What's Happening this Week

There are couple of fun things happening in the Cochenour Gallery this week.

On Thursday from 4-7pm the Georgetown Main Street Group is hosting Love Your Downtown. In an effort to work more with the college, this community development group have invited students, faculty and staff, the ENTIRE police force, and even the Mayor to come together and chat about Downtown Georgetown.

Don't miss this event! There will be cookies, Nexus credit, and an opportunity to voice your opinion on what YOU would like to see happen Downtown!

THEN

On Friday from 12-2pm, again in the Cochenour Gallery, photographer Tim McCoy's exhibit Sanctuary will open. Mr. McCoy's photographs involves a radical re-framing of reality. Meaning is often determined as much as by what is "cut" from the framing of the images as it is by those elements that are revealed in detail. He has largely excluded human figures, although humanity is alluded to through the cultural icons and remnants shown. Thus, the focus is on what people leave behind rather than the evanescence of contemporary culture. Hope you can make it! Also a Nexus event and... cookies!

Review: Christopher Saucedo's "Red Cross Blankets"

Christopher Saucedo's talk in the Cochenour Gallery.
His work is on view until November 29.

On November 8, 2013, the latest exhibit at Georgetown College’s Cochenour gallery opened with an art talk by sculptor Christopher Saucedo and his show Red Cross Blankets. The show primarily consists of unorthodox self-portraits composed of mixed mediums. The images used are related to the artist’s measure in fluid volume through familiar liquid containers such as soda cans, coffee mugs, milk cartons, gallon jugs, shot glass, and other glasses. According to the artist, he was inspired the aftermath in his homes in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in New York following Hurricane Sandy in 2012 when water remained in various containers from the flood water.

Saucedo is known as a sculptor and three-dimensional images, yet this show seemed to be made up mainly of two-dimensional works including two embroidered Red Cross blankets, three wooden canvases that have been branded with images of Saucedo’s container as well as ‘puzzle’ like piece with the container images broken up and rearranged, and a wooden and aluminum mobile that would remind one of a wind chime. These works prove that Saucedo is capable of breaking the rules in the area of traditional portraiture by presenting a different kind of visual representation of an individual.

In the traditional sense, one expects a portrait to be a realistic image to mimic the likeness of the subject and their features. This means it is an image meant to recreate life. However Saucedo takes this idea of a self-portrait being a visual presentation and puts a conceptual spin on it. He represents himself through empirical measure by fluid volume and the containers that hold the amount that equal his mass. So it places Saucedo’s representations on a grander scale through an intellectual perspective and yet a simpler scale through the common images used in his self-depiction.

Overall, it was good talk as Saucedo was very encouraging for questions and comments and the group was able to a good discussion of his works and the sentiment behind them. Also it was interesting to see an artist known for working mainly with 3-D pieces to execute somewhat 2-D works very well. Though on another note, I feel that the show could have been renamed to fit the titles of the works, like Fluid Volume Series instead on Red Cross Blankets, as the blankets only made up two of the pieces present in the show.

--Rebecca Siever, art history major, class of 2014

Jacobs Gallery Retrospective Redux

Students in ART 414 have been learning about modern art and are using works from artists associated with the Jacobs Gallery to make connections between art of the modern and contemporary eras. This assignment was planned and enacted in conjunction with the 10th Anniversary Celebration which kicks off this Friday, October 19th in the Dr. Donald L. and Dorothy Jacobs Gallery in the LRC. Please come join us as we mark this milestone in the gallery.

In the classroom over the past week, each student made a presentation about an artist represented in the collection, choosing to emphasize the visual, formal, contextual, or other parallels that may be drawn between artists from different decades, cultural contexts, and frameworks.

All of the presentations were vetted by their peers. The students selected two papers to post online. Actually, they were to choose a single paper/presentation, but the vote ended in a tie. Thus, both student works are excerpted here. You'll hear Senior digital art major Daniel Cantu II responding to the work of Matt Carone and Junior Art History major Lynsey Jordan responding to Dan Ludwig's works. Let us know what you think!

Senior digital art major Daniel Cantu made connections between Matt Carone's Smokers and Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon writing that: "Just as large, Picasso’s painting looks similar to Carone’s modern painting, which could easily pass as a homage to Picasso’s work. Whether or not Carone purposely looked back at Picasso’s cubist painting, the similarities are strikingly noticeable. Both paintings include five figures who happen to be nude. But the style in which they are painted–cubist or surreal–depict the figures as nude, without showing nudity. This method creates abstract people who are not naked, but exist as they are."

 

Cantu continues, "Both artists aimed to portray these figures in their own way, and their subtle way of representing them in their abstract form helps them depict various moods without identifying a class of people. The abstract faces and bodies of Picasso’s figures do not indicate if they are beautiful or not, they are simply women. Carone’s abstract figures are also able to classify the smokers as they are without assigning them to a class or culture."

Cantu also made connections between the nude figures in these pieces and the wooden models used in art classes, particularly drawing. He pointed us to this work: “Wordbones,” The Sisyphus Syndrome, wooden figurine on stairs, 2010.

Junior art history major Lynsey Jordan made connections between Daniel Ludwig and several other artists. She wrote, "I found it very difficult to pin down an artist to compare Daniel Ludwig to because he is so diverse in style. From the 1980s to now, he has had a major focus on the human form, usually female, but in his most recent works, he focuses on the male and female. These recent works are very abstract, but use very realistic human forms with jarring colors and shifting shapes to make the overall effect a very strange and unsettling one. These human forms, again, have the style of the “old masters” such as Delacroix or Titian and have a great passion and drama to them."

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Musée du Louvre. Image source: http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/death-sardanapalus

Daniel Ludwig, Raft, 2000s. Image source:  http://danielludwig.com/pages/paintings/recentpaintings/recentpaintings.html

next week at COCHENOUR: The Art of Portrait

artLAB Spring 2012

April 13-19

On display is a collection of work from ART370 Topics in Art: The Art of Portrait course. Six students have been working toward developing a better knowledge of the human face. This class has worked from observation of a sitter and from their own imagination.

Members of the class include:

Daniel Cantu

Mallory Meisner

Stephanie Barker

Devon Stivers

Ashley Hewitt

Ariel Sniegowski

*All heads were created with Roma Plastilina over a styrofoam armature with various added materials.

Even Deeper: Winters Photography

I must admit that I'm very excited for Michael's show in the Cochenour. I've had the privilege of getting to know him over the past few years as a result of connections with the 930 Art Center in Louisville. I've been able to show a few pieces there and each time I usually get to talk with Michael more and more.

It's exciting when you meet someone with a kindred spirit, who speaks your language; and in our case it's the language of photography. It's fun to sit down and talk shop because we have so much in common, and as a result we can often talk about issues that are more deeply rooted and inherent in our shared medium.

What I wanted to point out with this post is that both Michael and his wife Mickie share the practice and passion of photography and artmaking. To this extent, here's a link to their website where you can see more of their personal work and photography business.

Hope to see you at the reception tomorrow.
DK

a cut above

Don't miss artist Jennifer Anderson during her visit to Georgetown College this week!  The exhibition, Fragmented Faces: Cut-Paper Works by Jennifer Anderson will open with a reception in the Cochenour Gallery from 5-8PM on Thursday, October 20 (part of Georgetown's monthly Antiques and ArtWalk) and, Ms. Anderson will give a lecture at 5:30PM (NEXUS). 

Postcard design by GC Art's own Ryleyanne Vaughn.

On Friday morning at 9AM, art, art history, and women's studies students and faculty are invited to attend a coffee chat with Ms. Anderson, also taking place in the Cochenour Gallery.