Upload
goucher-college
View
222
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
An exhibit at the Silber Gallery at Goucher College
Citation preview
The Silber ArT GAlleryGoucher College Athenaeum
Wildland
Susan Main Joshua Wade Smith Peter Stern Polly Townsend
Ryan Browning Travis Childers Frank Day Elizabeth Hoeckel Savanna Leigh
We simply need that wild
country available to us, even
if we never do more than
drive to its edge and look in.
—Wallace Stegner
1
Wildland, a satellite exhibition in conjunction with
Artscape, features the work of nine local artists:
Ryan Browning, Travis Childers, Frank Day, Elizabeth
Hoeckel, Savanna Leigh, Susan Main, Joshua Smith,
Peter Stern, and Polly Townsend. While viewing
submissions from the Baltimore Office of Promotion
& the Arts and looking for an overall arching
theme, I was struck by the large number of local
artists whose work seemed to be derived from the
landscape. Landscape has been an artistic subject
for centuries—Goucher College has even mounted a
few shows around the theme. However, in this case
I noticed a narrower or sub-theme of wilderness
and outdoor recreation—Images of camper trailers
nestled in the woods, wild animals, mountaineers,
and people gathered together as if looking out
over a scenic view mingled with more traditional
nature imagery. Thus, each artist in Wildland draws
inspiration from the great outdoors, inviting the
viewer to explore the wilderness through their eyes
and experiences.
Laura Amussen, curator
2
Ryan Browning grew up in suburban Houston playing
video games and reading fantasy and science fiction nov-
els. In fact, he can’t remember doing much else as a teen.
Actually, on second thought, it would be wrong to omit the
days on end playing pen-and-paper role-playing games
like Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy card games like
Magic the Gathering. His work as an artist is fueled by
these escapist and fantastic unrealities, and he explores
memories of virtual worlds and landscapes in an effort to
reconcile both real and virtual space as one. The resulting
objects and images inhabit a mythology of visual and sub-
lime virtual experience, and often suggest a kind of hybrid
existence between worlds, where the crafted object takes
on the form of the virtual memory.
Image Guardian, 2008
oak strips
9’ x 3’ x 3.5’
4
Recently, Travis Childers
has been working on a
body of work relating to
man’s relationship with
nature. He thinks about
how people use manmade
materials to create their
own nature, whether it takes
the form of a habitat or
some action they do every
day, such as landscaping.
People tear down forests
only to replant trees using
their own manicured sense
of style. Natural materials,
some taking centuries to
form, become disposable
tools, used up and tossed
away without a second
thought. For Brickscapes,
Childers was thinking about
nature retaking the world
from man, as it often does in
abandoned buildings or ar-
eas. We use bricks to build
houses and walls to sec-
tion ourselves off not only
from nature, but also from
each other. The landscapes
on the bricks represent all
the different regions man
has “conquered.” Looking
at the world around us, we
see very few places where
people haven’t left a mark.
Brickscapes, 2011
mixed media on bricks, installation
dimensions variable
7
Frank Hallam Day is interested in culture, history, and
humanity’s footprint on the natural world. His images of
RVs lodged deeply in impenetrable night jungles suggest a
humanity isolated from a dark, unpredictable, and ominous
nature. The powerful sense of displacement and alienation
from the natural world conveys a relationship with nature
where something has gone very wrong. The occupants of
these pods are sealed off from the natural world looming
just beyond.
Nothing is more American than an RV, but these pictures
use RVs to suggest we aren’t headed anywhere good.
In these images, the RVs are the night song of a dark
American dream, lovely and glowing, yet somehow toxic
and chilling.
The images are intended to look staged, almost dreamlike,
halfway between fantasy and reality, but they are not—Day
is out on the road in Florida every night, week after week,
with lights and tripod looking for appropriate RVs. He then
uses incandescent lighting and (as the star streaks will
show) time exposures to make the image. The occupants
never know he’s there; their blinds are drawn and their
televisions are on.
8
Through collage and mixed-media work,
Beth Hoeckel conjures a vividly beautiful
and mysterious world beyond our wildest
imaginations. Much of her work is figurative
and landscape-oriented and recalls surreal
dreamscapes and whimsical hallucinations.
Her choice not to reveal the subjects’ faces
or expressions compels the viewer to imag-
ine what could be happening in the scene
and to what consequence. By combining
vintage-inspired, found imagery; futuristic
scenery; and mesmerizing colors, she is
able to produce an evocative narrative that
lures the viewer in and entices them to
imagine what secrets might be concealed.
Cream, 2011
collage on paper
6.5” x 8.5”
11
Savanna Leigh combines
film, sculpture, and painting
to describe placelessness:
the emotional connection to
a place that no longer exists.
Leigh’s moving landscapes
traverse time and space,
constantly shifting and
rearranging. These trans-
formations create amor-
phous landscapes that are
informed by geologic plate
tectonics—the actual move-
ment of the Earth’s crust. By
merging scientific geology
with emotional geography,
Leigh creates abstract
ghosts of places past.
12
By exploring landscape,
light, and language, Susan
Main examines the wildness
of attention and perception
through video, drawing, and
painting. Gathering seconds
of light, opening the cam-
era to one yard of ground,
pairing breath with a view of
the horizon, her work draws
simple boundaries in time
and space as a way to orient
under the elusive, shifting
conditions of everyday natu-
ral phenomena. Presenting
a landscape that fluctuates
between containment and
release, focus and dissolu-
tion, attachment and sacri-
fice, Main offers an everyday
wilderness teetering on the
threshold of perception.
15
Indebted to the spirit of Emerson’s self-
reliant man, Joshua Wade Smith designs
purpose-built sculpture kits—makeshift
ladders, suitcases, and backpacks—that
walk the line between tool and prop, and
provide him with a poetic means for his
endurance-based performances. Employ-
ing these kits he can build a camp, climb
a mountain, raze it, and rebuild it anew at
the next turnabout. Smith’s work seeks to
bridge the gap between the gallery and
the outdoors in a Sisyphean search for a
Contemporary Sublime.
Over the Mountain, 2009
mixed media, (image of performance)
dimensions variable
16
Understanding the photographs of Peter
Stern requires one to understand the pro-
cess he undergoes to obtain these images.
Many aerial photographers hire a pilot and
sit in the passenger seat, unencumbered by
the task of flying while they shoot. Stern is
the pilot and the photographer—an extraor-
dinary and often challenging combination.
Day-long flying missions at low altitudes uti-
lize all of his concentration and skills to stay
safe and produce the work. His dramatic
images are the result of first being drawn
to complex landforms that he initially views
from his ultralight airplane, and seeing the
potential abstract beauty of land forms such
as coal ridges, strip mines, and marshland
laid with irrigation line.
Stern uses a Nikon D300 camera with a
Zeiss 50 mm lens that he hand-holds, and
he prints his images in his home studio.
The photographs are unaltered in color and
composition; what the mind records is the
juxtaposition of earth, extracted, altered,
and restored, yet caught serenely for a mo-
ment from above.
19
Driven by the desire to find her ultimate landscape, Polly
Townsend has traveled to some of the most remote and
inaccessible regions in the world. Her paintings pres-
ent the world beyond our experience—vast, untouched,
desolate, and uninhabitable. Townsend’s work is devel-
oped mainly from memory, but also from photos, drawings,
and paintings made during long, unplanned, and usually
solo journeys through remote high plateau and mountain
regions. Townsend’s paintings are a study of her physical
and emotional response to these vast, uninhabited vistas,
which variously inspire, overwhelm, and intimidate. Often,
Townsend will literally paint across the canvas from one
side to the other to physically represent her journey, or
use compositional devices to highlight her own routes and
memories of the space. Returning to her studio to com-
plete the work in an urban environment provides a space
through which the memories and sensory experiences
can be filtered and gives the work a more multilayered,
abstract perspective.
Reformed, 2011
oil on canvas
66” x 70”
11
62
0-J
53
0 0
6/1
1
DiReCTionS
Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.
GaLLeRy HouRS
11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday.410.337.6477
The Silber Art Gallery is free and open to the public.
The Silber Art Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.
www.goucher.edu/silbergallery
The Silber ArT GAlleryGoucher College Athenaeum
June 28 – august 7, 2011
ARTISTS’ RECEPTIOn
Saturday, July 9, 2011, 3-5 p.m.
Susan MainJoshua Wade SmithPeter SternPolly Townsend
Ryan BrowningTravis ChildersFrank DayElizabeth HoeckelSavanna Leigh
Wildland