Exhibitions Archive 1990 – 1999

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present its biennial “Works on Paper” exhibition, a juried show this year featuring 31 area artists, from September 9 through October 24, 1999. This year’s exhibition was selected by James Elaine, Artist and Curator of Contemporary Projects, UCLA Hammer Museum, (formerly Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions/Viewing Program Coordinator, The Drawing Center, New York).  

The exhibition opens with a reception on Tuesday, September 14 at 6:30 PM beginning with a lecture by Museum of Modern Art Department of Drawing Curator Laura Hoptman to be presented at Beaver’s Stiteler Auditorium, directly adjacent to the gallery.  

Elaine chose 34 works from 710 entries submitted by a record total of 371 regional artists. The artists–both emerging and established–are Susan Arthur, Joe Begonia, Matt Bergen, Randy Bolton, Marina Borker, Astrid Bowlby, Mark Campbell, Geoffrey DeMasi, Kevin Finklea, Alan Goldstein, Richard Harrod, Joseph Ives, Leroy Johnson, Brad Kalin (North Wales), David Kettner (Melrose Park), Deborah Kogan (Wyndmoor), Rodger LaPelle, Joanne Maynard (Doylestown), Jeremiah Misfeldt, Joseph Moser (Oreland), Steve Riedell, Scott Rigby, Paco Rodriguez, Judith Taylor, Geri Tuckett, Buy Shaver, Nancy Sophy, Kevin Strickland, Anne Seidman, Matt Wine (Melrose Park), Barbara Woodall and Base Kamp–a collaborative, not-for-profit studio/gallery run by David Dempewolf, Justine Matherly, Scott Rigby. (Unless otherwise indicated, all the artists listed reside in Philadelphia.)

Beaver’s “Works on Paper” exhibition remains one of the few juried shows in the area selected from actual artworks, as opposed to 35mm slides. This year’s show, while presenting a range of media–including photography, collage, and text-based conceptual projects–celebrates the formal economy of drawing and the virtues of paper as material support. Examples of interest include David Kettner’s graphic analysis of a child’s depiction of his father, spectral abstractions in oilstick and walnut oil by Alan Goldstein and Nancy Sophy, Steve Riedell’s spiralling discs of collaged song lyrics, and Joe Begonia’s graphite abstractions inspired by loudspeaker designs. A nocturnal, 

suburban malaise emerges as the theme of works by Susan Arthur, Matt Bergen, and Mark Campbell. Base Kamp’s Failed Attempt at Shameless Self Promotion is a topical exercise documenting the artists’ ironic and exploitative encounters with Vito Acconci, Kiki Smith, and Sol LeWitt at recent Philadelphia receptions for these “famous artists.”                                                                                      

Laura Hoptman’s lecture will place Beaver’s “Works on Paper” show in a broader, contemporary context. Scheduled to begin at 6:30 PM on September 14th in Stiteler Auditorium, it is entitled “Drawing is a Noun: Working on Paper Today” and will address those factors Hoptman believes distinguish current drawing from work made as recently as 15 years ago. Hoptman’s curatorial endeavors at MoMA include “Sight Gags: Grotesque, Caricature, and Wit in Modern and Contemporary Drawing,” “Drawing on Chance,” and highly acclaimed shows for MoMA’s “Projects” series featuring Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans.   

A public reception for the participating artists will commence in the gallery immediately following the lecture.

Over the course of the exhibition, over $1,200 in cash will be awarded to five participating artists, including the Mildred Bougher Award ($500) and the Beaver College purchase award ($300). In addition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will select a work for consideration for its permanent collection. All exhibiting artists also become eligible for inclusion in the gallery’s biennial “Closer Look” series. These group shows–each selected by an independent regional curator–feature 3 to 5 artists in greater depth while highlighting thematic relationships among their works.

The 1999 “Works on Paper” exhibition is supported by grants from the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Friends and Advisory Board of Beaver College Art Gallery.

Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Painting Pictures–rendering the [photo]real,” a group exhibition of works by Matthew Antezzo, Judie Bamber,  Peter Cain, Marilyn Minter, Mary Murphy, Richard Phillips, Paul Winstanley, and Kevin Wolff. Exploring the use of photographs as subjects for contemporary paintings, the exhibition will be on view from February 20 through March 21, 1999.  Educational events include a gallery talk by exhibition curator, Richard Torchia, scheduled for Thursday, February 25 at 12:15 PM in the art gallery, and a lecture by participating artist, Indianapolis-based painter Kevin Wolff on Thursday March 4, at 6:30 PM in the Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall. Wolff’s lecture will be followed immediately by a public reception in the Art Gallery.

“Painting Pictures” presents fourteen paintings on canvas, aluminum, wood, and paper that consciously employ photographs as their subjects in the literal, often labor-intensive manner of “photorealism” but with a range of intentions, procedures, and effects that would have been unlikely in 1970 when this term was first used to name the work of painters Richard Estes, Robert Bechtle and others. The practice of realistically transcribing photographs into paint on canvas, sometimes disparaged as a conservative derivation of pop art driven by a numbing technique, has nevertheless persisted into the 1990s. Spurred, perhaps, by the current reconsideration of seventies culture, in the past five years the word “photorealist” has been difficult to suppress as an effective term to describe the work of numerous critically acclaimed painters. 

The exhibition serves as a way to mark the current impact of photography on painting, as well as to index critical shifts in both practices over the past thirty years. Works by Peter Cain (1959-1998), Kevin Wolff (Indianapolis) and Paul Winstanley (Great Britain) demonstrate photography’s new role as a highly adaptable source of both verisimilitude and abstraction. Mary Murphy (Philadelphia) and Judie Bamber (Los Angeles), use photos as a way to make an almost tactile, visceral contact with the recent past or as a method of mitigating personal loss. In the work of New York-based artist Matthew Antezzo, the material transformation from print to paint unleashes ideological and psychological content only latent in the original photographs.  Other works in the exhibition demonstrate the lessons of 1980s appropriation art (Richard Phillips) the contemporary resurgence of figuration (Marilyn Minter), and the cultural primacy of painting despite the ubiquitous presence of photography within the mass media.

The exhibition is funded by grants from the Arcadia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Advisory Board and Friends of the Beaver College Art Gallery.  

Since 1993 Matthew Antezzo has been basing his large-scale, grisaille paintings on photographs documenting performances and installations from the late 1960s and early 1970s. He selects works such Maggie Lowe’s Explosion  (in which the artist detonated a pair of Hostess “Snoballs”) and whose existence is entirely dependent on its having been published in an art magazine (in this case, Art in America., Jan-Feb 1971,  also the title of the work).  While Antezzo’s translation of Lowe’s convention-challenging performance into an heroically scaled oil painting is not without its irony, his canvas strives to rescue an ephemeral gesture from certain cultural amnesia. Antezzo’s work can thus be read as an act of affection, if not for Lowe’s work in particular, for the epoch of radical experimentation for which it is emblematic.  

Photographs from 1960s/70s publications also provide the sources for the recent paintings of Richard Phillips. These large-scale canvases, several of which were included in 1997 Whitney Biennial, typically depict the close-cropped faces of fashion models rendered at billboard scale and in a manner that equates the sensuous reality of oil paint on linen with the artifice of cosmetic beauty. In Transfixed, the model’s head is enveloped in a shadow of deep purple pierced by a vignetted spotlight that transforms her face into a blank mask blinded by glamour. 

Phillips’ indulgence in the surface of painting as analog for the superficial allure perpetrated by the fashion industry becomes the target of works by Marilyn Minter. The two enamel paintings on aluminum eschew her signature, Ab-Ex “drips” in an effort to exploit the fetishism of what Minter recently referred to as “photo-shop realism.” Based on photos she scans into a computer, digitally alters, and then transcribes into shiny paintings on metal panels, often applying the enamel with her own fingertips, works such as Finger Toes Study expose forms of horror that can lie beneath glamour’s thin veil. In this tightly cropped collage, Minter seamlessly joins a hyper-real image of a glossy fingernail with a similarly cropped detail of a frosted toenail, suggesting that model’s hand has been monstrously deformed.

Judie Bamber employs her technical virtuosity to both ideological and personal ends. Her Untitled #1 is a life sized, tightly cropped close-up of female genitals. Scrupulously painted in oil on a piece of wood 6” x 1 3/4”  x 2”, the work has an object-like (even phallic) presence that reverses Freudian readings of “female lack.” Based on a photograph, its extended sense of time and focused looking transcend the limits of camera vision and subvert taboos in viewers male and female, gay and straight. Bamber is also represented by two 10” x 14” watercolors of meticulously rendered photographs of her father (who died as a young man while she was still a child). A sunstruck black and white beach portrait (from 1966) and a flash-filled side-view of her father typing (based on a photo taken three years later and printed after his death) stubbornly record every nuance of the faded, original prints.  Despite their fidelity to the snapshots, Bamber’s watercolors possess an elusive clumsiness that sidesteps sentimentality while subtly asserting her felt presence.

Mary Murphy has also cultivated a crafted approach to transcribing family photographs into psychologically charged paintings.  Recognized in Philadelphia for her abstract paintings of interwoven, painted bands, in recent years Murphy has applied her fascination with the grid as image to the grid as an instrument of depiction. Mom, Dad, Maureen and Me translates a detail of a group portrait into a mosaic of 1200 one inch square gray tones, each loosely brushed and smudged into the next. The resulting distortion of detail accentuates facial features and anomalies, while alluding to the struggle of preserving identity within the often unspoken and repressive structures of family dynamics. 

Indianapolis based artist Kevin Wolff is represented by two canvases that relate directly to his series of paintings of reflections exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial.  In Wall, False Hole, Mirror, Wolff depicts a photograph he took of a circle of black paper affixed to a mirror (unfocused) and a found photograph of an interior (beyond the mirror) into which a real hole has been cut. Mourning Picture represents a clipping (from a Spanish rock magazine) of two young men attached to a mirror tilted at an angle beyond which an inverted bouquet of roses hangs. One of the men, flattened and distorted by foreshortening, directs his eyes at the other, whose head has been cut out in a flower-shaped flap that hinges forward, parallel to the picture plane, his face and the scalloped edges that frame it sharply in focus. Both paintings’ play of gazes, reflections, and multiple methods of representing space suggest the baroque reflexivity of Valesquez’ Las Meninas, a work critic Hal Foster has suggested as a paradigm of photorealist practice.

Engaging cerebral puzzles are also posed by a pair of Los Angeles streetscapes by Peter Cain. Mobil and Glendale Boulevard might suggest the obsessive chaos of Richard Estes’ urban views were it not for Cain’s looser brushwork and suppression of all the usual commercial signage from these images of a gas station and convenience store. Devoid of the text and logos they would normally support, the blank display panels and banners assume an air of eerie expectation as they  become more perfectly “new” again–as if they were models of themselves, uncompromised by actual application in the real world. Cain’s cityscapes participate in an unexpected dialogue not only with Edward Hopper but with Hans Hoffman and late Mondrian. Vacant of figures,they suggest a world customized for cars–the subjects of Cain’s earlier paintings (exhibited at the 1993 and 1995 Whitney Biennials) that earned him a cult following before his untimely death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 at the age 37.

The deadpan depiction of cars, trucks, commercial graphics, and urban textures–glossy or gritty–attracted many of the original photorealists. This preoccupation with surfaces had more to do with the formal, pictorial, and illusionistic possibilities inherent in the appearance of these subjects than with any impulse toward critique or transformation. In a pair of 1989 paintings depicting the walls of a graffiti emblazoned underpass, London-based painter PAUL WINSTANELY demonstrates how the same, grungy urban subjects might be redeemed by the similar techniques. Rendered in foreshortened perspective, the cropped details of opposing walls, certain details obliterated by a blinding light at the terminus just past the frame, the uninflected pristine surfaces of these canvases imitate the texture of air brush–the very medium depicted in the painted image. The quotidian is rendered as a shimmering passage to the infinite.      

Funded by the Arcadia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Advisory Board and Friends of the Beaver College Art Gallery.

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Not the old, not the new, but the necessary,” an exhibition of sculpture, photographs and video by artist Paul Ramírez-Jonas on view from November 11 through December 17, 1998. Titled after a 1920 revolutionary slogan crafted by Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, the show is a compact survey of works by this New York-based Latin American sculptor and chronicles his nostalgia for technological failures and utopian ideals brought down to earth and into the light of the everyday. Among the earliest works included are examples from Heavier Than Air (1993-95).

For this project Ramírez Jonas used white cotton fabric and wood slats to construct replicas of late-19th century “flying machines” developed by inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell, Lawrence Hargrave, Walter Brooks and others – all of whom were left in the dust by the Wright Brothers. Ramírez-Jonas equipped each of these kites with disposable cameras (triggered by mechanical alarm clocks), which, when flown off New York’s Robert Moses beach, snapped aerial views of the shore. Each of the resulting prints depicts a length of colored string stretching from the base of the airborne kite (just out of the picture frame) to a tiny figure below – Ramírez-Jonas clutching the other end of the tether. Objective proof of the flight of each craft, these dizzying, vertiginous images also capture the romance of invention despite the artist’s patent awareness of the impossibility of recreating history. This sense of exploration at a commonplace frontier is especially apparent in a projected videotape from 1997 entitled A Longer Day. Charged with the Einsteinian possibility of using speed to stretch time, this deceptively straightforward work is driven by a mind-over-matter aesthetic and the myth of “westward expansion.”

Leaving his New York studio at sunrise with his video camera pointing directly out his windshield, Ramírez-Jonas drove due west with the express purpose of taping the sunset (midway through Indiana), which he prolonged and repeated by traveling slightly faster than the speed limit. This optimistic work is paired with Red Ball (1997), a 73”-diameter slice of the top of what would be a 40-foot diameter rubber sphere. Standing on this silicon mound, we are reminded of the curvature of the earth. This natural fact – effectively camouflaged by the scale of our planet – is responsible for a host of persistent phenomena that form the core of many of the artist’s projects, A Longer Day notwithstanding.

The most recent work in the exhibition, “Not the old, not the new, but the necessary” (1998), is a reinterpretation of Tatlin’s 1919 Monument to the Third International. This triptych of color photographs depicts three views of a Babel-like tower of studio paraphernalia – a sculpture stand, various chairs, an LP of salsa music, an electric fan, plastic buckets, a text on Proust, a jar of water, etc., illuminated only by the headlight of a toy locomotive speeding up and down the pile on a moebius-like track. Taken with 20-minute exposures, these photographs render the circuit of the train as a perfect double spiral, a form whose mathematical precision contrasts sharply with the quotidian chaos of the ad hoc structure that supports it. The work becomes a reminder of the paradoxes that distinguish Tatlin’s Monument, a tower whose technological idealism guaranteed its practical failure but ensured its potency as a symbol of international socialism. Ramírez-Jonas’ pragmatic reiteration, like all of the artist’s works, is fueled by a lucid, do-it-your-selfer’s sense of purpose and immediacy. Writing about the pieces he has selected for this exhibition, the artist remarks that the works look both forward and backward in time with a sense of wonder and joy that embraces the constancy of the physical world. The pieces also suggest that human endeavors are part of that constancy as well. They offer a utopian vision not of a better tomorrow, but simply of a present that will always have a tomorrow and a yesterday. Ramírez-Jonas was born in Los Angeles in 1965, and was raised in Honduras. He moved back to the United States in 1985 to attend Brown University. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989 and moved to New York later the same year. In addition to three solo exhibitions at Postmasters Gallery in New York (in 1994, ‘96, and ‘97), and London’s White Cube (1994), his recent efforts include projects at Rojer Björkholmen Galleri (Stokholm, Sweden), and Studio Guenzani (Milan). He is currently preparing a large-scale clockwork performance for the city of Utrecht, Holland that premiers this spring.

The exhibition will be accompanied by “Anything but the Present,” an illustrated conversation between the artist and Kirby Gookin (art historian, critic and curator) scheduled directly prior to the opening reception on Wednesday, November 11 at 6:30 PM in Stiteler Auditorium, Murphy Hall, on the Beaver College Campus.

The exhibition and lecture are funded by the Arcadia Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Friends and Advisory Board of the Beaver College Art Gallery.

Installation view, “Period Room: A Project by Amy Hauft,” Beaver College Art Gallery

Juror: Mark Rosenthal, Curator, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York.

Participating Artists

Anthe, Jennifer Baker, Pay Boyer, Charles Burwell, Yane Calovski, Mark Campbell, Pete Checchia, Susan Crowder, Susan Deseyn, William Drake, Sandra Eliot, Tom Ferris, Hyunsoo Han, Marilyn Holsing, Judith Jacobson, Jeanne Jaffe, Kocot and Hatton, Anna Kuo, Shelly Inez Lependorf, Benjamin Long, Virgil Marti, Quentin Morris, Suzanne Okamoto, Sue Patterson, Stuart Rome, Lynca Schmid, Rita Siemienski Smith, Concha de la Serna, and Joseph Sweeny.

The Beaver College Art Gallery is pleased to present “Kay Rosen: ABC (At Beaver College)” an exhibition of murals, paintings and drawings employing alphabetical sequences, on view from February 16 through March 17, 1998. The opening reception will take place on Monday evening, February 16, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM beginning with a lecture on Rosen’s work by Tom Sokolowski, Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, in the Stiteler Auditorium of Beaver’s Murphy Hall.

“ABC” provides an unusual opportunity to examine a series of integrally related pieces by an artist recognized for her innovations in the exploration of text as image. Each of the eight works in the exhibition draws on the deeply embedded, universal order of the English alphabet to reveal what Rosen refers to as “unofficial and coincidental encounters between structure and meaning.” In these characteristically bold and deceptively simple pieces (ranging from 1988 to the present,) Rosen mines the alphabet for examples of “pictorial onomatopoeia,” unearthing startling relationships between letter sequences as they are written, spoken, and named.