Robert C. May Photo Lecture @ UK, Friday

DAVID HILLIARD

Exhibition: October 5 - November 11, 2012
Lecture: November 2, 4 pm
in the UK Student Center's Worsham Theater
FREE

David Hilliard’s expansive, multi-panel photographs invite the viewer into the world of his subjects. His portraits are panoramic in scale and suggest subtle narratives about the nature of love, family, adolescence, and sexuality. Often the work is based on his own life, as in a self-portrait of him with his father. Titled Rock Bottom, they are emerged in a lake, both connected and separated by the body of water between them.

Hilliard’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States in addition to venues in Spain, Germany, and France. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2001 and a Fulbright Grant in 1995, among other honors, and his work is included in many collections, among them the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

DAVID HILLIARD, Mary Remembering, 2008, c-print, courtesy of the artist and Carroll & Sons, Boston

See original post HERE.

words and bodies

Last week, Georgetown College art department and galleries had the privilege of hosting not 1, not 2, but 3 artists. These artists, Gray Lyons, Linda Wilson, and RICHard SMOLinski, spent much of their visits working with students, and we thank them for sharing their passion for art and art making with us.  

Here are a few photos from the multiple activities that took place. Please be sure to check out gray lyons: borderland, featuring gray's recent cyanotypes, on view in the Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery through November 21.

RICHard SMOLinksi (center, wearing cap) at his poetry/performance art workshop with english students of Dr. Adam Clay and art students of Prof. Boris Zakic (far right)

Gray Lyons (left) and Linda Wilson posing in front of The Long Marriage

Gray Lyons demonstrating process for Prof. Darrell Kincer's photography students

Dorothea Tanning: Eine Kleine...

See above for Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 1943 in the collection of Tate. This painting was mentioned by visiting artist Gray Lyons during her talk on Friday afternoon. Thanks, Gray. 

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is one of the best known of Dorothea Tanning’s early paintings. It shows what appears to be a hotel corridor with numbered doors, the farthest of which is open just enough to offer a glimpse of incandescent light. A giant sunflower and pieces of its torn stem lie on the landing. Two fallen petals lie further down the stairs and a third is held by a doll propped against one of the doorways. The doll is remarkably life-like and wears similar clothing to the girl standing nearby. Her status as a toy is only revealed by her hairline and the regularly moulded contours of her torso. The tattered state of the clothes worn by both the doll and the girl suggests that there has been some sort of struggle or encounter with powerful forces, and the girl’s long hair streams upwards as if blasted by an immensely powerful gust of wind. Tanning has said: ‘It’s about confrontation. Everyone believes he/she is his/her drama. While they don’t always have giant sunflowers (most aggressive of flowers) to contend with, there are always stairways, hallways, even very private theatres where the suffocations and the finalities are being played out, the blood red carpet or cruel yellows, the attacker, the delighted victim....’ (Letter to the author, 1999)  More info here.

Modern Art News

Picasso's "Woman Ironing" was cleaned recently, revealing a clearer picture of an image underneath the painting. 

From the Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society; Photo: Kristopher McKay/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

We've been learning about Picasso, Duchamp, the Armory Show, and Guernica in Modern Art over the past two weeks. We have been looking at the artists as ascribing to theories of the mainstream or avant-garde; formalist or conceptual; representational or abstract.

Because Picasso's been on my mind, I was pleased to read the news that one of his paintings has another work buried beneath. It seems he painted Woman Ironing on top of a portrait of a man with a mustache which the artist abandoned. The ghost of the man underneath was first detected with an infrared camera in 1989. (Yes, art history can move at an incredibly slow, but thorough pace). See the known image at the head of this post, and visit the buried image by clicking here.

Opportunity: Internship at Scott County Museum

Internship opportunity at Scott County Museum: they want to investigate preservation techniques and the effects of air (oxygen), UV light, and so forth on preserved items in the museum. Contact Dr. Hamilton, in Chemistry, if you have questions. 502-863-7080

More Art Here!

On Friday evening, the Georgetown College Art Galleries welcomed painters Daniel Ludwig and Anne Leone to campus in conjunction with the opening reception for Perspectives: Celebrating a Decade of the Dr. Donald L. and Dorothy Jacobs Gallery. 

Ludwig gave a fascinating talk regarding the art of collecting, highlighting traits of individuals like the Jacobses, whose foresight in acquiring works by modern art masters have truly benefited scores of people.  See works by Ludwig and Leone in Georgetown's own Jacobs Gallery.

Want more?  This Friday, join visiting artist Gray Lyons in the Anne Wright Wilson Gallery for another Nexus talk at 12:30!

In Which We Marry, 2011, cyanotype, 66" x 60"

A Game of Exquisite Corpses with ART 338, Intermediate Digital Imaging

ART 338 Intermediate Digital Imaging, Exquisite Corpses, a set on Flickr.

Some fun and games in ART 338 Intermediate Digital Imaging, getting ready for our next assignment that involves collaborating with one another. We'll be playing a game of exquisite corpse digitally as each student contributes to a composition with two other classmates. Our drawings featured here were a quick introduction and warmup to the idea/process.

ART 120 Photography, Pinhole, Fall 2012

ART 120 Photography, Pinhole, Fall 2012, a set on Flickr.

Recent work from ART 120 Photography, where students built their own cameras from common, everyday materials to produce fantastically dreamy photographs that bring light to their subjects and locations in new and fresh ways. Enjoy!

Opportunity: Art Show for students

UT-Martin's annual event. The deadline for our competition is February 15, 2013.

Details can be found at this web address.
http://www.utm.edu/departments/finearts/entry.htm
I hope you can share this with students and colleagues. Thanks so much.
Prof. Lane Last
University of Tennessee Martin
Exhibition Coordinator

Opportunity: Internship at Kentucky Arts Council

This is a fantastic opportunity for someone interested in working with art students, artists, writers, and other culturally-minded folks. Kentucky Arts Council Internship Opportunity: The Kentucky Arts Council is the state government agency responsible for developing and promoting support for the arts in Kentucky. As the state’s arts agency, we create

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

Opportunity: Graphic Design Internship in Lexington ASAP

25-year-old Lexington agency Group CJ is looking for a smart, enthusiastic intern as soon as possible. 

Opportunity: Lecture at the U of L

Join me next Tuesday to congratulate Dr. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim on the publication of his book, Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918. The lecture will be held in the library at the U of L. Parking at the Speed Lot or on campus. 

Students from GC and faculty will remember Dr. Kim from our visit to see and hear Dr. Linda Nochlin. Need a blast from the past? Click here. 

terminus

Sad news over the weekend, see article.

D.C. Trip Report

Just wanted to say that we had a fantastic time on our Art Department trip to Washington D.C. over Fall Break. Highlights included the National Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum, Air and Space Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Washington Monument, WWII Veterans Memorial, Reflecting Pool, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial.

Other important highlights included H&M, Forever 21, Pentagon City Mall, meeting up with a variety of friends and family, riding the Metro, one very busy and extremely cold Chipotle, driving in downtown (aka getting lost, no thanks to Siri), getting stuck in a Romney induced traffic jam, chair "massages" from Gus the mini-bus, movie nights at the Graham's, brownies, and most importantly "Red," the Graham's golden retriever!

  Outside the National Gallery, East.

 The smallest and most profitable McDonald's on the planet.

 Outside the Hirshhorn and two days too early for Ai Weiwei.

  Riding the Metro downtown.

   Walking on the National Mall.

   The (non)Reflecting Pool.

Visiting the WWII Veterans Memorial.

If you see someone who went on the trip, ask them about their experience. They probably have plenty of stories and photos to share. And we're already looking forward to a trip next Fall Break!