs and film footage that have more recently chronicled the sport, and ESPN Classic's "Classic Fight Night." As a result, the images often conflate details from different eras; though the boxers' clothing is modern and a jumbotron lists the score, the crowd seems plucked from a 1940s film – it's dotted with fedoras and the air is thick with smoke. "In order for the story to take off on its own," Valdez explains, "it was necessary to bounce back and forth" in time.
Peppered with scenes and figures from the artist's personal life, most of the images do not depict the action, but rather the moments when the boxer lies felled in the ring or recovering on the sidelines – a tactic that puts the focus on contemplation, rather than competition. "I wanted to leave it open," Valdez says, "so you could make up your own story and decide what you want to see in it." But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Stations is that its focus is not on victory or glory. Instead, the cycle seems to suggest that in life, as much as in boxing and in art, real success lies in being willing to confront one's difficulties and fears – and continuing to grow, despite them.
Vincent Valdez received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. He has had one-person shows at the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, the San Antonio Art League Museum, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas. He is represented by Finesilver Gallery, also in San Antonio. He has also exhibited his work at Parsons University, Paris; the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Smithsonian; and the Mexican Museum in Chicago. His work is included in the collection of Cheech Marin, and is part of the traveling exhibition Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge. He currently resides in San Antonio.
This exhibition may be visited through April 30, 2006, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS
Opening reception with talk by the artist
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
University Gallery, upper level
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
10 West Hanna Street<
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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SKIRTING THE LINE: CONCEPTUAL DRAWING
FEBRUARY 15 - MAY 7, 2006Events | Download Press Release as PDF |
Greencastle, IN, February 2006 — Skirting the Line: Conceptual Drawing a group exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists whose work or practice is informed by the processes and qualities traditionally associated with drawing, yet is equally as driven by conceptual concerns, opens at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University on February 15, 2006.
Within the history of art, drawing has typically been regarded as simultaneously fundamental and peripheral, essential to artistic practice and the most basic skill an artist can possess, yet subordinate to the more privileged mediums of painting and sculpture. Paradoxically, despite drawing's moniker as "the mother of the arts," and the widely held belief that it serves as the basis for both painting and sculpture, it has historically been marginalized as a preparatory medium or process, rather than an art form complete in itself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, drawing became analogous to artistic activity - and essential to the development of Conceptual art - when artists adopted it as a means of demonstrating process. The act of drawing, or as artist Mel Bochner has notoriously quipped, "drawing as a verb," became a prime site of experimentation and a conceptual device, primarily because of its ability to directly express the artist's decision-making process between thinking and doing. Drawing's proximity to thought naturally aligned it with Conceptual art, where the idea was paramount to the object, and the resulting object - if there was one - existed as a document of the artist's thinking.
The twenty-first century ushered in a renewed interest in drawing, the re-materialization of the art object, and thereturn of the artist's hand. Reacting against the ideological, theory-based art of the 1980s and 1990s, artists reengaged with craft by adopting working practices that favored labor-intensive processes and aesthetics over politics. During this time, contemporary artists began to expand the potential of drawing through new techniques and hybrid media and, more than ever before, fully exploited its liminality and multivalent nature by pushing the medium across boundaries to new forms and possibilities.
The group of artists represented in Skirting the Line adopt these hybridic approaches to drawing - as both a verb and noun - utilizing drawing as a fundamental and continuous part of the creative process, and also as their primary conceptual medium. However, they do not favor thought over the manipulation of materials, and don't perceive drawings to be limited only to the arrangement of lines on a page. Instead, they view line as the basis for the investigation of formal and conceptual issues, and use non-traditional media and processes in order to systematically test the conditions, appearance and definitions of drawing. By transposing the qualities and processes of drawing onto a variety of contemporary media - including installation, film, sound, sculpture, photography, video, and performance - they create composite works that subvert conventional definitions of drawing by conflating this traditional medium and process with conceptually-driven contemporary art practice.
Participating artists include: Francis Alÿs, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Clare Churchouse, Marc Dombrosky, Mark Fox, Tonico Lemos Auad, Mark Lombardi, Anthony Luensman, Marco Maggi, Ryan McNamara, Vik Muniz, Danica Phelps, Type A, Georgina Valverde, Pablo Vargas Lugo and Holly Zausner.
Skirting the Line: Conceptual Drawing was curated by Kaytie Johnson, DePauw's Director and Curator of University Galleries, Museums and Collections.This exhibition may be visited through May 21, 2006, and is free and open to the public.
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SPECIAL EVENTS - ‘Art for Lunch' Gallery talks
March 9, 12:30 pm
"Paper Trail: Documenting and Cataloging Incidences"
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
March 16, 12:30 pm
"Connecting Medieval and Modern Conceptual Art"
Anne Harris, Associate Professor of Art
March 23, 12:30 pm
"A Noticed Moment: Chance, Truth and Coincidence in Contemporary Art"
Lori Miles, Assistant Professor of Art
April 6, 12:30 pm
"Drawing a Bead on Contemporary Art"
Michael MacKenzie, Assistant Professor of Art
The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. Please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at http://www.depauw.edu/galleries for more information about special events associated with this exhibition.
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The galleries at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center are open Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; and Sunday 1-5 p.m. For more information about special events associated with this exhibition, please call the gallery information line at 765.658.4882 or visit our website at:
http://www.depauw.edu/galleries
For more information please contact:
Christopher Lynn, Assistant Curator
Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4884
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Events
General Information
Tu - F: 10 am - 4pm
Sa: 11 am - 5pm
Closed:
During University breaks and holidays
Location:
The Richard E. Peeler Art Center
DePauw University
10 West Hanna Street
Greencastle, IN 46135
Click for Directions
For more information, please call: 765.658.4336
The galleries are wheelchair accessible.
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