I am pleased to follow up my last post with this announcement that my encaustic and fiber sculpture "Passages" received an Award of Recognition in the 70th Annual (WVE) Wabash Valley Juried Exhibition at The Swope Art Museum.
Juror Carter E. Foster, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, wrote this statement for the exhibition program.
"Surrealism is alive and well. Whether through startling disjunctions of scale, eerie elimination of detail, strange juxtapositions or simply playful twists on observed reality, many of the artists I chose for this year's exhibition find endless richness in tinkering with the world while remaining fully part of it, without resorting to abstraction. Some mined their psyches or that of an imagined other quite playfully and optimistically, without the darker undercurrents often common in this type of work. On the other hand, the terror of the mind's unknown or blacker recesses was not feared at all by others. Art has the privilege of distance bringing even the unspeakable to our protected selves.
Surrealism is alive here in painting in particular, though some of the most intriguing examples are three-dimensions, with a fetishistic, reliquary-like quality that is appealing and original.
Painting's elasticity and durability was also a strong constant. I was thrilled to see such a thriving community of oil painters. The medium's demise is always overstated-flexibility and practically means that once one masters its technical basics, endless interesting riffs are possible, and there was no shortage of that among the rich trove of image types submitted to this exhibition. The long tradition of exploring pictorial space and finding a tension between flatness and depth is richly apparent and beautifully mined with much variety.
It was heartening in general to find an interest in mastering the craft of making, whatever the medium. Ceramics is clearly having it's moment in Indiana as with the rest of the world-it seems to be thriving everywhere these days, laudably so. I also enjoyed seeing certain artists push the use of language and the body, a mini-theme for this show.
In a world truly saturated with images, in which the image seems to be overtaking and ruling so many aspects of our daily lives, and over which we seem to have less and less control, even while gaining more and more access, it is a real pleasure to find those who are willing to take control themselves and use imagination fearlessly and with great confidence."
The exhibition runs from June 28-August 23, 2014.
Swope Art Museum
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| Passages |
Juror Carter E. Foster, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, wrote this statement for the exhibition program.
"Surrealism is alive and well. Whether through startling disjunctions of scale, eerie elimination of detail, strange juxtapositions or simply playful twists on observed reality, many of the artists I chose for this year's exhibition find endless richness in tinkering with the world while remaining fully part of it, without resorting to abstraction. Some mined their psyches or that of an imagined other quite playfully and optimistically, without the darker undercurrents often common in this type of work. On the other hand, the terror of the mind's unknown or blacker recesses was not feared at all by others. Art has the privilege of distance bringing even the unspeakable to our protected selves.
Surrealism is alive here in painting in particular, though some of the most intriguing examples are three-dimensions, with a fetishistic, reliquary-like quality that is appealing and original.
Painting's elasticity and durability was also a strong constant. I was thrilled to see such a thriving community of oil painters. The medium's demise is always overstated-flexibility and practically means that once one masters its technical basics, endless interesting riffs are possible, and there was no shortage of that among the rich trove of image types submitted to this exhibition. The long tradition of exploring pictorial space and finding a tension between flatness and depth is richly apparent and beautifully mined with much variety.
It was heartening in general to find an interest in mastering the craft of making, whatever the medium. Ceramics is clearly having it's moment in Indiana as with the rest of the world-it seems to be thriving everywhere these days, laudably so. I also enjoyed seeing certain artists push the use of language and the body, a mini-theme for this show.
In a world truly saturated with images, in which the image seems to be overtaking and ruling so many aspects of our daily lives, and over which we seem to have less and less control, even while gaining more and more access, it is a real pleasure to find those who are willing to take control themselves and use imagination fearlessly and with great confidence."
The exhibition runs from June 28-August 23, 2014.
Swope Art Museum
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