540 West 28th Street New York, NY, 10001 | 212 244 7415

Artists Take a Swing at the Look & Legacy of TennisDiana Shi — Aug 13 2016

Tennis, the athletic medium and stomping ground for the Sisters Williams and Roger Federer, is a sport of silence, punctuated by the occasional grunt or sigh of anguish. Like many high-endurance sports that require extensive training and laser-sharp focus, the mental games happening inside athletes’ heads can be just as grueling as the physical ones. Now, Quiet Please: The Mental Game of Art and Tennis, at Berkeley Art Center, takes a more psychoanalytic approach to a sport that is often perceived as a high-class hobby but, in practice, requires a fine-tuned amount of focus.

“Tennis has a reputation for being fancy—those crisp, white skirts, clubhouses with cherry-ornamented highballs and high membership fees,” shares Glen Helfand of the Berkeley Art Center. “Those city-subsidized facilities, however, don’t maintain the same glamor. They cross class—they’re not pricey, highly engineered materials, but they do have [classy] labels.”

Helfand also describes an inherent love for tennis as a necessity of the exhibit: “[The artists] appreciate it metaphorically, for the back and forth and he strategic components. They all played as kids, and a few still do. Did that fuel their art practice? Perhaps, the works they present here [...] will reveal the answers to that.”

Libby Black, a painter and installation artist, grew up absorbing the tennis world. Her installation art is “for show,” reflecting “items of good taste and elevated economic status if not athletic prowess.”

“Her interest in tennis,” Helfand describes, “is rooted in televised games, and how those helped form her identity. In her youth, she watched with her family and saw Martina Navratilova, who for decades was considered the greatest female tennis player—and a queer role model.”

Martina, 2012, Libby Black, pencil on paper, 12” x 8”

540 West 28th Street New York, NY, 10001 | 212 244 7415

Another featured artist, Jennie Ottinger, is noted as describing the game as “really the only sport where the player is totally isolated,” maximizing any personal dialogue swirling inside the player’s head.

“This exhibition,” Helfand continues, “finds its cues in the ways that people use tennis to apply a whole range of mental strategies, physical exertions, the joys of victory and the agonies of defeat.” Check out more images from Quiet Please: The Mental Game of Art and Tennis, below:

Left: I know you can do it, Jana, 2016, Jennie Ottinger, cut-out paper and oil. Right: I know you can do it, Jana, 2016, Jennie Otinger, video, music by Lionel Schmidt and Free SF X, 5:49 minutes. Courtesy of Berkeley Art Center.

Deuce, 2016, Libby Black, paper, glue, and acrylic paint, 36” x 16” x 6.” Image courtesy of Gallery 16

painting courtesy Libby Black

540 West 28th Street New York, NY, 10001 | 212 244 7415

My Tools of the Trade, 2016, George Pfau, ink in paper, 11.5” x 14.5”

I asked my body to do whatever was necessary to reproduce that “crack”, 2016, George Pfau, ink on paper,

11.5” x 14.5”

As you allow one element of a stroke to change, others will be affected, 2016, George Pfau, ink on paper, 11.5” x 14.5”

Belong and Believe It, Andrew Witrak, 2015, card-board, papier mache, acrylic paint, 16” x 9” x 25”

You Cannot Be Serious, 2016, Andrew Witrak, cardboard, papier mache, house paint, 6’ x 5’ x 9’ August 13, 2016. Web. August 16, 2016. <http://thecreatorsproject.vice.

com/blog/tennis-group-exhibition-sports-berkeley>