Fruit and Fish: Alison Goodwin’s Reimaging of the Modernist Motif

Alison Goodwin’s painting Cantaloupe (2008) at first appears, perhaps naively, to depict a still life of fruit and flowers on a table: pomegranate, cantaloupe, sunflowers, and a drink. Beneath two rusty red and murky green lines, a diamond pattern demarcates the floor from the wall above. Next to the mottled green-and-red wall is a view through an open window. Three narrow houses lean precariously to the left; the windows are indicated, almost carelessly, by blocks of watery black paint. Two stylized trees with foliage shaped into bulbous spheres punctuate the row of buildings. Goodwin’s particular style, with its emphasis on a skewed perspective, flattened forms, and broadly applied colors, cannot—and should not—be read as unsophisticated or unknowing. Rather, Goodwin’s paintings reinterpret the work of some of the most important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century painters. She deliberately evokes the style and subjects of European modernists such as Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Each of her paintings recalls the implied formal tension between depicted three-dimensional space and the literal flatness of painted planes of color and stylized forms that her predecessors welcomed. Matisse, Cézanne, and others in the late nineteenth century rejected academic norms of picture making (painting realistically through modeling, shade, and one-point perspective). By revisiting these artists’ aesthetic, Goodwin complicates this historical progression and inserts her own mark onto the modernist (and particularly male-dominated) canon. [excerpt

Bright Lights on Quiet Streets: Tom Keough’s Nocturnes

The well-kept city streets lined with trees and old brownstones may seem familiar in the paintings of Brooklyn-based artist Tom Keough, but the neighborhood is disquietingly empty. Keough situates the sidewalk in the immediate foreground of his paintings and compels the viewer to enter into an eerily vacant scene. With few exceptions, Keough leaves the always still and sometimes snowy New York setting largely unoccupied. Nonetheless, Keough conveys human presence in his paintings with the soft glow of lamplight from windows, footprints in the snow, and cars parked along the side. The theme of urban alienation—a paradoxical sense of loneliness felt in the midst of dense population and bustling activity—has been examined by Keough’s art-historical predecessors, such as Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and perhaps most consistently by Edward Hopper. Whereas these painters frequently employed various urban types (shop girls, entertainers, once clerks) lost in thought to evoke a sense of estrangement and inward reflection, Keough remarkably conveys similarly absorptive emotional states without such figural intervention. [excerpt

Mark Greenwold’s Excited Self

In a recent exhibition catalog of painter Mark Greenwold at New York’s DC Moore Gallery, the artist, in lieu of a conventional statement about his work, conducted a self-interview. To his question, ‘‘Why?’’ Greenwold responded: I thought that I could possibly get at things that another person might find too daunting or too polite to ask—very obvious questions by the way, that I’d probably be too thin-skinned or reactive to give an honest response to if another person asked the question. [excerpt

Ronald Gonzalez: Private Collection

In Ronald Gonzalez’s latest series of sculptures, old leather satchels, small antiquated appliances, dulled tools, bicycle handles, shoes, a fencing mask, an accordion, a bicycle seat, a toaster and helmets, among other various found parts and outdated detritus are combined to evoke the heads and torsos of human-like forms. The viewer identifies the components at once as what the objects literally are as well as the specific body parts they figuratively describe. As such, his art calls for an exercise in perceptual shifts that allow for more than one visual interpretation. While some objects are manipulated, others are left intact, as Gonzalez creates paradoxically human and strangely inanimate assemblages. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Embodiment and Emptiness: Alison Rector’s Interior Spaces

Alison Rector’s painting Green Kitchen (2002) depicts a seemingly ordinary domestic interior: a flight of stairs ascends to the right, and a foyer, furnished simply with a wooden table and chairs, leads to a kitchen and, further still, to a broom closet. The old-fashioned wood-burning stove, muted and patterned wallpaper, antiqued furniture, brass sconce, and wide-planked hardwood floor characterize this home as possibly from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the lack of figures and personal effects makes the definitive time of occupancy ambiguous. Rector’s unoccupied interiors, however, do not appear abandoned. Even in the quietest of her closed spaces, the viewer perceives a presence, perhaps of the non-depicted occupant. [excerpt

Kara Walker: Harper\u27s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

The preface to the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden asserts, “We proposed at the outset to narrate events just as they occurred; … to praise no man unduly because he strove for the right, to malign no man because he strove for the wrong. The suite of lithographs on display at Schmucker Art Gallery by prominent contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker entitled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), on loan from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, challenges the truth Guernsey and Alden claimed to recount and inject a discourse about rightness and wrongness the authors professed to omit. Walker’s silhouettes of distorted, fragmented and flailing black bodies are silkscreened over an enlargement, using offset lithography of woodcut plates, of the original Harper’s prints published in Guernsey and Alden’s text to incorporate a new understanding of suffering, loss and horror absent from the nineteenth- century illustrations. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1005/thumbnail.jp

A Venus of Wild Nights: The Female Nude in Paintings by Judith Linhares

A nude woman sits on a pyramidal assemblage of logs in a pose reminiscent of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1902) in Judith Linhares’s painting Up There (2003). With a delineated but transparent form, an absurdly large bumblebee feeds on enormous flowers at the base of the structure. The female figure oversees the fantastical scene like a queen bee atop a beehive. Linhares revisits the subject of a monumental female nude in her paintings (a traditional subject in the history of painting), and as such, these ‘‘queen bees’’ populate a whimsical but historical world. Her paintings are large, and even in reproduction, the monumentality of the image is felt. Not only are the subject and size of her paintings significant, but what also matters to the meaning of her work is her own identity as a woman and as a painter. In her evocation of recognizable figures (as in comparison to The Thinker), Linhares assertively tackles the history and subject of painting itself in her works. She renders the sky in Up There with enormous brushstrokes of blue and white and applies seemingly arbitrary swaths of orange throughout the composition. At once, Linhares manages to merge abstraction and figuration, the recognizable and the uncanny, the historical and the contemporary, the conventional and the avant-garde. [excerpt

Maren Hassinger: Lives

Gettysburg College’s Schmucker Art Gallery is pleased to present Maren Hassinger: Lives, an exhibition of the artist’s films, sculptures, and installations held in conjunction with the Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference, “Public Health, Human Prosperity, and Justice: Public Policy in the African Diaspora,” and co-sponsored by the Eisenhower Institute in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania February 26 and 27, 2010. Hassinger’s work provides a contemplative perspective on complicated issues of nature, culture and identity in relation to broader themes of race, gender, as well as politics, and social policy. Ethereal and evocative installations of branches, plastic bags, and twisted newspapers powerfully reveal the tenuous intersection of the mass-produced and the organic. Complimenting the coiled strands, circular forms, and ascending paths of Hassinger’s sculptures are projections and films that similarly examine notions of circularity and biological (or natural) connectivity, in addition to linearity and lineage. These installations compellingly address the various complexities of lives: personal and public identities, Hassinger’s autobiographical lineage, and the legacies of broader African-American experiences. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1001/thumbnail.jp

\u27Yet in a Primitive Condition\u27: Edward S. Curtis\u27s The North American Indian

From 1907 to 1930, Edward S. Curtis created The North American Indian, a forty-volume edition of photographs and writings that he hoped would cover “every phase of Indian life of all tribes yet in a primitive condition.” All evidence indicates that he set out to make a singular and unified work of art. However, a comparative analysis of photographs made at different moments in this ambitious project reveals that The North American Indian ultimately is characterized not by stylistic and thematic unity but by significant shifts in aesthetic and political orientation. [excerpt

Melissa Ichiuji: In the Flesh

When she dances, acts, sculpts, sews or films, artist Melissa Ichiuji presents the human figure in political and personal terms, examining its various states of desire or distortion. This exhibition In the Flesh presents three discrete recent bodies of Ichiuji’s work: a series of busts of political figures from the 2012 election season entitled Fair Game, a trio of life-sized sculptures of female bodies, and lastly, Everything to Lose, a film and corresponding photographs of the artist donning an elaborately sculpted costume. Despite seeming differences in medium and subject in this exhibition, Ichiuji works with similar materials and artistic practices in each. She sculpts with fabric and pantyhose and does not hide raw, purposefully crude stitches and seams. Because the pantyhose stands in for flesh; bits of thread under the surfaces look like veins, and gestures seem animated, Ichiuji’s heads and bodies are paradoxically naturalistic and doll-like. “My background as a dancer and an actor,” Ichiuji explains, “informs the physicality of my figures.” Mimeticism, or the evocation of the “real” body, in Ichiuji’s work is mesmerizingly fraught. One sees abstraction and strange realism at once. Her political portraits are uncannily accurate; life-size sculptures approximate the presence of a live figure, and her own body in performance and film hypnotically and paradoxically is obscured and revealed. The perceived fantasy implicit in her work chafes against the viewer’s detection of the “real.” This friction can be seen in how Ichiuji’s real body—her hand, her upper back, her own curves and flesh—is perceptible through the doll-like costume she wears in Everything to Lose. Likewise, from the Fair Game series, one can recognize Newt Gingrich’s characteristic smile through a tangle of women’s underwear, and the distorted figures in her larger-scaled sculptures appear on the brink of movement. [excerpt]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/artcatalogs/1011/thumbnail.jp