winding on and through the lands

February 25 - April 6, 2014

winding on and through the lands is an invitational exhibition featuring recent videos, photographs, drawings, sculptures, paintings, and installations by eight alumni of the School of Art at Illinois State University: Diana Gabriel (Chicago), Jenny Hansen (Normal, Illinois), Jason Judd (Chicago), Mary Laube (Iowa City, Iowa), Joseph Madrigal (Decorah, Iowa), Jason Sherman (Tucson, Arizona), Lisa Thomas (Bloomington, Illinois), and Neal Vandenbergh (Chicago).

The exhibition title is taken from a poem written by Jason Sherman, whose modestly scaled, luminous paintings—consisting of metallic enamel, oil paint, and spray paint—are bold abstractions evoking details of fiery landscapes. Constructed primarily from string, Diana Gabriel describes her site-specific installations as "structures designed to be rooted somewhere between logic and daydream." Neal Vandenbergh's high-intensity Yellow Monochromes—three 8-foot panels coated with yellow traffic paint and prismatic sheeting—simultaneously reference Hard-Edge Abstraction and urban construction zones. Jenny Hansen's layered collages are frenetically worked assemblages of drawing, detritus, and writing inspired by autobiographical experiences, literary fiction, and popular culture. Jason Judd also references literary sources with works such as Not dumb now, a text-based triptych that is a proper phonetic translation of an excerpt from Franz Kafka's The Rejection. Mary Laube's recent work includes an 11-foot-high geometric wall "painting" created from cut vinyl, and Warp Whistle, her collaborative project with composer and sound artist Paul Schuette. Ceramicist Joseph Madrigal exploits and often subverts the "rich and varied histories" of clay, including its status as craft, instilling in his elegant mixed-media objects a "perpetuity of emergence and connection to materiality." Finally, Lisa Thomas combines ephemeral everyday materials such as shelf-lining paper, lint, and hair, with painting and drawing, creating enigmatic and poetic works.