Exhibitions 1997-98
Laurie Snyder and John Wood
Visual Reading- Books for Exhibition
September 4 - 28, 1997
Laurie Snyder and John Wood work collaboratively, yet separately with the ideas and the craft of Artists' Books. With the artists' belief that viewers can "read" visually, the idea for this exhibit grew out of a commitment to the importance and concept of visual reading. Snyder and Wood work with image, memory, sequence, balance, repetition, rhythm, time, color, pattern, and texture to create their personal language of expression.
The genesis of Books for Exhibition comes out of an impatience with displays of books behind glass. In addition
to sharing an enthusiasm for the potential of the visual experience, the artists also embrace the materiality of
the book. They attempt to create works that push the boundaries of the book, yet always reinforce its craft traditions.
The artists also seek to make connections between the books themselves and the architecture of the gallery: the
walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Chuck Forsman
Outside the Garden
October 2-November 2, 1997
Artist's Statement
Rightly or wrongly, I have always held the working assumption that art and nature are inextricably bound and must have sprung from parallel convulsions. The one begat the other, the other begat the one, and both predate the chicken and the egg.
I was born in western Idaho in the great outback that it is our conceit to call "the west." This is no
garden, but like many people, I love it. I love the whole dry, forbidding, bewildering and hauntingly beautiful
place. Natually, I have a lover's quarrel with what we have made of it. The way we treat the land is one measure
of our character and it is so void of trees and humidity here that little is hidden. When we err, it glares. What
we see, looking honestly, is as likely to sober us as it is to dazzle us. In art, beauty and honesty are uneasy
bedfellows. Nonetheless, I am trying to make honest pictures that are beautiful because this is still the landscape
of hope.
-Chuck Forsman
Rebecca Johnson
Matter of Being
November 6 - December 7, 1997
Living and working in a new place is not new to Rebecca Johnson. As a peripatetic artist, she follows the migratory path of jobs, grants, commissions, and financial whims.
Upon arriving in a place, Johnson looks for materials that tell stories about the land--its history and its people.
So, while in Gambier (where the work presented in Matter of Being took form), she found sandstone from road cuts,
bottles from farm dumps, limestone from rubble piles in the vicinity of the College, fallen elm trees, slate from
a local elementary School, and books, lenses and objects collected from junk shops around Knox County. This exhibit
is a compilation of visual poems, that in describing the big picture and the little picture, questions our cultural
experience.
Barry Gunderson
The Lighter Side of Darkness
January 12-February 26, 1998
A Professor of Art at Kenyon, Barry Gunderson spent his last two sabbatical leaves in New Zealand and in Norway. The experiences and the climate he encountered in Norway, both greatly influenced his work, which evolved into a study of figures-- a move away from his previous focus on "critters." The pieces displayed in The Lighter Side of Darkness reflect a discovery of ancestors and cultural roots. Working stylistically in a folk-art tradition, his pieces are carved from driftwood found near a fjord, and de-emphasize the physicality of the body as a form.
Gunderson's reaction to the shortness of daylight in Norway is reflected by the loss of the sun. The color black
dominates in many pieces, emphasizing the forced hibernation of the Norwegians as the winter months arrive. The
full cycle of the seasons is represented by Gunderson's mythological goddesses who signal a regeneration of hope
as they symbolize the arrival of the spring and summer months.
April 23-May 23, 1998
Claudia Esslinger
"Fragile Armors" is a larger project in progress which is represented here by "Religious Armor." Together they speak to the way in which people protect themselves. Human-sized constructions allude to armor and clothing, both constrictive and protective. They are made of organic materials such as willow and gut, grasses and reed, but they house videos that evidence technology. More than a window to the world, these images also pit the organic with the manufactured, the world of the hand-constructed with the electronically recorded. Thus on two levels, the armors are protective of the power of the very things we fear: technology and our inner selves.
"Religious Armor" also deals with religious control through waxed doctrines appearing on the breast plate
of the piece. Constricted by these doctrines and opinions are people who have been the target of these statements,
represented by interviews shown on a video monitor.
I am a storyteller. The story is yours and mine. The theme is ours. The specifics are mine. It is about life and it is told in fragments and with pictures. It is honest. Some of it may be true.
My art work is about life as it occurs through human intellect, experience, and the disquietude of the soul. Doing
the work is how I try to understand the complexity of the one life I know I have. The images develop through the
explorations of themes that merge from my need to ask questions. The questions are timeless but the uniqueness
of each of our lives presents the possibility of personal insight. My work is a search for insight and understanding.
About three years ago I decided I should return to the human figure as subject matter in my work. I had not worked with the figure since my college days, a span of more than 25 years. As I now teach a course in this subject matter I thought I should re-encounter what I am asking my students to explore. In these three years my approach to the figure has gone through several changes. Some were focused on a specific theme-Fear. Some were spirited beings trying to address events beyond reality. In all these pieces I was relearning how the human body works in order to translate anatomy into sculptural form.
For this Faculty Exhibit I have returned to one of the basic subject matters in the history of art-making, the
Reclining Nude. But as always, I am looking for ways to make my work my own. My reclining nudes are thinking--big
thoughts and little--fleeting or concrete, important and dull.
Recently, I have chosen to use digital imaging in my work because my skill level has finally increased-after
five years of practice-to the level where it can be fun and I can be playful. It feels like sketching: direct,
immediate, forgiving. I like to construct meaning by collaging images together that somehow seem to belong with
each other. This is an intuitive process which exercises my imagination. The general theme of these digital collages
is manual labor, like gardening and house painting, the type of repetitive work that launches daydreams. The images
of gloves are also a bit of a pun on the term digital.
I have been an installation artist for the last 17 years. I discuss my work by setting up word pairings-fact/fiction, history/memory, powerful/powerless, seeing/knowing, and self/place/location. Although the specific content of my work changes, these word groups remain appropriate. There is a social subtext to all my work. It is the uneasy balance between these words that delineates the territory I investigate.
Recently I've been working with optics. I am interested in how we see and how we process information. The act of
seeing becomes a metaphor for self-knowledge, cultural identity and public and private memory. I work with very
primitive technologies, many based on the camera obscura.
"Persistence of Vision," the piece I am exhibiting in the faculty exhibition, is centered around the
idea of memory. The term ‘persistence of vision' is used scientifically to explain the phenomena by which the optic
nerve processes what it receives, but it is also an apt metaphor for vision, the mind and memory.
