1980s Exhibitions
Previous University Gallery Exhibitions
1989
Social Studies: Truth, Justice and the Afro-American Way
Open February 7 through 26, 1989
Social Studies: Truth, Justice, and the Afro-American Way is an exhibition of art by seven prominent contemporary black American artists dealing specifically with the black experience regarding issues such as racism, poverty, sexuality, creativity, black/white stereotypes, and personal relationships. The exhibition of thirty-five paintings, textiles, and sculptures includes works by Beverly Buchanan, Dana Chandler, Robert Colescott, Joe Lewis, Bertrand Phillips, George Pitts, and Faith Ringgold.
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Through a Glass, Darkly
Open March 7 through April 6, 1989
In the past decade, artists have radically reinterpreted the medium of photography, denying its traditional role as a recorder of “truth” and exploiting instead its ability to create states of “unreality." Through a Glass, Darkly features large-scale photographs by Ellen Brooks, Barbara Ess, Richard Prince, Andres Serrano, Laurie Simmons, and Oliver Wasow. These works explore unsettling psychological states, artificial terrains, and hallucinatory worlds within clichéd imagery. Intensified color, murky detail, distortion, and other manipulations contribute to the transformation from fact to fiction in the artists’ works, and the invention and adaptation of new and archaic photographic techniques are the means by which they achieve their ends.
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Local Aesthetic: Bloomington-Normal Artists Revisited
Open May 9 through July 23, 1989
Local Aesthetic: Bloomington-Normal Artists Revisited presents sculpture, paintings, and drawings by ten local artists who have been affiliated with ISU’s art department, and who maintain studios in the Bloomington-Normal area. The artists are: Michael Dubina, Herb Eaton, Mark Forth, Fay Lee, Michel Metcalf, Kay Seefeld, Peter Spooner, Ann Taulbee, and Ron Wojtanowski.
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Our Corner of the World
Open August 15 through September 30, 1989
Our Corner of the World featuring works by the following seventeen Illinois artists: Diane Cox, Neraldo de la Paz, Dan Devening, Joel Feldman, Aristotle Georgiades, David Hodges, Wendy Jacob, Donald McFadyen, Bea Nettles, Robert Paulson, Rosalyn Schwartz, Peggy Shaw, Linda Vredeveld, Chuck Walker, Florrie Wescoat, Mary Lou Zelazny, and Terri Zupanc.
Illinois is home to the second largest concentration of artists in the country. The fifty-seven works in Our Corner of the World represent a small sampling of the best visual art being produced statewide. Sharing a common environment does not necessarily mean sharing a collective aesthetic. These seventeen artists work in a range of media including collage, painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. The subjects and concepts of the artworks are widely varied as well, ranging from Rosalyn Schwartz’ alien landscapes to David Hodges’ obscure narrative paintings to Wendy Jacob’s “breathing” sculpture.
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BIOkinetic
Open October 10 through November 19, 1989
BIOkinetic features installations by six Chicago artists: Wendy Jacob, Gary Justis, Michael Paha, John Pakosta, John Ploof, and Thomas Skomski. As has always been true of kinetic art, these works are concerned with movement. Unlike earlier, more mechanistic kinetic sculpture, the works in BIOkinetic focus on life processes such as erosion, respiration, growth, and decay. In delightful and thoughtful ways, these artists combine movement and natural and man-made materials to produce a kind of “living sculpture.”
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Behind the Screen: Five Video Artists
Open October 16 through 31, 1989
Behind the Screen: Five Video Artists is an exhibition showcasing the video works of artists George Kuchar, Carole Ann Klonarides, Edin Velez, Mary Lucier, and Shalom Gorewitz. Although video art has roots in the art of the 1960s, it has only recently come into its own as recognized art form. The five artists in Behind the Screen represent an interesting cross section of contemporary video art, and represent diverse approaches to this relatively new medium.
George Kuchar, who has been making films since the late 1950s, has a penchant for turning his daily interaction with others into videos which are both humorous and revealing.
Edin Velez, who was born and educated in Puerto Rico, gives the viewer a look into the practices of cultures as diverse as Japan and South America, through what he calls “video essays.” These works combine the tradition of narrative, documentary film with abstract imagery, heightened color and music which compliments Velez’s subjects.
Mary Lucier’s thought-provoking videos often invite viewers to contemplate what is happening to the natural environment. Lucier uses video in much the same way that American Luminist painters like Frederick Church used paint and canvas, seeing the screen as a “frame” through which we experience nature. Her comments on our need to replace the beauty we’ve destroyed with the artificial landscape brought to us through the medium of television challenge the viewer to give thought to this growing problem.
Shalom Gorewitz evokes both the real and the abstract in his work. The use of computer-generated image processes transforms Gorewitz’s “real” filmic imagery into jarring, haunting pieces with socially concerned content. Many of Gorewitz’s video works contain images relating to his Jewish ancestry, through which he explores contemporary problems such as racism and the dilemma of contemporary of religion.
Carole Ann Klonarides often collaborates with artists who work in other media to produce videos. Her work Cascade, produced with the painter Dike Blair and the sculptor Dan Graham, uses the urban landscape to emphasize a sense of verticality, which is important to their artwork. Klonaride’s video Cindy Sherman: An Interview uses the TV convention of the talk show to allow the photographer Cindy Sherman to present herself as many different “character types,” which is what she normally does in her photography.
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1988
Joseph Nechvatal: Paintings 1986-1987
Open February 9 through March 20, 1988
Joseph Nechvatal’s work explores technology’s paramount influence on our ways of seeing in this “Age of Information.” A computer is used to digitize and magnify the artist’s initial drawings and/or photographs. The computerized information is then “painted” by robotic arms onto canvases up to 12-feet-wide.
Nechvatal’s paintings have shimmering, spectral presences. Images are layered in a web-like, labyrinthian manner, drifting in and out of the viewer’s field of perception. The work has a holographic quality, due to the ethereal spatial handling of juxtaposed two and three-dimensional images and the illusions generated by the dot matrix.
These paintings address both sides of the increased possibilities that technology affords us: on one hand, freedom and extended perception; on the other, dehumanization and impending nuclear disaster.
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Donald Baechler: Paintings and Drawings 1981-1987
Open April 26 through June 12, 1988
Donald Baechler: Paintings and Drawings, 1981-1987 is an exhibition of twenty-seven paintings and drawings spanning a period of six years. From his earliest paintings of displaced modern objects (chairs, resorts, still lifes) floating quizzically on monochromatic grounds, Baechler has remained an inscrutable figure among young contemporary artists. Eschewing his photographically inspired images for an ongoing pursuit of more liberated drawing styles, the artist has sustained a paradoxically primal sophistication. Baechler’s paintings are, in many senses, accumulations: layers of previously painted imagery peek ghostlike through the elegantly collaged surfaces, as do the disturbing secrets of the anonymous “artists” whose drawings have been appropriated in the work.
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Mark Innerst: Landscape and Beyond
Open September 27 through November 13, 1988
Landscape and Beyond is the first overview of paintings and works on paper by Mark Innerst, including landscapes, still lifes, and allegorical subjects. The twenty-nine works in the exhibition span seven years of Innerst’s career, from 1981 through 1987. Innerst is best known for his exquisite landscapes with low horizons which feature the tiny yet searing towers of technology challenging the vastness of Nature. Their spectral radiance shining through layers of muted paintstrokes and glazes, Innerst’s landscapes offer us a vision of nature and technology’s inextricable embrace: the Divine Light and the Electronic Sublime.
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Elizabeth Stein: Transformations
Open October 18 through November 5, 1988
Elizabeth Stein: Transformations showcases nineteen photographs based in nature. In each photograph, a detail of a single image is duplicated in a grid sixteen to twenty times—reversed, inverted, and flipped—to form a kaleidoscope of texture and color. Stein, a philanthropist, Chicago native, and former Bloomington High School art teacher, always enjoyed shooting pictures of animals and trees and clouds. “Nature photography was my bag,” she said.
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1987
Anxious Objects
Open August 19 through October 9, 1987
…Modern art always projects itself into a twilight zone where no values are fixed. It is always born in anxiety…
—Leo Steinberg, 1962
Anxious Objects is an exhibition featuring works in various mediums by seven young artists, all living in Chicago, who share no specific theoretical standpoint, yet are all concerned with the displacement, transformation or simulation of modern objects or photographically reproduced material. The title, borrowed from Harold Rosenberg’s prescient book of essays, The Anxious Object, published in 1964, reflected the late author’s striving for a re-definition of art in an era in which “…the entire social basis of art is being transformed…”:
Anxiety is thus the form in which modern art raises itself to the level of human history. It is an objective reflection of the indefiniteness of the function of art in present-day society and the possibility of the displacement of art by newer forms of expression, emotional stimulation and communication…The art object’s nature is contingent upon recognition by the current communion of the knowing. Art does not exist. It declares itself…
—H. Rosenberg, pp 17-18
JANET CARKEEK’s luminous Time Accumulation seascapes are hand-colored enhancements of landscape-like lines she found in pieces of plywood selected in her haunts of lumberyards. Rather than portray nature through the Renaissance “window,” she paints right over it. While offering us distant visions evoking the intensity of Charles Burchfield or the Hudson River School, the artist beckons us to experience the objecthood of wood.
JEANNE DUNNING engages in a different sort of discourse with nature in her series of untitled color photographs bearing Latin and English zoological “captions” superimposed on close-ups of branches, leaves and other photo-clichés. Mimesis and the deception of language, and the authority of science are among the issues explored there. The artist’s interest in the interstices of art and language is evident, also, in a series of genre objects (book, goblet, violin) fashioned in brick.
GREGORY GREEN’s Assaults and Warnings are mixed-media spectacles that evolved from the artist’s earlier performance pieces. Circular sawblades mounted in rows on framed canvas spin with horrific associations and hypnotic effects. Four out of five senses are confronted by these adrenalin-raising metaphors for the mechanism of power.
MITCHELL KANE’s enigmatic installations combine generic abstract paintings, posters, assorted hardware and materials such as wax, plastic molding and stretched rubber. As arcane in content as they are quotidian in material, these works pursued subtly resonant associations between romanticism and art’s enshrinement, the imprint of architecture and media-promoted machismo.
HIRSCH PERLMAN’s work is predominantly photo-based and addresses the differences but inevitable crossovers between art and text. Allegories of relativity and our primal tendency to read, be it nature, signs or art, his images are mirrors held up to reflect the viewer’s concept of art’s elusive “place.”
VINCENT SHINE refabricates utilitarian objects such as buckets, funnels, fire extinguishers and mailboxes out of graphite, steel, fiberglass or polystyrene, often slightly (more recently, considerably) manipulating scale. Offering the viewer an art object in place of a mass-produced anonymous object, his surrogates explore expectations regarding the function of art and the mystique of the common.
TONY TASSET’s Domestic Abstractions are seductively crafted pseudo-paintings in which nature, in the form of animal hide, “passes” as art. Barbed comments on the decorative function of even the most avant-garde art, these works bring home issues of collecting, art history and taste. His buttoned leather, “Seated Abstractions” plays upon the overlapping turf of modular sculpture and designer furniture, yet does not encourage viewer comfort in contemplating these cushioned parodies of Minimalism.
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John Hull: The King Lear Series
Open October 16 through November 22, 1987
These paintings are not about violence. They’re about observed violence. Particularly, I think these paintings are about the responsibility the viewer has to these events.
I think my paintings have a moral basis but I am not trying to teach a lesson—these aren’t allegories. I think that their meaning comes from an accumulation of detail, an accumulation of incidence. There isn’t a moral lesson at the end of these, and I don’t really think there is with Shakespeare, either.
John Hull’s King Lear paintings transcend story-line, penetrating to the core of Shakespeare’s existential drama concerning man’s enduring “his going hence even as his coming hither.” Set in the vast expanses of the New Mexican landscape, these paintings portray interactions among soldiers under big desert skies. The narrative is so inscrutable that the dominant sense is of vain attempts to grasp unanswerable mysteries—a groping for meaning.
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Shelley Hull: Paintings and Constructions
Open October 16 through November 22, 1987
My use of these mystical notions is personal. For Kabbalists the primary concern is man’s relationship to God and explaining God’s inner workings. For me these myths transcend their theological context and describe psychological events. Also, I am quite selective in my use of Kabbalah. Numerology, theurgy and angelology are essential aspects of Kabbalistic doctrine which do not interest me. The paintings relate to the notion of the Diaspora. They express the pain, sadness and anger of separation from the ideal and the longing for reunion and wholeness.
Spiritual in intent and luminous in palette, Shelley Hull’s intimately scaled canvases, panels, and boxes synthesize mythologies from various sources and centuries. Influenced by the writings and oral traditions of 16th century Jewish mystics, Hull interprets mythic concerns and icons in a psychologically infused manner. Sinuously coiled, illusionistically rendered fabrics intermingle with actual silks. Phantom hands sail across fiery skies. A shrine-like, theatrical atmosphere is evoked, and often extended into the third dimension, to further engage the viewer’s meditative eye.
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Janet McKiernan's Magic Theater
Open October 16 through December 12, 1987
The crystalline surfaces of Janet McKiernan’s paintings bring to mind the reflections in a sorcerer’s pool, beneath which stirs a spring of magical imagery. Innocence swims below the surface, coupling and uncoupling with wit and perversity. The disquieting quality of many of the paintings results from a fusion of a child’s mimetic mind with a distanced, somewhat cynical outlook.
McKiernan’s work has all the delicacy and whimsy of a Faberge egg; whipped cream clouds, lacy ribbons of chimney smoke and ingenuous bluebirds skim across the skies of her landscapes. In The Intangible, a bird poised in a pale pink sky “plucked” smoke, which is thus transformed into cotton, from a brick chimney. On the one hand, we have a paradigm of the artist’s alchemical role: mixed colors from tubes of paint transforming them through application to the canvas, thus creating a world with its own set of rules and illusions. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, by making smoke palpable, McKiernan attests to the converse – that what we call reality is as diaphanous as smoke rings in the air.
In McKiernan’s paintings, humans are often indifferent spectators to the sly animation of everyday objects. In The Shell Game, a man with pale skin, slicked back hair and an elongated nose removed his hat to reveal a spinning top on his head. With an expression as blank as a character in an animated store window display, the wheels of thought had literally escaped his head, leaving him cipher.
In spite of their veneer of fairy tale pleasantry, these paintings hold the concealed intentions of an encoded diary, conjuring notions of Rasputin in Toyland. As a counterpoint to her juxtaposition of innocence and the darker subconscious, McKiernan’s palette balances a range of pastel pinks, yellows, and greens with engorged purples and reds. She will dress her windows and skies with chaste, sheer lace or engulf them in heavy velvets trimmed with ermine and peppered with tassels and jewels of paint, suitable for a spoiled Czar.
Many of the paintings feature the device of a half-drawn curtain, as in a carnival sideshow, seducing the viewer with a promise of a revelation of wonders, a defiance of the laws of nature. Before our very eyes, a clown juggles weightless bubbles and feathers. An egg hatches endlessly to reveal yet another egg within, presenting us with an ersatz immaculate conception. A steaming teapot metamorphoses into the head of an elephant.
Masquerading as fleshy grapes, eyeballs clustered on a plate tempted us to sample their sweet pulp – a mordant reply to the expression “painting is a feast for the eyes.” We are further mystified by the frequent and unexplained presence of a stratum of floating, translucent bubbles which drifted aimlessly through the tableaux, as if linking each unique scenario to the next.
But, like the carnival magician, McKiernan is careful not to reveal too much. With faint insinuations of surreality lurking behind every rock, every cloud, every tree, her paintings stop short of being graphically surreal. She parodies the Surrealist showman who lacked such restraint in Dolly. In this work, a gigantic Dali- mustachioed watch face, suspended from a parted curtain, looms above the dwarfed audience. As in any vaudeville act, we are reminded that the proverbial cane is always waiting in the wings to remove a poor player who has outworn his welcome on the stage. The Persistence of Memory is reduced to the Persistence of Dali.
I pursue the grasp of surreal mental twisters…Calculated to extend limits of perception and entice subconscious connections to the surface, the usual and familiar are exposed as ravishingly, thrillingly absurd.*
Entering McKiernan’s veiled worlds is like stepping inside the “Magic Theater” in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, where any transformation is possible and all dreams may come true. As in Steppenwolf, admission is NOT FOR EVERBODY – a superficial view will not disclose the images’ darker purpose. The most insidious nightmare, after all, is one that poses as a detached parade of mundane objects and activities, building gradually toward the dreamer’s unaccountable experience of anxiety. The price of admittance to her “theater” is no steeper than a subtle rearrangement of our perceptions regarding the decorousness of the commonplace.
- Barry Blickerman and Lauri Dahlberg
*Excerpt from the artist’s statement, 1985
