Exhibitions Archive 2000 – 2009

Titled after a phrase from a Victorian carte de visite, this project by Philadelphia-based artist Gerald Nichols provides a comprehensive look at his reverence for a distressed American landscape. Filtered through Nichols’ idiosyncratic, associative systems—a sensibility that merges a concern for formal abstraction and art history with the signification and immediacy of vernacular art—this new project was conceived specifically for the gallery and constitutes the artist’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia in nearly a decade.

Transformation: The act of changing in form, shape, or appearance; a person or thing transformed. Specifically, transformation achieved through a narrative process—and the "relation of narrative to its objects"—marks the curatorial underpinning of this exhibition of new work by Jennifer Macdonald, Kate Moran, and Jim Hinz. At different points in their careers and possessing distinct sensibilities, all three artists share concerns with emotional ambiguity and intimacy, a fascination with the miniature, and an interest in mythologies of nature and culture. Moreover, each artist’s talent for the well-crafted and well-loved object deliberately shapes the form and content of their art.

Jim Hinz, video still from Dark Head, 2002, nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds, courtesy of the artist.

The Secret Life of Things
For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced…understand all about it….
--Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

In the seven paintings and one animation featured in "A Closer Look 5," Jennifer Macdonald explores her preoccupation with decorative objects and beloved toys from her youth. Her collector’s mindset and fertile imagination combine to produce reenactments of childhood play transformed by adult behavior. Removing the taint of kitsch that surrounds objects such as stuffed animals, Hummel collectibles, and antique porcelain, for many viewers, Macdonald invests and, in the process, transforms these miniature props — which, for her, embody nostalgia and cliché — with elements of romantic melodrama, melancholy, and humor.

Macdonald describes her images as "investigations of an abbreviated, narrative form," pictorial fragments in which action is suspended between hesitation and decision, the inanimate and the animate. In this context, the toy becomes a narrative device used to relate a fantastic tale, a point of departure for the interface of imagination and memory and, perhaps, a surrogate for the artist herself.

What Macdonald has termed her interest in the "seductiveness of storytelling" reveals itself in miniature vignettes such as It’ll End in Tears and The Reversal with a disjunctive combination of scale, object, and action. In the former, creepy-crawly prey disturb an eighteenth century ménage-a-trois, perhaps as a form of moral retribution. In The Reversal, Macdonald again employs three characters to envision a moment of "sinister betrayal," underlined by a nearby coiled rope.

The drawings are painted on both the front and back of large sheets of frosted mylar with enamel and nail polish. Each work possesses a formal delicacy and lightness of touch and color that in some instances emphasize the narrative’s innocence and naiveté, while in others mask its darker, more cynical motives. With floating figures set in vast expanses of space, the pictures form a frieze-like panorama that anticipates the artist’s experimental move into animation. Macdonald, by introducing real motion into her narratives, accentuates the concept of metamorphosis and transcendence in her works — the toy/fiction comes to life.

Ambivalence and intense attachments are recurrent themes in Brighter Death Now, a one minute and fifteen second animated tale of a lonely boy and bunny that suggests a grown-up version of The Velveteen Rabbit—that classic parable of childhood love, loss, and transformation. In Macdonald’s narrative sequence, the boy meets-, loves-, and loses- bunny theme is disrupted by an act of sudden violence that quickly turns into a tender ritual: the boy’s fetishistic attempt to preserve the spirit of beloved things and friends.

The painstaking, intimate approach the artist brings to her line animation—composed of 283 hand-drawn and colored cards—as well as to her paintings, imbues her imagery with a poignancy that complicates its pop effects. This attention to mood highlights Macdonald’s concern with heightened emotional states grounded in handmade, imaginative worlds.

Dwelling
You should lie down now and remember the forest, for it is disappearing—
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life
--Susan Stewart, The Forest
An artist who moves comfortably between drawing, photography, and sculpture, Kate Moran has produced a number of objects for "A Closer Look 5" that utilize all three modes. Spiraling, literally, around the idea of the forest, in both its actual and metaphoric states, the works reveal a personal lexicon of circular forms that comes together in an investigation of enigmatic and haunted themes.
A deep interest in etymology shapes Moran’s art. For her new body of sylvan imagery, ideas of "clearing" offered a rich point of departure. Through an array of work executed in different media, Moran constructs her own experience of the forest as a place of fairy-tale enchantments, recollected childhood freedoms, and adult anxieties.

In folklore and literature, the woodland is typically the site of transformative events; an otherworldly place that induces fears and dreams in all who cross its threshold. As much as this romantic trope must appeal to Moran’s artistic imagination, it is her concern with the potential disappearance of the forest in our lifetime that gives the work contemporary, even political resonance. Evoking Susan Stewart’s poem, The Forest, Moran asks the viewer to recognize the significance of this world of shadow and silence and to contemplate its role in our lives from the perspectives of both youthful resonance and ecological ruin.

Moran is intrigued by temporal transformations. Using a tangible object either found in the world (a toy truck) or crafted by her (tiny pieces of wood carved and painted to resemble logs, a tree rendered in graphite, steel discs) as a foundation, she employs different visual strategies to contemplate the relationship between space and time. By translating each object’s physical presence into two- and three-dimensional representations — a photograph, a drawing, or a sculpture — Moran alters and complicates the viewer’s perception of the original object and its place in the world. These handcrafted narrative "fragments" suggest the artist’s concern with creative transformation and reveal her interest in symbolic pairings.

Significantly, in these terms, Moran’s photographs deceptively present themselves as drawings. Burning Hemlock, for example, originally began as a sketch of the top of an evergreen tree that the artist then set on fire and photographed. Printed on matt paper, the image acquires a charcoal-like quality and finish. Conversely, a tonal drawing of a monster truck wheel – absurd in its exaggeration — is derived from an earlier photograph of a truck jumping over hemlock.
This formal dialogue suggests how Moran signifies time and intimacy in her work. As she explains, photography arrests the moment while simultaneously suggesting change, "presenting an image of tangible things, only to dematerialize, as in the sensation of life passing by one’s peripheral vision." Drawings, alternatively, indicate time spent with an object.

Kate Moran, Clearing (behind and before), 2002, oil on steel, twenty-one discs, courtesy if the artist.

Two recurring motifs in Moran’s art — miniaturization and mechanization — surface in Clearing (behind and before), a forest-like display comprised of twenty-one metal discs, vividly painted with synthetic swirls and slightly elevated above a square platform by metal rods. Referencing both tree rings and a toothless, felling blade, the arrested movement of the spirals produces a tension in which time is magically suspended. The playfulness and artificiality of the piece question the dual life and death cycle of nature, as well as the need for, act of, and consequences of clearing.

The meticulous attention — making, remaking, representing — that the artist brings to her object-driven fictions, parallels what Stewart characterizes as miniature time: "a type of transcendent time which negates change and the flux of lived reality." Moran’s forest is fragmented, reduced, and tamed in an attempt to be understood. In the process, it provides a psychological stage setting for private imaginings, past memories, and future hopes.

Jennifer Macdonald, video still from A Brighter Death Now, 2002, one minute and fifteen second animation, courtesy of the artist.

Shadows of Love
The day wants you living
And it’s not the last
Time to believe
In more than the past.
Andy with the dark head
Make something new
Keep your eyes open
I’ve shut mine for you
Keep your eyes open
I’ll open mine too
Keep your eyes open
I’m looking for you.
--Jim Hinz, Dark Head

Jim Hinz, in work that is both intimately autobiographical and ironically removed, pays homage to the indie-pop song as an art form in his installation for "A Closer Look 5." Evoking sentiments—humorous and solemn—about the mythology of romance, his extended, reconsidered cliché is articulated through a multimedia offering, loosely built around the concept of smoking.

The installation is composed of handmade objects (a model lung, a cigarette convincingly made from leather and parchment), altered possessions (fragments of favorite shirts transformed into cigarette packets and also used to decorate a grandmother’s craft project) and three "music videos," props from which fill a wall-mounted vitrine. The latter, which represents a new departure in his work, combines a patchwork of comical and affective images with a song-cycle that chronicles in true pop fashion a contemplative state of mind and a relationship’s painful end.

A melancholic, ambient strain runs throughout Hinz’s two instrumentals and three vocal pieces. Structurally simple yet emotionally dense, they range from the lyrical urgency of 17c, a reference to the musical patterns of the seventeenth century as antecedents of contemporary pop, and the creeping effects of a synthesizer in Lope, to the lulling incantation of Dark Head, with its reverberations of longing. The personal address of Dark Head and the a cappella I Am New, delivered by Hinz in a near whisper, lend a particularly intimate, sensual quality to these songs.

Like his handcrafted objects, the artist’s music possesses an endearingly homemade and improvisational feel yet one shaded by somber tones of experience. Archived in a museum-like setting, the videos, sculptures, drawings, props, and crafted artifacts document the artist’s attraction to relics of youth and souvenirs of love. In its entirety, Hinz’s effort resonates with themes of loss, addiction, and obsession.

With the dominating presence of Red Sculpted Carpet — a floor-covering the artist connects to memories of his family home that also evokes a hotel lobby or movie theater — the tension between private and public, emotional and analytical, becomes the feature presentation. The literary scholar Robert Pogue Harrison defines nostalgia as an emotion that "laments the condition of loss, however imaginary or impossible its object of longing." In these terms, nostalgia plays a role in the artist’s acts of tender transformation—from the lovingly made objects and recontextualized family heirloom to the songs themselves.

While Hinz’s "pop canvas" is plaintively humorous, like a classic Smiths song, his visual and verbal expressions reveal archetypal narrative patterns — darkness and light, seeing and knowing, death and devotion — motifs he treats with a deft touch. One might puzzle over the relationship between individual works in Hinz’s installation, but its emotional claim on the viewer is undeniable.
Sylvia Yount
Guest Curator

Notes:
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), ix.
Ibid., 56.
In addition to Stewart’s poem, Moran was inspired by Robert Pogue Harrison’s examination of the roles the forest has played in the Western imagination; see Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
For example, the forest is the place where the Velveteen Rabbit is made real.
Stewart, On Longing, 65.
Harrison, Forests, 155.
Andy Partridge used the term "pop canvas" to describe the "delightfully miserable" music he wrote for his band XTC. See Barry Singer, "Adventurous Punk of a Troubled Past," New York Times, Arts and Leisure (June 9, 2002): 28.

This exhibition is the first one-person show in the region since 1985 for Philadelphia-based veteran photographer William Larson. The show introduces three works in video, a medium he only began investigating in 1998 after thirty years of exploring the temporal possibilities of the still image. Each of the three pieces demonstrates a concern for depicting time in static space while consciously using one medium to comment on another. The artist’s preoccupation with root technology, cultural framing, and self-reflexive storytelling is echoed in the exhibition’s title, an allusion to the “back story” or subtext behind the primary intention of film narrative.

Mallare (2000) is a silent, single-channel piece projected onto a suspended screen. It is comprised of the computerized text of Ben Hecht’s 1922 novel Mallare being completely deleted, one word at a time. The process proceeds backwards from the final sentences (“Pity me. This is the cross.”) to the first (“Fantazius Mallare considered himself mad…). Following the cursor are three emblematic sentences Larson selected from the novel that continually rewrite themselves as the piece progresses. These sentences function like a buffer between the text of the novel and a field of constantly changing digits (the protagonist’s obsession) that overtake the text. The contradictory flow of the manuscript being erased as the video moves forward becomes analogous to the narrative of this gothic tale of madness and self-destruction. By allowing the viewer to drift backwards through the text, the artist provides another way to experience the story while revealing a new, generative grammar in the process. Larson conceived this work as one of several text based performances in which the deletion process, something he refers to as “one of the exquisite native programs on the computer,” acts as interface between mathematics and language.

NOTime, 2000, video projection onto perpendicular walls, color image: 9’ x 12’; black and white image: 20” x 28”, 12.5 minutes.

NOTime (2000) is a two-channel work projected on perpendicular walls. A large-scale, color video image depicts an antiquated movie projector on a Victorian table, its reels scrolling the projected film into an inevitable pile on the floor. This projector appears to be the source of a second, smaller, black and white image of looping footage excerpted from a 1923 documentary showing a pair of busy bricklayers in an obviously redundant activity. The illusory relationship between the image of the movie projector and that of the bricklayers gives way to further realizations regarding the historic interplay between the early film technology depicted and the contemporary video equipment actually generating the projections in the gallery. Despite these casual relationships, the two images form their own independent, machine-like rhythm as they grind toward an unresolved yet seemingly deterministic outcome.

STILL and yet, 1999-2000, video projection, image: 6’ x 8’, 60 minutes.

STILL and yet (1999-2000) projects a series of what appear to be nine “snapshots” of the same image repeated and enlarged to six feet by ten feet, separated by a simulated strobe flash. Tension mounts as each impromptu, family tableaux is suspended in real time for as long as eight minutes or more. Close scrutiny of a group of seemingly identical images, for instance a half-clothed women reaching for a doorknob, reveals slight variations in the background between frames – in this example the image on the Television monitor is constantly changing.

Trained as a painter, Larson has been a significant figure in the field of fine art photography since the early 1970s. His initial experiments with sequential imagery demonstrated a filmmaker’s attitude toward depicting time and space while other projects evinced an interest in synthesizing images through high and low technology. Fire Flies (1976) – one of the first artworks to employ fax technology – documents Larson’s inventive use of early teleprinters as a means to combine photographs, sound, music, text, and voice to create a form of electronic collage. Tucson Gardens (1983), a suite of shadowless images documenting the backyards at the edge of the Sororan Desert in a bleached-out palette of primary colors, carefully references “garden magazine” style picture-making. Articulating Larson’s own wry sense of formal order, the series is regarded as one of the era’s landmarks of color photography, a mode generally disparaged until that time.

Larson’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the International Museum of Photography (Rochester, New York, 2000), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, 1993) and the Institute for Contemporary Art (Philadelphia, 1985), as well as important group exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2000), the Whitney Museum of American Art (Biennial, 1981), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1978), where his work is included in the permanent collection. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Atlanta Museum of Art, the Getty, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art also own his photographs. Among his awards and honors are a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2001), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1971, 1979, 1986, 1992), and a grant from Polaroid Corporation (1979). Larson received his B.S. from SUNY Buffalo and his M.S. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Institute of Design in Chicago. He is currently the Director of Graduate Photography and Digital Imaging at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

A survey of artists’ books and publications from the 1960s to the present, for browsing and sale, selected from Printed Matter, Inc., New York.

Partial list of featured artists: Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, Mel Bochner, Christian Boltanski, Angela Bulloch, David Bunn, Daniel Buren, David Byrne, John Cage, Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Tacita Dean, Helen Douglas, Peter Downsbrough, Jimmy Durham, Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldman, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Karen Finley, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Liam Gillick, Robert Gober, Rodney Graham, Renée Green, Simon Grennan & Christopher Sperandio, Joseph Grigley, Paul Heimbach, Dick Higgins, Susan Hiller, Hirsch Farm Project, Thomas Hirschorn, Nancy Holt, Jenny Holzer, Douglas Huebler, Daniel Jewsberry, Allan Kaprow, Emma Kay, Ellsworth Kelly, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippinberger, Alison Knowles, Jeff Koons, Richard Kostelanetz, Sean Landers, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Ken Lum, M.M. Lum, Anita M-28, Antonio Muntadas, Peter Nadin, Paul Noble, Richard Nonas, Yoko Ono, Kevin Osborn, Dan Perjovschi, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Tom Phillips, Jack Pierson, Adrian Piper, Stephan Prina, Richard Prince, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Joe Scanlan, David Shrigley, Daniel Spoerri, Telfer Stokes, Michelle Stuart, Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, Marther Wilson, Phil Zimmerman.

Juror: Thelma Golden, Chief Curator, The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York City, New York.

Installation view, “Works on Paper,” Arcadia University Art Gallery.

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop,” curated by Los Angeles-based critic Michael Duncan. On view from November 16 through December 20, 2000, the show opens with a lecture by Duncan on Thursday evening, November 16, at 6:30 PM in Stiteler Auditorium followed immediately by a reception. Admission is free. 

Installation view, “The Big G Stands for Goodness: Corita Kent’s 1960s Pop,” Beaver College Art Gallery

“The Sea and the Sky” focuses on the ocean, atmosphere, and cosmos as subjects for contemporary works by twenty-four American, European, and Asian artists who employ celestial and watery imagery to reflect on the existential and sublime.

Co-presented by the Beaver College Art Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland and curated by Patrick T. Murphy and Richard Torchia.

A 47-page catalogue accompanies this exhibition with an essay by Susan Stewart and a published conversation between the curators.

“In works of art representing the sea or the sky, there is always an infinite reach or recession—behind the heavens is the unending vastness of space; behind the breakers, the extent of the main; under the surface, the depths; behind the clouds, the stars; behind the stars, more stars; and behind our conscious ness of these views, a vast, inarticulate, and untranslatable consciousness. Every gesture indicating surface and depth in these works is an index to the profundity of profundity itself. As watchers of the sea and heavens—at least from Amerigo Vespucci onward—gathered their observations in notebooks and bound manuscripts, they speak to our need to find some legible and encompassing form for such vastness. Meville’s Ishmael described the laborious transmutation of the whale into “Bible leaves! Bible leaves!” Marcel Proust watched the sea reflected in the glass of a bookcase. To frame enormity within the covers of a book, to register the infinite through a series of patient, exacting, marks on sheets of paper, brings the scale of such phenomena back to hand and eye and thought—the vehicles of human intelligibility.”

— Excerpt from “What Thought is Like” by Susan Stewart from the Sea and the Sky catalogue.

Robert Nesbit, Setting Sun, 2000 (installation detail), light-blocked gallery utility closet illuminated by monitor playing 90-minute videotape, altered doorway.

Robert Nesbit’s Setting Sun is a videotape documenting an entire sunset filmed in real-time from his north-Philadelphia rooftop. Placed on a shelf in the gallery’s functioning utility closet—like another can of paint or a waiting spotlight—the T.V. monitor is the only source of illumination in the intimate space. The work becomes a tragic comment on our capacity to appreciate both natural and aesthetic occurrences, however mediated and displaced.

Karen Butler, Scene 8, from the series Anywhere but Here, 2000, C-print mounted on Plexiglass, 48” x 72.”

For her ongoing series Anywhere but Here, begun in 1997, Karen Butler uses acetate, vacuum-formed plastic, colored lights, and a variety of commercially printed “sky” backdrops to create tabletop dioramas of nearly featureless seascapes. She then photographs these fabrications with a macro lens and prints them as large-scale Cibachromes. Mounted behind sheets of Plexiglass, her saturated views invite reverie within an ambiguous space confused by the uncertainty of subject matter. Is the viewer made witness to the mind-boggling, colorful splendors of nature or presented with equally intense images based on simulation and Technicolor dreaminess?

Eileen Neff, Five, for Example, 1990, black and white silverprints on board, 36” x 60” x 37 1/2.”

Each of the photographs that comprise Eileen Neff’s Five, for Example depicts a cropped view of a different body of water. Configured into an oversize “book” whose freestanding panels play on the illusory verticality of water surfaces viewed obliquely, the work’s real subject becomes the nature of representation itself. Despite the implication of a countless procession of waves, the work’s sculptural physicality and its inevitable limitations, by contrast, remind us of how cerebral our concepts of distance, mutability, and infinity can be.

Vija Celmins, From China, 1982, graphite on acrylic ground on paper, 21” x 21.”

Like most of her work, Vija Celmins’ From China is based on a photograph—in this case a magazine clipping about one and a half inches square. Dense layers of graphite, applied with extremely soft pencils brought back from China to the artist as a gift, build up this dark field of the image while the stars are formed by the isolation of the white acrylic ground. What might be a comet trail, created by the aggressive drag of a pencil point that tears the fabric of the paper, divides the composition horizontally.