1990s Exhibitions
Previous University Gallery Exhibitions
1999
post-hypnotic
Open January 14 through February 21, 1999
post-hypnotic examines the resurgence of pronounced optical effects in the work of 28 painters living in the U.S., Switzerland, England, and Japan. The Op art movement—peaking in the wake of mid-sixties World's Fair optimism—lost its critical appeal as it transmuted almost overnight from canvas into clothing design. Since the 1980s, however, numerous artists have revisited perceptual phenomena involving pulsating patterns, afterimages, vibrating illusionistic space, and other sensations often associated with altered states.
While philosophers, computer scientists, and neurologists grapple with the nature and location of consciousness, sixties counterculture's more intuitive discoveries—the visceral undertones of a droning electric guitar; the visual, aural and temporal hallucinations induced by mindbending drugs; the mantras and mandalas of Eastern religions—have been assimilated by the culture at large and transformed into the digital pyrotechnics of Magic Eye calendars, "rave" culture techno-psychedelia, mesmerizing TV graphics, and high-definition video games. In contrast to Color-field painting's adherence to rigid formalism, Minimalism's dismissal of metaphor, and Op's "shalt not" attitude towards imagery, the artists in post-hypnotic infuse their eye-popping abstractions with provocative and often questioning references to this highly charged visual landscape.
post-hypnotic begins chronologically with works from the mid-1980s: Big Iris, Philip Taaffe's linoprint collage on canvas, recasts the retinal overdrive of Bridget Riley's classic Op with the intimacy of vernacular design and craft. Scorching Day-Glo color and cell-and-conduit imagery in Peter Halley's Red Cell convey electronic interconnectivity and the structural systems that shape our contemporary environment. Ross Bleckner's soft-focus stripe painting, Brothers' Swords vibrates between ornament and abstraction. Walter Robinson's scintillating spin-art reframes New York School abstraction in the guise of boardwalk art.
A dual concern for modernist abstraction and far-reaching popular reference continues in works included from the late eighties to the present. Paintings that may appear at first glance to be nothing more than patterned stripes, concentric circles or spirals are actually grounded in the real world: Sarah Morris hard-edge grids flip-flop between skewed Mondrians and perspectival views of glass-and-steel architecture. The undulating stripes in Karin Davie's Lover reincarnate heroic abstraction as a wavy funhouse mirror image, making sly reference to female anatomy. Embedded in clear resin like insects in amber, Fred Tomaselli's intricately arranged pills and hemp leaves allude to art's transportive potential. Other artists test our ambivalent fascination with the computer, employing it either as a design tool or for direct output: Aaron Parazette bases his vortex paintings on "clip-art" paint drips which are scanned onto computer to orchestrate color interactions. David Szafranski's computer-generated Bra Sale rewards patient viewers with a perversely banal "magic eye" message.
Op's burgeoning and diverse presence in works by emerging artists suggests that it is, as Tom Moody has written, "an unfinished project." What was seen in the eighties as a critique of a failed movement is now viewed as more openly experiential. Investigating what Tomaselli has called "the mechanics of seduction," the work in post-hypnotic tests the blurry boundaries between transient sensory titillation and the transforming experience of ecstasy.
Artists
- John Armleder
- Ross Bleckner
- Stratton Cherouny
- David Clarkson
- Mark Dagley
- Karin Davie
- Steve di Benedetto
- Michelle Grabner
- Tad Griffin
- Peter Halley
- Jim Isermann
- Yayoi Kusama
- Judy Ledgerwood
- Jason Martin
- Tom Martinelli
- Tom Moody
- Sarah Morris
- Aaron Parazette
- Bruce Pearson
- Walter Robinson
- Susie Rosmarin
- Peter Schuyff
- Michael Scott
- James Siena
- David Szafranski
- Philip Taaffe
- Fred Tomaselli
- Yek
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Press
Otherville
Open March 2 through April 4, 1999
Artists living and working in Chicago invariably deal with the label “Chicago artist,” a tag that has strong ties to Imagism in the 1960s and 70s. Fueled by information technologies, heightened critical awareness, and adventurous new galleries, artists have managed to maneuver around the art world’s “regionalist” pigeonholing. Certain sensibilities, however, continue to characterize new Chicago art: funkiness and wit, for example, seem to have been handed down like torches by the Imagists. Otherville presents work by seventeen emerging artists who are questioning and reshaping the parameters of the Chicago scene.
Curated by Bill Conger.
Artists
- John Arndt
- Stephanie Brooks
- Timothy Brower
- Tom Denlinger
- Josh Garber
- Alice Hargrave
- Paul Kass
- Chenoae Kim
- Michael Lindell
- Shona Macdonald
- Pamela Staker-Matson
- Michael McCaffrey
- Patrick McGee
- Alison Ruttan
- Angela Schlaud
- Mike Slattery
- Rob Weingart
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Harold Gregor and Ken Holder: from the road, from the river, from the sky
Open May 28 through August 23, 1999
The landscape of the American Midwest has been the subject of Harold Gregor’s paintings since 1971. With mathematical precision, Harold Gregor has consistently taken images of the plains and the working farm, creating rock-solid color statements that capture the rich texture of nature, all the while investing these traditionally clichéd images with “wonder and revived meaning.” The paintings in this show are the result of the many years of Gregor’s survey of the heartland, and also of his recent experimentations in subject and media.
Having focused on the landscape of the Southwest as his subject for years, Ken Holder shifted his direction in 1996 to the vistas along the two thousand miles of the Lewis and Clark Trail. Anticipating the expedition’s bicentennial in 2004, Holder has been avidly compiling research material through books and many trips along this territory, documenting and interpreting the current conditions of the terrain. The exhibited works are selected from the resulting body of work that includes over four hundred preparatory drawings and watercolors and over thirty large and small-scale paintings.
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Mealy Mouthed Materials, Charismatic Shapes & Other Funny Stories
Open August 27 through September 21, 1999
Curated by Sally Gil and Dan Mills, Director of the Roland Gibson Art Gallery, State University of New York, Potsdam.
Mealy Mouthed Materials, Charismatic Shapes & other Funny Stories features sculptures by seven New York artists: Lucky DeBellevue, Paul Dickerson, Barbara Galluci, Sally Gil, Elana Herzog, Kenneth Johnston, and Daniel Wiener. Co-curator Dan Mills writes, “As a group, the artists are broadly united by employing historically ‘non-traditional’ sculptural materials such as carpet, shrink wrap, chenille stems and Easter fuzz. The work and its manufacture is often charged with wide-ranging associations. It is often idiosyncratic, but also informed by recent art movements such as Minimalism and Process Art.” Integrating used consumer materials with a perverse whimsy, much of this sculpture feels matter-of-fact and spontaneous while retaining a heartfelt honesty.
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Growing Up Postmodern
Open October 5 through November 17, 1999
Curated by Barry Blinderman and Bill Conger
While Baby Boomers review their pension plans and incidents such as Columbine create international shockwaves, artists are examining the contradictory and perverse reverberations of childhood and adolescence with renewed fervor. Growing Up (post)MODERN gets its name from Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd," a landmark study of the conditions of adolescence and early adulthood during the 1950s. Fourteen artists were represented in this exhibition, which was presented in conjunction with Border Subjects 4, an interdisciplinary, international, two-day conference dealing with issues of race and class in youth culture and literature.
Artists
- Donald Baechler
- Mike Cockrill
- Francesca Fuchs
- Jack Hallberg
- George Horner
- Larry Mantello
- Paula McCarty
- Karl Rademacher
- James Rielly
- Christian Schumann
- Michael Scott
- Kathryn Spence
- Thomas Wrede
1998
Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong
Open January 13 through February 22, 1998
Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong was the first museum survey of a Chinese-American artist’s rapturous visions of ethnic urban experience. Born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a resident of New York’s Lower East Side since the early 1980s, Wong became highly acclaimed for his paintings of crumbling tenement façades in fantastic landscapes featuring gilded constellation diagrams, stylized hearing-impaired symbols, and street-beat poetry by Miguel Piñero. Even within the quirky, flashier-than-thou East Village art scene in the 1980s Wong’s paintings always stood out. An eccentric character in the art world—a Chinese-American portraying a Hispanic neighborhood—he revitalized traditional landscape paintings with bricks, iron gates, chain link, sign language, and verse.
Thirty-four paintings dating from 1983 to 1993 were included. This exhibition, which was partially funded by the Illinois Arts Council, traveled to The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from May-September, 1998. Rizzoli International and The New Museum co-published a 96-page color catalogue with essays by Carlo McCormick, Lydia Yee, Yasmin Ramirez, and co-curators Dan Cameron and Barry Blinderman.
Wong’s paintings are now included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Press
Sound of the Sun
Open June 2 through August 2, 1998
Sound of the Sun presents the work of seven artists from Bloomington-Normal’s sister city of Vladimir, Russia: Sergei Skuratov, Olga Gollman, Yuri Lebedenko, Alexei Veselkin, Leonid Kosinstev, Yuri Negodaev, and Raisa Vartsava.
Vladimir, Russia has a long and complex history. Established one thousand years ago, Vladimir predates Moscow and was an early capital of Russia. The Vladimir region also referred to as “The Golden Ring,” is known for its ancient cathedrals and was once a center of Russian Orthodox Icon painting. Icons are still restored and created within the city. The city is home to many artists. Some teach in the art schools while others, trained in traditional methods, make a living selling their work. Vladimir is also home to several of Russia’s most revered choirs, a world-class gymnastics school, and two universities.
With a population of approximately 400,000, Vladimir is a major industrial area, producing everything from tractors, to military hardware to textiles. Most people live in large apartment buildings erected during the Soviet period and use the trolley for transportation. Moscow is only 130 miles away and St. Petersburg can be reached while sleeping on the night train from Vladimir.
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Inglenook II
Open August 19 through September 27, 1998
"An inglenook is the nook and sitting area by a large open fireplace. Significant changes in domestic history in the nineteenth century involving the development of central heating have drastically interrupted the traditional evening orientation toward a single hearth (a shared communal space), thereby prompting major changes in how we live. Housing is the most reliable indication of one's essential identity-a microcosm of our most intimate world. The interior reveals status, privacy, social segregation, customs, popular beliefs, and modes of behavior. The hearth used to be the central focus of the home- a place where significant matters took place, from nourishment and comfort to social interaction. This space has been replaced by the virtual hearth of the computer, a solitary experience in which interaction takes place as disembodied experience. With the disappearance of the domestic hearth, its artistic contemplation has become a critical concern for many artists. Their interest in the relationship between art and social space is one of the central focuses of this exhibition.
INGLENOOK includes artists whose works address vernacular design and cultural artifacts, especially those revolving around the context of the domestic. Presenting objects that are readily recognizable, these artists contemplate issues of design to explore the social uses of space. By focusing on familiar aspects of material culture, such as the elements of architecture (bricks, fixtures, stairs, faadesl and interior design (decoration, table settings, furniture), they investigate the historical, formal, perceptual and psychological properties of design and how they are disseminated to create meaning.
Lament for the loss of communal space and desire for its recreation date back to the advent of the industrial revolution and the Arts and Crafts tradition in the mid-nineteenth century. Concerned that their work have a social impact, many practicing painters and sculptors in Europe and in America became designers and architects. Gerrit Rietveld and Henry van de Velde, influenced by theorists like Ruskin, Morris, Semper, and Berlage, voluntarily gave up painting because they had come to believe that design and architecture were more socially useful. But it was not until the early twentieth century, with the Bauhaus, de Stijl, and Constructivist movements, that the integration of architecture, design and studio practice became a central concern for many artists. The desire to synthesize human experience through a reunion of art and the industrial world has, however, seen many disruptions. Categorization has created artificial divisions within the arts that are ultimately useful for market purposes only. Undermining the dualistic model in which various practices must exist within their discrete categories, the artists in this exhibition seek to unify experience and remove aesthetic hierarchies created between artistic practices. INGLENOOK uses the hearth as a metaphor for social space-a place in which differences are negotiated and defined.
There is a social imperative inherent in art production, and in examining the interactive nature of design, artists may use the familiar and the functional to create situations that alter viewers' understanding of their surroundings. Looking at the interior as a space in which many emotional, biological and social processes take place, INGLENOOK is a setting that questions the relationship of the viewer/ participant to design. How does it nurture, control and represent our individuality? From family diaries to coffee tables-encompassing creative mediums from video and music to computer-generated painting and glassblowing-the works explore how experience is contextualized within the constructed environment."
—Yvette Brackman
An earlier version of this exhibition took place at Feigen Contemporary in New York, and was curated collaboratively by Rena Conti, Ivan Moskowitz, and Yvette Brockman. Many thanks to: Lance Kinz and Susan Reynolds, the directors of Feigen, for their support in initiating the project and seeing it through; to Jeremy Blake for his graphic design work on bath Inglenook and Inglenook II; and to the artists and galleries that facilitated loans of artwork.
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Text and Territory: Navigating through Immigration and Dislocation
Open October 6 through November 8, 1998
The artists in Text and Territory use various materials—law books, embroidered cloth, cooked earth, and maps—to comment on the use of language and maps in identity formation. Responding to our boundaries—ethical, social, national, or sexual, the exhibition probes the stability of texts and territories, and their power to (dis)place us.
The artists in Text and Territory approach the question of cultural identity from different backgrounds and locations. Joe Nicastri and Sherri Tan utilize law books, canonical texts, and plot maps to create sculptures that are as beautiful as they are troubling. Dan Rose suggests in his wall sculptures that the boundaries between peoples are as constructed and dislocating as the illusory boundaries between nature and culture. Whether incorporating territorial lines drawn on a map or invisible lines depicting the difference between bodies, David Wojnarowicz vividly undermines the boundaries of identity. Vibrating between image and information, Julie Mehretu’s work elaborate the patterns of migration in images that reveal the movement of people and the passage of time through layers of drawing. Indira Freitas Johnson articulates the sensation of hybridity by combining the traditional needlecraft of India with American sweepstakes entries. Pure Chutney, a film co-directed by Amitava Kumar, articulates the diversity and hybridity of Trinidadian-Indian culture with a sophisticated awareness of the difference between individuals and the community in which those individuals participate. A collaboration between photographer Ruth Ward and writer Fatema Mernissi, Vanishing Orient: Papa’s Harem is Shifting to Mama’s Civil Society reveals the power and, conversely, the difficulties of women in the Muslim world.
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1997
Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide
Open January 14 through February 23, 1997
Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide is an in-depth museum exhibition of an artist who emerged in the turbulent 1980s international art scene. Pulsating with energy and overflowing with information, Kenny Scharf’s art infuses 60s pop icons and biomorphic forms with a symbolism reflecting electronic technology’s insistent grip on our most primal fantasies.
Scharf’s ebullient and jarring images have reached a wide audience through their appearance on postcards, Absolut ads, calendars, and clothing, but the artist’s abundant studio works have yet to be featured in a comprehensive mid-career retrospective. Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide will explore the ambivalent fusion of high art and cartoon, technological aspiration and ecological devastation, myth and mass-media, and hedonism and spirituality inherent in Scharf’s work.
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Buried Pleasures
Open March 5 through April 13, 1997
Buried Pleasures is an obsessive investigation into the link between vision and desire. Rosalyn Schwartz and Barbara Kendrick explore sensuality and the visual symbols and cultural rituals that express or regulate our impulses. They engage in the discourse of women's sexuality in titillating forms that incorporate feminine mythology and art history. The works have an organic, visceral presence that is both elegant and disturbing.
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Visions Not Far from Normal
Open June 3 through August 2, 1997
Visions Not Far From Normal is an exhibition consisting of paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography, and unique musical instruments by eight artists living in Illinois. As the title might suggest, obsessive or unusual themes underlie the work in this exhibition. Six of the artists are self-taught, three have exhibited widely, and two are exhibiting for the first time. Three are senior citizens.
D. Bill, of Danvers, is already a local legend for creating telephone pole totems with cartoony hatchet-hewn faces, many of which grace the yards of cartoony hatchet-hewn faces, many of which grace the yards of central Illinois.
Michael Bowlds, of Park Forest, makes intricately patterned colored-pencil drawings which offer surrealistic and wryly humorous glimpses of popular culture.
Josefina Ferran, who lives in Normal, paints colorful and vivid scenes based on their childhood memories of Cuba.
Glen Davies, an urban art teacher, artist and muralist, exhibits tarpaulins and wood sculpture inspired by Mexican ritual, comics, and 1960s visionary experience. Locally, he painted a mural for La Bamba, “Burritos as big as your head!”
Steve Johnson, of Bloomington, creates self-playing, hybrid musical instruments that are handcrafted from wood, metal, and surplus electronic parts.
Elizabeth Stein, a former art teacher in Bloomington, arranges kaleidoscopic collages with color Xeroxes from photographs of nature.
Irene Zion, a resident of Champaign, paints intimate and Kafkaesque portraits of family and friends, presented in frames with wood-burned images and writing.
Kenneth Rogers, of Joliet, presents macabre visions populated by clowns, dolls, and distorted beings.
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Sue Coe: Heel to Boot
Open August 14 through September 21, 1997
Heel of the Boot is a comprehensive retrospective of Sue Coe’s lithographs, monotypes, and photo-etchings from 1979 to 1997.
Arriving in New York from England in 1972, Coe quickly found work as an Op-Ed page illustrator for The New York Times, and also contributed political drawings to publications such as Mother Jones, Penguin Books, Discover, and RAW. In 1979, she began to make photolithographs, taking a drawing and making virtually unlimited editions, selling the prints initially for $5. Gradually, she became actively involved in the various printmaking processes, exploiting the expressive potency of woodcut, monotype, etching, photo-etching, and aquatint.
Coe has used prints as a vehicle to broaden her reach in expressing her outrage against inequities of power and the vulnerability of the powerless. Sharing the tradition of Francisco Goya, George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, and John Heartfield, she portrays the plight of victims of war, economic injustice, violence, racism, animal experimentation, and sexism. Despite its unflinching examination of the misuse of power as the artist sees it, Coe’s work also contains much irony and humor.
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1996
Industrial Amounts
Open January 16 through 28, 1996
Curated by Greg Bowen and featuring the work of Clove, Stephen Linksvayer, and Phil Wagner, Industrial Amounts examines the role of the artist in a society that has become dependent on mechanical and technological means of production. These works employ imagery and processes borrowed from a section of society directly opposed to the arts, where individuality and creativity are not valued commodities.
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Frankenstein (in Normal)
Open January 23 through February 25, 1996
Frankenstein in Normal is an exhibition based on the classic Mary Shelley text, a tale of romance, creation myth, love, fear, and horror.
Among the 25 artists chosen for the exhibition are several historical figures. These artists (Hans Bellmer, Rockwell Kent, Walter Murch) are often discussed in relation to contemporary artists but rarely shown alongside them. This exhibition includes painting, photography, sculpture, slide projection, and drawing as a way to explore the following categories: The Lab, The Doctor, The Monster and Bride. Hoping to make connections between the artistic practice and issues from the Shelley text, the Lab will be seen as studio or exhibition site; the Doctor will be seen as artist and viewer; the Monster and Bride will be seen as artwork.
Artists featured in the exhibition are: John Goodyear, William Pope.L, Curtis Mitchell, Marcia Lyons, Howard Johnson, Megan Williams, Larry Miller, Francois Morelli, Kay Rosen, Hannah Wilke, Ida Appelbroog, Rockwell Kent, Stephe Spretnjak, Mira Schor, Sue Johnson, Jeanne Silverthorne, Hans Bellmer, Richard Klein, Pietro Costa, Robert Feintuch, Judy Linn, Rona Pondick, Jack Whitten, Walter Murch, Joy Stingone, and the schoolchildren of Normal.
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Doll House
Open August 15 through September 27, 1996
Doll House is an exhibition consisting of installations, assemblages, photographs, paintings, videos, and virtual environments exploring the role of childhood memory and socially imprinted concepts of “the feminine” in contemporary art.
Seven of the 18 participants in Doll House are graduates of ISU’s School of art: Amy Buck, Tonya Hart, Taya Hubbard, Kim Knowles, Mandy Morrison, Rachel Nowak, and Cec Hardacker. The other artists are Laurie Anderson, Nancy Burson, Karen Finley, Karen Kilimnik, Mery Lynn McCorkle, Aimee Morgana, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, all living in New York city; Mindy Schwartz and Jeanne Dunning, of Chicago; Janet McKiernan, living in Seattle; and the late Chicago surrealist, Gertrude Abercrombie.
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Dismal Science: Photoworks by Allan Sekula 1972-1992
Open October 8 through November 17, 1996
Dismal Science is a museum survey of eight photographic projects produced by artist and writer Allan Sekula during the past 24 years. Sekula’s art interrogates the traditions of documentary photography and romantic notions of the artist's role in society. He reached prominence as both an artist and theorist in 1984 when a book of his works, Photography against the Grain, was published by The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Sekula’s discursive texts, sequential photographs, slide projection pieces, and audio recordings appeal to reason as well as emotion. His art is designed to increase our capacity for discernment and engage us in struggles for social transformation.
Early works such as Aerospace Folktales and Meditations on A Triptych explore the ways in which family and personal life are shaped by religion, gender roles, and class. More recent works, including Canadian Notes, Fish Story and Dismal Science, examine abandoned, camouflaged, and abstract landscapes marked by the global movement of labor, goods, and power. Crucial to Sekula’s projects are the ironies he finds in our culture’s blind economic optimism and its blatant disregard for consequences.
In this era of dissolving boundaries between academic disciplines and cultural traditions, museums must question existing concepts of art and its social role. Sekula’s audience is international and interdisciplinary in scope. His projects address the struggles of individuals and cultures caught in the cold war and post-cold-war economies. His narrative elements—assembled from news, advertising, literature, and everyday experience—trace the impact of a shifting global economy on the lives of working people. We must navigate between several points of reference in Sekula’s narratives. The media consumer, interviewer, subjective narrator, and objective reporter are among the many voices we may encounter in a given work.
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1995
Dann Nardi: Middle Ground
Open January 24 through February 26, 1995
Middle Ground is a large-scale temporary installation consisting of wood, light, earth, and assorted materials that appears to have emerged from the space itself. The installation creates an uninterrupted environment of conceptual and constructive processes. Maquettes, photo documentation, and drawings of eight of Nardi’s permanent outdoor sculptures are included in the exhibition as well.
Dann Nardi, an Illinois State University master’s degree graduate, is known primarily for his outdoor site-specific sculptures in which he combines organic and industrial elements as raw concrete and wood or metal and water, emanate a quiet refinement where conflicting forces are harmoniously resolved. His preliminary renderings and maquettes are works of art in themselves and his mastery of materials such as concrete, metal, and wood is evident in the unique combinations and surfaces he creates.
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Arch Connelley: Works 1981-1993
Open January 24 through February 12, 1995
AII dressed up in a sumptuous array of baubles, bangles, and beads, the works of Arch Connelly are charming essays that keenly probe some aspect of pictorial surfeit. His regular descents into over opulence are so openhanded as to be disarming, and his ebullient manipulation of the fauxjewels, jazzy sequins, and glitter that make up most of his palette is assured enough to carry a weight far beyond that of the materials themselves. Connelly-who died of AIDS in New York City last year and is celebrated here in a memorial retrospective in the state of his birth and training-was an artist who enjoyed operating in the muddy zone between camp and kitsch, always willing to risk excess in order to pursue the kind of goofy elegance he regularly achieved. His assemblages, sculptures, and paintings constitute a wonderful in-joke, imbued with enough cloying artisanry to make his glitter and sequins scintillate with pleasure.
The rectangle was often too staid to carry his rococo wanderings; more than half of the works shown here are round or oval. Curving edges provide just the added fillip and slight dislocation that invite further embellishment. In Perfect Kiss, 198S, Connelly tautly wrapped a circular orb with a sequence of gauzy scarves that coalesce at the center of the piece. He then encrusted parts of the scarves with a dynamic array of faux-pearls of different sizes-a few dozen of the thousand or more that are in this exhibitionradiating out in erratic rhythms from the center. Connelly's art is not without its wistful and poignant aura, and a kind of fragility of feeling can lie just beneath its thickly bejewelled surfaces. This work, from its title to his subsequent layering of effusive "riches," bespeaks his effort to render an emotive substance through his manipulation of tacky but oddly sincere materials.
A nother substance Connelly employed was bits of flattened eggshell, which cascade across the surface like manna falling from heaven. His painstaking application of this material onto often monochromatic abstract painting reflected a sensitivity to the delicate nature of the eggshell and with it he created a brittle craquelure. Snow Leopard, 1993, is an ivory-white piece; the slight discolorations among the eggshell bits the residue of a nature Connelly was loathe to suppress, here nearly submerging it within a cocoon of white paint. In his varying responses to his raw materials, Connelly was able to key up or down depending on his sources. His several, extremely busy collages, both spoofmg and indulging in a certain kind of megahunk, gay erotica ( one of these, Local Boy, 1991, appeared on the cover of the November 1991 issue of Artforum), produced a visual onslaught that is characteristic of his work. From the dizzying amplitude of these pieces-and of much of his work-it is clear that for Connelly rampant excess in the pursuit of charm and liveliness was no vice.
—James Yood from Artforum, "Reviews," February 1994.
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Residue
Open March 7 through April 9, 1995
Residue features artists Eve Andree Laramee, Tom Denlinger, Laurie Palmer, and Lauren Szold, who explore notions of environment as both natural and fabricated conditions. Utilizing a variety of media in site-specific installations and process-oriented in approach, these artists employ a poetic science in their examination of how meaning and function shift through material change.
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Alexis Rockman: Second Nature
Open August 17 through September 29, 1995
Garden of Unearthly Delights is the first museum survey featuring thirty works (18 large-scale paintings and 12 smaller works) of Rockman’s idiosyncratic and intensely colored visions of our hyper-rapidly changing biosphere. In an age of genetic engineering in which Darwinian natural selection is about as credible as Noah’s Ark, Rockman creates seductive and perverse paintings alluding to the unsettling interface of biology and technology. Using botanical and zoological illustrations and early 20thcentury naturalistic murals as his springboard, Rockman skews the evolutionary tree to feature marginalized creatures, inter-species couplings, and a wide variety of mutants. His exquisitely rendered oil paintings are imaginative amalgams of science-fiction, natural-history dioramas, and art history from Bosch to 17thcentury genre scenes. Eerie and entrancing, Rockman’s work “collides our complex negotiation between nature’s construction of us, and our construction of it.” (M. Dion, Flash Art)
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Good and Plenty
Open September 8 through 29, 1995
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Endurance
Open November 14 through December 17, 1995
Endurance is an international survey exhibition that traces the work of twentieth-century visual and performance artists whose individual and collective works test the physical, mental, and spiritual endurance of the body. The works included derive from performance, body art action, and conceptual art pieces from the 1960s to the present. Endurance presents work that is often difficult to categorize and comprehend in a historical context. In doing so, Endurance is a visual elaboration on the dynamic and dramatic transformation in the contemporary arts from the 1960s to the present.
The exhibition includes work by 38 artists consisting of photographic documentation from key works that exemplify acts of endurance. The photographs are presented as large format mural prints lending the images a scale which corresponds to the body.
Endurance is defined as the extreme form of presence, an emphatic statement of existence, real time, and the physical limitations of the body and the will. Within these performances/actions there is an intention beyond the physical to reach the spiritual. The acts which encompass Endurance are rituals of the modern world; a way for the artist to prove a point with themselves and society; or, as an act of defiance where the artist becomes his/her own victim. Endurance is an action that mediates between triumph and defeat. In Endurance, art is a form of acting in which meaning changes from the visual to the physical then ultimately to the photograph, which is the final art/object.
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1994
Peep Land: Paintings by Jane Dickson 1983-1993
Open January 18 through February 20, 1994
Peep Land is an exhibition featuring thirty paintings completed within a ten year period (1983-1993) by New York-based artist Jane Dickson.
The late Glenn O’Brien, art critic and former member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, characterized these paintings in his essay “Peep Show at the Magnetic Go-Go Pole," written for the Dickson catalogue, as a “post-postmodern” perception of nighttime in Time Square, stating:
“Painters live in such places as Paris or Eastern Long Island because of the light. But certainly Times Square is a place where the light is uniquely “advanced,” where a strange and vivid unnatural spectrum blends the erotic come-on of neon with the cheap fluorescence of all-night donut shops and the penetrating surveillance of the sodium street lamp. In Times Square, Dickson was initiated in the advanced degrees of light and she learned how translucence and opacity operate in a world where little is clear.
Dickson’s transcendental reportage updates realism with the full-blown post-postmodern spectrum of artificial light. The sun never intrudes on Dickson’s pictures. This is a world of endless night, where black light is the beacon of the black hole of desire. There is no land in the landscape, no tree, no leaf, no flora, no fauna; the only nature visible is flesh. The flesh exists in a world of its own, making a labyrinth of textures and wavelengths. Reality and fantasy merge in a landscape of optical illusion.”
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Olive Branch: Photographs and Texts by Cedric Chatterley
Open March 1 through April 10, 1994
Cedric Chatterley’s eight-year project, Olive Branch, explores the heritage of poverty in an American family, our problematic social welfare system, and the sadly ironic circumstances that Mark, the subject of this body of work, encounters as he attempts to achieve some level of economic and physical security. The unadorned installation of 11x14 inch black and white images is accompanied by texts which describe Mark’s experiences in his own words as well as commentary by doctors, family members, social workers, and Chatterley.
The poetry of Mark’s expressions combined with Chatterley’s vivid images render a tale that is dense with metaphor and socio-political implications. The fallacy that poverty is strictly an economic issue is shattered as Mark’s story unfolds. Chatterley’s half-ironic use of the title Olive Branch not only compares Mark’s dead-end hometown to the biblical story of promise, but also relates to the Bible as a narrative of western culture. Essentially Olive Branch is about the relationship between the photographer and his friend Mark and the pervasive effects of poverty on individuals and families.
Olive Branch, is literally and symbolically an “open book” dramatically displayed on dark red walls. According to some viewers, the installation has a theatric presence enveloping the viewer in Mark’s “performance,” opposed to the performer being surrounded by his audience. The end of the exhibition is left open, as are the possibilities for Mark to move towards achieving his goals.
Olive Branch communicates to audiences beyond the boundaries of the art and academic community, while also paying attention to contemporary issues in photography criticism and documentary practice. Through exposing his subjective position in Mark’s life Chatterley has created a context in which viewers can consider their own positions regarding the social hierarchy, ethics, and art.
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Synthetic Nuvism: Scott Jacobson, Clove, and Jason Fascination
Open August 16 through September 25, 1994
nuvism swings, dips and covers its mouth to conceal a salacious grin. Filtered through KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, suburban ennui, debased 60s icons, and the tackiest abstract painting ever found at a local art fair, it grooves to the heartbeat of a culture that has clearly exceeded its speed limit.
artificial. plastic. fake. Artists today provide artifacts drawn from a reality that is increasingly experienced in reproduction. vinyl celluloid. tape. Technology is the new spirituality, a virgin territory for communion through the extension of human gesture. sampling. synthesizing. internetting. We scan the out-of-body electric.
turgid biomorphs drip from Mondrian’s runny nose, overtaking the Cartesian grid like a virus. ejaculates blurt out codes as old as the Rosetta Stone. Imps of teen lust stare out from paintings so tumescent they begin to bulge in relief. All-flowing in sexual currents, through high-voltage art we Transcend.
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Discontents and Debutantes: Paintings by Mike Cockrill and Brian Calvin
Open October 4 through November 6, 1994
Discontents and Debutantes features paintings by two artists whose imagery occupies a precarious social interzone between fantasy and taboo, private and public, childhood and adulthood, and personal and media-induced realities. New York artist Mike Cockrill, creator of The White Papers, a scathing pictorial voyage through American culture from 1963 through 1980, has exhibited paintings dealing with sex, politics and dysfunctional family life since the early 80s. His monumental paintings of girls on cusp of adolescence exude an ambiguous eroticism that leads us to rethink our views on voyeurism and decorum. A dark humor saturates Brian Calvin’s canvases, which transform popular cartoon characters such as Charlie Brown, Olive Oil, and Fred Flintstone into crusty, pock-marked down-and-outs. Injecting three-dimensional topics like suicide, despair and self-loathing into characters from a two-dimensional, child-friendly realm, this young Chicago artist combines the stylistic and anecdotal mastery of Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Guston with the most banal popular icons imaginable.
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1993
Alex Grey: Sacred Mirrors
Open March 2 through April 11, 1993
The Sacred Mirrors is a unique series of 21 paintings that takes the viewers on a graphic, visionary journey through the physical and metaphysical anatomy of the Self. In his exploration of the complex nature of the human condition, Alex Grey portrays the interconnectedness of the body, mind, and spirit through his boldly colorful and obsessively detailed life-sized figurations. Art critic Carlo McCormick has written about the importance of Grey’s visionary work: “In this current cultural climate of post-modern self-doubt, Alex Grey’s work offers a rare and affirmative vision of the transcendent potential of human spirit.” First exhibited at The New Museum in New York in 1986, the Sacred Mirrors are a crowning achievement in the development of Alex Grey’s work. Four related paintings from 1979 to 1993 and a recently completed bronze sculpture entitled World Soul are also featured.
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Outside the Lines: Selections from ISU's Collection of International Child Art
Open May 25 through August 7, 1993
Throughout the summer of 1993 University Galleries of Illinois State University will be featuring selections from the former University Museum's collection of International Child Art. The collection which contains over 8,000 items has been exhibited both nationally and internationally over the past 20 years through the efforts of curator, Dr. Barry Moore, who recently retired from the Art Department at Illinois State University. The pictures in this collection have provided art educators with a vital source of research materials and have been published extensively. All of the images in the exhibition were created by children from around the world who were untrained in the arts. The expressive strength of the work testifies to the existence of an inherent human capacity to create meaningful visual representations of the world and our place within it.
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Primary Peoples, Colors and Shapes: Recent Work by Joe Lewis
Open August 19 through September 26, 1993
A lot of people have problems with art that has political content because it makes them look at themselves, and that's the thing that makes them upset. It makes them think about things that they'd rather forget, or shows them that they aren't really who they say they are.
—excerpted from a conversation between Joe Lewis and Barry Blinderman, June 1993
Joe Lewis’ large-scale sculptural installations explore issues of the environment, race and gender, and comment upon the universal nature of humankind’s struggle for continued existence. The exhibition derives its names from a work of 1991, with the full title Primary Peoples, Colors, and Shapes Vanquished by the Bald Eagle. The first in a series the artist did on the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits slavery, the piece includes neon, plexiglass, photostats, rawhide, and didactic information on the implications that the amendment has for citizens convicted of a crime. Other works are also composed of unusual materials, such as Ivory soap, LED signage, chainsaws, and gummy bears, as well as paint, metal, and wood. Lewis has consistently dealt with social and political content in his art, integrating diverse disciplines such as history, philosophy, science and religion to produce multi-media works that are rich in meaning and visual excitement. Lewis’ intent as an artist is to be connected with society; he noted in a recent interview, “Art is still probably the only thing that can really allow people to get in touch with themselves and with the world.”
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Paul Rosin: Obliged by Nature
Open October 5 through November 7, 1993
Obliged by Nature features work from 1983–1993 by Chicago artist Paul Rosin. Rosin’s photographs are vivid depictions of people, places, and things in a psychically, often sexually charged state, viewed through an ambiguous lens of wary curiosity and empathetic involvement. His oeuvre explores four recurring themes: portraits of bohemians in the sex-drugs-and rock’n’roll genre; mythological allusions that incorporate personal and collective memories; sharp commentaries that challenge cultural prohibitions; and an idiosyncratic obsession with notions of fatigue.
Since 1980 Rosin has worked in a 20 x 16 inch, uniformly vertical format, framing his silver gelatin prints identically in heavy black frames. Frequently shooting his subjects through a distorting lens or skewing focus, he manipulates the negative surface by scarring, scratching, typing words, or altering the emulsion with chemicals. Finally, many of the black and white prints are toned, subtly hand-colored, or painted with oil or enamel, making each one a unique object.
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1992
Signs of Life
Open January 21 through March 1, 1992
Signs of Life features 27 works by New York artists Kiki Smith, Rebecca Howland, Cara Perlman, and Christy Rupp.
"The exponential rate of technological advancement in the 20th century is a dizzying and euphoric phenomenon that pervades every aspect of modern life. As never before in human history, boundaries between what we consider real and artificial, living and dead, inner and outer, are blurred far beyond the limited tracking range of our cognitive and sensory capabilities. By now, however, ongoing atrocities committed against nature in all forms have made us well aware of the nightmarish consequences of a rapid ascension to Virtual Paradise unaccompanied by any tangible sense of social harmony or spiritual evolvement. The utopian heralding of the machine as God in the teens and 1920s was soon followed by prophetic warning signs such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published only a year before the Nazis began their systematic extermination of millions, and six years before our own state-of-the-art annihilation of Hiroshima. Nuclear paranoia (remember air-aid drills and basement fallout shelters in the 1960s?) has now been displaced by the far more immediate dangers of global warming, air and water pollution, AIDS, and the destruction of the rainforests.
Rebecca Howland, Cara Perlman, Christy Rupp, and Kiki Smith are among the scores of contemporary artists creating work that deals with the unsettling interface of nature and technology. What distinguishes their artmaking from that of many of their peers is their rejection of a high-tech, polished factory look preoccupied with formalism and art-about-art, in favor of a homemade, roughly hewn, humanist approach. The four artists began to exhibit in the late 1970s as members of Collaborative Projects (Colab), a New York group that collectively organized film and video projects, an art/film journal, and theme exhibitions. The forty or so original Co lab members had come of age during a decade dominated by arcane minimalist theory and a sequestered gallery system that rarely addressed gripping social realities like homelessness, hunger, and scores of undeclared wars. Like the New Wave musicians who had gotten around the locked doors of a nearsighted music business by producing their own gypsy-label records, Col ab artists opened stores to sell low-cost multiples, aired films and videos on the newly available cable TV network, published their own magazine, and staged an impressive and influential series of "post-gallery" exhibitions including The Times Square Show, installed in a former bus terminal/massage parlor; The Real Estate Show, co-organized by Howland at a storefront on the Lower East Side; and Animals Living in Cities, organized by Rupp at Fashion/Mada in the South Bronx."
—Barry Blinderman, excerpted from "Signs of Life," exhibition catalogue essay
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Nicolas Africano: Lost boy, laughing man
Open January 12 through February 21, 1992
Lost boy, laughing man is an exhibition of paintings and figurines by internationally recognized Illinois artist Nicolas Africano. The works in the exhibition were produced during an intensely introspective period in the artist’s life (1985-86); a time when he was working from, what he now considers, his “full depth.” In the large, high-relief paintings and small glass and bronze figurines, the dance between hope and disillusionment, role and will, and flesh and spirit is played-out in fragile narratives whose specificity and simplicity implicate universal themes of dualism and individual struggle.
Africano, a native of Illinois and graduate of Illinois State University in Normal, was born in Kankakee in 1948. He received a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in art and while still a student he began incorporating the written word into his paintings. Later in his career, Africano also began sculpting his figures out of glass and bronze. Writing and narrative themes have always been an important element in his work and Lost boy, laughing man will be filled with the artist's writings as well as selected paintings and sculpture from a very significant period in his prolific career.
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Dennis Oppenheim: The Blueprint Drawings and Selected Sculpture
Open March 10 through April 10, 1992
Dennis Oppenheim: The Blueprint Drawings and Selected Sculpture concentrates on a rarely exhibited body of work—one that has not yet been documented in book form. It is the first museum exhibition of Oppenheim’s large “blueprint” drawings, which have been made archival by transferring original blueprints onto cloth. These visually striking works have been carefully reworked with collages of transparent and opaque overlays, and thus graphic works in their own right. The exhibition also features selections of original pencil-on-vellum drawings, recent color drawings, models for sculptures, and one full-scale sculptural work.
Dennis Oppenheim is known worldwide as a highly influential figure in contemporary art. Since the mid-1960s, his work has progressed through series which virtually defined Land Art, Body Art, and the use of video and film in sculpture, moving to his Factory, Machineworks, and Fireworks projects of the 1970s, and more recently to series of kinetic sculptures and installations.
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The Vernacular Object: An exhibition of collections curated by Peter Spooner
Open June 2 through July 28, 1992
COLLECTIONS: The Vernacular Object is an exhibition featuring selected collections of common and not-so-common objects owned by Central Illinois residents. Most people collect some type object, a fact discussed by such diverse observers as Sigmund Freud and Erma Bombeck. This exhibition presents a variety of “non-art” collections of objects which have been lovingly amassed by 13 individuals. Presented in an “art context,” the hundreds of items in these collections seem to take on the qualities of aesthetic appearance, design, and meaning normally associated with what we call “art.” In other ways, the objects and collections in the exhibition can also be appreciated for their historical and social significance. At the same time, an exhibition of works from the University’s permanent collection wll be shown during the same time period.
The collectors and their objects in the exhibition are: Leslie Allen, salt and pepper shakers; Rodney Carswell, pencils; Glen Davies, religious artifacts, pillow slips , and lodge items; Evan Evans, mousetraps; Mark Genrich, religious artifacts, and lodge items; Gerry Guthrie, religious artifacts and lodge items; James Huddleston, picture frames; Adrian Marek, purses; Craig McMonigal, religious artifacts, Christmas items, and photographs; Ardie Nowers, wooden molds for picture frames; Michael Sarver, religious artifacts; Brian Simpson, neckies; Bob Steinman and Anne Scott, bakelite and lucite objects; Pat Stevens, religious artifacts and lodge items; Tim Van Laar, original paintings based on collections; and the doll collection from the former University Museum.
The University’s permanent collection exhibition, which includes 2,200 contemporary artworks, will include pieces by Frank Stella, Mark Tobey, Max Klinger, Karl Schmidt-Rotluff, Georges Rouault, Buzz Spector, Wonsook Kim, Nicholas Africano, Alan Cohen, Richard Cramer, John Himmelfarb, Thorsen Kursel, Donald Lipski, David Moreno, Dennis Oppenheim, Kiki Smith, and others.
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Spirit Ascending: Recent Drawings by Harold Boyd, Wonsook Kim, and Fay Lee
Open August 11 through October 30, 1992
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Medicine Body
Open September 29 through October 30, 1992
Medicine Body features the work of artists from across the nation that relates to medicine, healing, disease, and cultural rituals that define these common experiences. This exhibition takes the viewer on a visual journey from the “death chambers” in states that use capital punishment, to people suspended in water and air, through the healing experience of yoga, and into an installation that invites the viewer to participate in its creation. Debra Risberg, curator of the exhibition, believes that it is an auspicious time to promote art that expresses how we relate to and understand our physical being and how it is defined and reflected in our cultural attitudes and rituals. “The way we understand and treat our own bodies is reflected in the way we control and respond to the environment as a whole,” she said. “This exhibition is meant to engage the viewer in an observation of one’s own personal experience with medicine, death, aging, healing, and ritual and to promote a dialogue about the cultural conditions that influenced our experiences.”
Artists featured in Medicine Body include Sue Anderson and Barbara Hammer of California; Bill Burns of Montreal; Lucinda Devlin, Robert Flynt, John Orentlicher, and Joe Ziolowski of New York; Christina Howe of Washington; Gary Higgins of Arizona; Anita Jung, Carol Padberg, and Kathy Pilat of Illinois; Belinda Razka of Pennsylvania; and Jeffrey Silverthorne of Indiana.
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Mark Forth and David Hodges: Fractured Tales from the Heartland
Open September 29 through October 30, 1992
Fractured Tales from the Heartland: Paintings by Mark Forth and David Hodges includes 40 paintings by the two artists completed between 1987 and 1992. Hodges, a Rockford native who lives in Chicago, creates tiny oils on panel which keyhole visions of awkward rituals (camping, parental sermonizing, medical exams) that cling persistently to the banks of memory. He encases these somewhat sinister “miniatures” in disproportionate large frames, often displayed in proximity to real objects such as tables or a painted drinking glass. Forth, a native and current resident of Bloomington, paints "fictitious nocturnes" in which mysterious domestic scenes set in the dark interiors of midwestern buildings are transformed by candlelight or moonlight into “shadowy theatres of the unconscious.” Although each artist has pursued a highly individualized painting style, both reference art ranging from Caravaggio to 1930s-40s realists.
"Viewers of Mark Forth's paintings enter a realm of stillness and shadow, where antique furnishings, austere architecture and eerie lighting become interpreters for mute figures that stand, crouch, or recline impassively. Like somnambulists, these single or paired characters perform their quotidian rituals: boiling or pouring water, turning on lights, reading, working with tools, and especially looking. No reveries illuminate the glances of the oddly rendered people-their solitude remains inviolate. Nor is there promise of a clarifying vision in the dark landscape beyond the windows and doors of their chambers. The only possible clues as to the mysteries locked within these sparsely furnished rooms lie in meticulously articulated and curiously situated household objects: teacups lined up on a bedpost, tinted glass bottles on shelves and bureaus, a cluster of antique alarm clocks on a windowsill, a painted porcelain lamp lying on the floor...
...Looking at a David Hodges painting is like peering through the wrong end of a telescope at a distant place you have seen before and are not quite sure you would ever want to visit again. Yet you do, repeatedly, seeking a glimpse through tangled threads of memory at the perfect isolation one experiences during moments of existential realization. Hodges' tiny paintings invariably allude to the dreamlike links. seepages and distortions that occur when we try to recall the past in speech, in written word or in images. Within his spatially and psychologically compressed compositions we find bizarre characters invoked in the most common of' scenarios, relatively normal-looking folk engaged in absurd activity, or, as in the most insidious nightmare, a detached parade of somewhat believable events building gradually toward an unaccountable sense of anxiety."
—Barry Blinderman, excerpted from the Fractured Tales from the Heartland catalogue.
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1991
Keith Haring: Future Primeval
Open January 15 through February 24, 1991
Keith Haring: Future Primeval is the first major survey in the United States of the artist’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures from 1979 to 1985. By the time of his death at age 31, Haring had produced a vast and diverse body of work, ranging from his subway drawings to scores of public murals. As an innovative and tireless draftsman, painter and muralist, Haring explored endless permutations of symbols which simultaneously capture the mystery of ancient ritual and the obsessions of high-tech society. Perhaps more than any other contemporary artist, he has reached audiences far beyond the boundaries of galleries and museums.
Over 100 drawings, sculptures, and painted found objects are featured in the exhibition. Many of the works selected, particularly found objects of wood and metal, and chalk on black paper subway drawings have never been reproduced or exhibited in galleries or museums in this country. Paintings on paper, vinyl, leather, tarpaulin, canvas, plexiglass, wood and metal are included, as well as small-scale steel sculptures, painted vases, automobile hoods, a painted crib, and a special "black light" installation featuring several day-goo drawings and wooden reliefs by the artist.
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Jeanne Dunning: Bodies of Work
Open March 12 through April 10, 1991
Jeanne Dunning: Bodies of Work presents 43 photographs questioning issues of identity, sexuality, and the interior and exterior self. Drawing from a variety of sources, Dunning’s images appear to be other than what they are: a piece of fruit resembles a human orifice; a women’s head appears to be shaped like a phallus; a human hand takes on a smooth yet lumpy intimacy. Dunning’s work stimulates an irrepressible desire to look. In her photographs of women with mustaches and the insides of nostrils, she encourages viewers to stare at what would normally be taboo. By emphasizing the crucial details or aberrations, Dunning refuses to let viewers passively indulge in female beauty.
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Contemporary Art from the Collection of Jason Rubell
Open October 1 through November 10, 1991
Contemporary Art from the Collection of Jason Rubell features a selection of seventy works of contemporary art by fifty-three artists. At twenty-four years old, Rubell has managed to amass a collection of works that reads a virtual “who’s who” of contemporary art. Beginning with Minimalist and conceptual artists working from the 1960s to the present (Richard Artschwager, Brice Marden, Sol Lewitt, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman), the collection also features works representative of neo-expressionism (Eric Fischl, Keith Haring, George Condo, Francesco Clemente), postmodern abstraction (Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, Ross Bleckner), neo-conceptual art (Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Rosemarie Trockel, Mike Kelley, Cady Noland) and conceptually-oriented photography (Bernd and Hilla Belcher, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman).
This exhibition affords an opportunity for students, artists, and general museumgoers to see a broad yet incisive selection of work by established and emerging artists, and to witness the building of a growing collection from the ground up.
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David Moreno: Beneath the Skin
Open October 1 through November 10, 1991
Let's begin by way of an oversimplification: David Moreno's paintings are what they are about and are about what they are. In his variously scaled works there is a direct link between the physically disrupted, corrupted surface and a form of meaning that is essentially biological. Moreno fuses "pure" abstract painting, illusionistic imagery and a conceptually coded language onto a single surface. Despite his obvious technical expertise as a painter, a modest reticence prevails where a bravura flash might attract more attention. The paintings are clearly hand-made, sometimes roughly textured, with elements purposefully off balance, but Moreno has no desire to revel in mere human emotion or in any grand existential plea via his gesture, nor does he presume that painting can ever parallel some imagined universal perfection. David Moreno is a master of the studied understatement. His paintings do not clamor, shout or beg for our attention - they earn it with a convincing blend of wit, craft, and metaphorical allusion. At a casual glance, several of his works could be mistaken for color field paintings from forty years ago or minimalist works from more recent years, recycled in keeping with current appropriationist practice. On closer examination the subtle and quiet surfaces of his paintings appear porous, teeming with life beneath thin translucent skins.
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Deborah Muirhead: Recent Paintings
Open November 19 through December 15, 1991
"My work is informed by many sources: genealogy, oral history, African American folklore, and southern landscape. These interests prompt me to make paintings in which space and time and illusive and ambiguous. Meaning is alluded to through coded forms and guided by the titles. I am interested in making paintings that are paradoxical; suggesting the duality of form and content. The images in my paintings are ephemeral, they hover in fields of color formed space and slide between figuration and abstraction."
—Deborah Muirhead, 1991
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1990
David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame
Open January 23 through March 4, 1990
Self-taught in the arts and letters, David Wojnarowicz [Voy-na-RO-vich] used any mode of communication at his disposal to fight for visibility in what he termed “the pre-invented world.” He developed a stirring and concise lexicon of sounds and images, looking to visionary discontents like Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, and William Burroughs for inspiration. Following his diagnosis with AIDS in the late 1980s, Wojnarowicz’s relentless anger at a homophobic Church, and politicians who ignored the existence of this deadly illness, fueled much of his scathing imagery. The soul-piercing diatribes he delivered to audiences throughout the U.S. until his death in 1992 still resound today; the sustained power of his work is evident in the political storm surrounding the removal of his video Fire in My Belly from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010.
In January 1990, the David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame retrospective opened at University Galleries with a performance witnessed by an enthusiastic crowd of 700 people. Amidst four of his videos running simultaneously, Wojnarowicz spoke passionately about safe sex, lack of AIDS funding, and the dearth of queer rights in our “one-tribe nation.” One of the final chapters in Cynthia Carr’s biography, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, contains an account of Wojnarowicz’s experience in Bloomington-Normal, the media response to his exhibition, and the artist’s successful legal battle against the American Family Association, who defamed his work in thousands of leaflets mailed to Congress and religious institutions throughout the U.S. Wojnarowicz stayed in Bloomington-Normal for several weeks between 1989 and his death in 1992. He published three prints with Normal Editions Workshop and created some of his last major paintings and photographs in a studio he rented at Front and Center streets in Bloomington.
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Duncan Hannah: Mythic Times
Open April 24 through May 27, 1990
Duncan Hannah: Mythic Times presents 33 paintings created by the artist between 1977 and 1990. An ancillary exhibition of paintings and prints by such notable artists as Edward Hopper, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Ralph Edward Blakelock provides a unique opportunity to view works by important artists who have influenced Hannah over the years.
Duncan Hannah has gained a well-deserved reputation as a painter who has consistently followed his own artistic direction while wisely and selectively borrowing from styles and subjects of the past. Born in Minneapolis in 1952 and educated at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and at the Parsons School of Design, Hannah has developed a manner of painting which carefully balances narrative and figurative elements with a love for loose yet descriptive brushwork, highly expressive color and finely tuned composition. Stylistically, these paintings closely recall works by painters such as Paul Cezanne, Andre Derain, and Paul Gauguin. The attitude they project, however, more accurately brings to mind Edward Hopper, the American artist whose paintings of solitary figures, streets and buildings still speak to us of a "psychology of isolation." In many cases, Hannah's paintings indulge art-historical fantasies, allowing us to answer questions like "what if Cezanne were mixed with Hopper, or Balthus with Derain?" In Mythic Times (1985), the title painting of the exhibition, an adolescent boy stands in front of a scene which, at a glance looks common or even bland, but actually contains the potential elements of a heroic tale. Like nearly all of Hannah's paintings, Mythic Times is tinged with nostalgia, looking like an innocent, pastoral scene from the landscape of the past. The boy's attention is turned from us and is given completely over to the book he holds, which might well be Homer's Odyssey, with the sea, the modest boat, the vast threatening sky and the inviting, warm-colored house suggesting various elements of that story. Travel is a recurring theme in Hannah's work, manifesting itself literally in images of ships, roadways, cars and trains, and in a figurative or psychic sense in the dreamy, pensive attitudes of his figures. In a Duncan Hannah painting, the action is stopped, but the scene has not changed yet—something is pending and the next act is always about to happen. The artist supplies the skeleton of a narrative, and the viewer is invited to build the body of a story around those bones, and to animate Hannah's mysterious, self-absorbed figures. Duncan Hannah's paintings are full of ordinary objects, scenes, and figures which are painted with reference to familiar 19th and 20th century styles. The post-impressionism of Cezanne and Gauguin; the full-blown color of Bonnard; the directness and near abstraction of Edward Hopper—all of these influences, as formidable as they might seem, are skillfully interwoven in Hannah's paintings, which are always beautiful, but never merely beautiful. Although his subjects are always identifiable, Hannah is not only concerned with an exact replication of things; he is interested both in producing a version of reality in paint that is visually and formally interesting, and also in bringing viewers to a point of emotional empathy with his subjects and their environments. In the painting Solitaire (1983), Hannah presents us with an understated version of what could be an existential dilemma, where a game of random draws is the most meaningful activity, carried out in front of an expressionless void which could very well be a New York School geometric abstraction. Judging from her hairstyle, the woman card player looks oddly dated, and everywhere in Hannah's work, people, clothing, cars, and buildings appear to be typical of an earlier time, perhaps the 1940s or 50s. As Carter Ratcliff said in a 1985 catalogue essay, "Hannah feels that a car or shoe from the time of his youth is more like a car or a shoe than its contemporary counterpart could ever be."
It is obvious that archetypal images function better than specific places or contemporary figures in Hannah's paintings because they allow for the creation of an atmosphere, a general circumstance to which all viewers can easily relate. In Swing (1987), Hannah employs a perspective which renders the swinging boy only loosely connected to the earth, and thus succeeds in emphasizing the reverie and abandon of such a moment, one all of us have experienced before. The fact that the self-absorbed figures in most of Hannah's paintings are young and nearing or in puberty, identifies him with Balthus, whose paintings of the 1940s and 50s often depicted young girls in dreamy, distracted states. In Hannah's work, states of mind are as obvious as mimetic qualities and formal structures; despite their sometimes common or nondescript appearance, these paintings exude a wealth of psychological content. While he often utilizes past styles, Hannah is not interested in Fauvism or post-impressionist abstraction for their own sakes, but consistently pushes style together with moody and portentous narrative. But to call Hannah a narrative painter, or only a narrative painter, seems unfair both to him and to painting's long history of storytelling. Everywhere in these paintings, stories are suggested and clues of time, place, mood, and event are given generously, but never absolutely. The viewer's own chronological and emotional history is always the missing element in Hannah's narratives. Color ranges from local, to heightened, to subdued; form is built and simplified with Cezanne-like strokes, dashes, and patches of paint; flat and nearly abstract passages mingle with those producing depth and modeling. In the midst of all this painterly activity, Hannah realizes unique worlds for his archetypal figures, with which we can all, for one reason or another, identify and empathize. Although many artists have influenced Hannah, these paintings are uniquely his—the use of past styles is not only an ironic "quotation," as some critics insist. Instead, Hannah recasts some almost dangerously overused (and by now even trite) styles and functions of painting to produce a new and distinct voice—one clear enough and mysterious enough to appeal to both lovers of "old-fashioned" narrative, romantic art, and those expecting a "new" art of speculation and detached commentary.
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Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture
Open August 28 through October 7, 1990
Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture presents over fifty works created by Donald Lipski between 1978 and 1990. Lipski creates sculpture out of nearly anything—debris found in the street, industrial salvage, military surplus, flea market castaways—any of these materials are candidates for inclusion in the work of this inventive artist. Putting together such unlikely objects as a missile nose cone and a camera bellows, or a Christmas tree and an aluminum walker, this one-time magician and escape artist practices another kind of magic: that of giving special meaning to objects through unexpected combinations. Our own imaginations are set in motion in response to Lipski’s strange accumulations, which range from the horrific, to the melancholy, to the hilarious.
