Side by Side: Selections from the Permanent Collection on view September 19, 2019 – January 12, 2020 curated by Veronica Kessenich.
Side by Side: Selections from the Permanent Collection examines the nature of acquiring a collection, learning about art and exploring how artists’ taste and content evolve over time. Curated by Veronica Kessenich, executive director of Atlanta Contemporary and visiting instructor in art history in the Agnes Scott College Department of Art and Art History, the exhibition centers around never-before-seen pieces requiring framing, restoration and current cataloguing. Side by Side aspires to illustrate the unity of the collection, which has at times seemed fractured, thereby deepening the mission and values of the Department of Art and Art History within the values and aspirations of the college and community it serves. Works collected since 1925 reflect the storied history of the college and, thereby, present an illustration for today’s student to reflect on the social and intellectual challenges of our time, as seen through a century of changing values. New acquisitions, chosen specifically for this exhibition, strive to fill gaps and steward a collection that reflects our awakened and evolving values.
The permanent collection began at Agnes Scott in 1965 with a gift of 50 original works from Harry L. Dalton, given to the college in honor of his wife, Mary Keesler Dalton, class of 1925. The Dalton Gallery was subsequently named after them. Over the past five decades, Agnes Scott College has expanded this collection to include notable works by important Atlanta-based artists and nationally renowned contemporary feminist artists. Many of the works presented permanently reside in offices and buildings throughout the campus. This exhibition will highlight those rarely exhibited works and recently acquired acquisitions. The works will be re installed, campus-wide at the conclusion of the exhibition.
One of the comparisons from the exhibition- (left) Angela West’s Nature Morte: Still Life #11, undated, color photograph c print and (right) Max Schnitzler’s The Bouquet, 1941, oil on canvas.
The Possibility of Framing Infinity on view spring 2008 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“Painting as a noun takes on limitless form and attitude. It can arouse visual pleasure, support a manifesto, tell a story and speak of ideas. It is carved out of history. As a verb, painting is a suggestive practice that unfolds and is often self-reflexive. It is about color and shape and the senses extraordinaire. A rich process of exploration can take place through the goop of the medium, the blending of pigments and energetic eye movement. In action, the painter’s scope of vision will enclose the picture plane like a web—or like the hot pinball machine of life. This process has the power to capture a point of view, cracking open space to produce new galaxies, often delving into the personal and unknown. Articulated and raw, restrained or whatever, painting at its best is a commitment that constantly poses questions.
The processes employed when painting can play a significant role in the development of any artistic work, infiltrating composition and method. This exhibit was inspired by this belief, that a painting sensibility, the dug-in knowledge developed through an intentional, prolonged experience of painting, can be expressed through a variety of forms and media. It is a way of thinking, of looking at the world that rests in composition. This idea allows for the making and exploration of culture with a focus on fluid form, light and material.
As this exhibition evolved, a certain sensation emerged from within the early gathering of artists, nothing out of the ordinary or uncommon, but a very strong binding sensibility. The exhibit’s founding premise, of bringing together artists working in a variety of media through a painter’s lens (or brush), became less of a priority than fostering this sensation, identified as the artists’ consideration of a limitless, never-ending continuum of space that changes with perspective, over time. The title, The Possibility of Framing Infinity, is meant to be open-ended as not to describe the artwork but the act of making.
For centuries artists have been working to express space and time—whether for a specific narrative or as a means to an end. Grounding this within the history of art, three artists or works of art are brought to mind. Consider the painting Mona Lisa (1503-1506) by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). The sitter, with her enigmatic smile, is front and center, with rolling, misty hills disappearing into a diffuse background of atmospheric perspective. It has a sense of continuum, of forever, not only in the landscape but also within her visage. In the painting by J. W. M. Turner (1775-1851), The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (1835), which is exemplary of his work, the scene breaks into an intuitive deconstruction of the moment, with color and light telling the tale rather than an exact rendering of a historical incident. To Barnett Newman (1905-1970) whose paintings with “zips,” as he called them, begun in the 1940s, embedded the sublime into vibrating planes of color where the splits simultaneously break and hold his work into dense motion.
This framing of a place or body, whether it is a literal figurative point of view or a formless and intangible space can be experienced throughout this exhibit. In Colleen Lynch’s, Marcia Cohen’s and Caomin Xie’s paintings, a world is abstracted to come together into a meditative or ocular whole. A happening is described and re-scripted as it repeats through history—as the flood of Katrina is riffed and swelling in the sensory installation by John Otte. Jeremy Chance strives to disassociate himself from the potentially personal, emotional process of painting by honing in on headshots of actors portraying various expressions connected with depression, utilizing the distancing processes of printmaking to further himself from emotional stimulus. The picture plane, broken into a wake of formlessness, is reinvented and pulled together by the artist. Sally Heller creates environments of overgrown fuzzy and plastics stuffs that explode in space, with trees of PVC pipe, grass and mosses of pipe cleaners and Mylar pools of water. By framing these moments, space is re-shaped and transformed. For Sarah Emerson, the threshold of mortality is highlighted next to the unending unraveling coil of infinity in her existential explorations. Kristine Moran’s overflowing, unfolding worlds are empty of living human presence, where remnants of abandoned warehouses are overgrown with unbridled nature—flooded, iced over—still lit by the artificial glow of florescent lights.
Framing usually showcases something in its best light, possibly at its most effective essence. To frame infinity, to square off the limitless and timeless, is a bold endeavor.”
“looking/longing is simple in its premise, offering a phenomenal experience of looking and a visual meditation on the potent power of the medium of photography.
We absorb our surroundings by reading clues of light bouncing off objects, our subconscious quietly processing the scope of our vision. When a person, landscape or object is immortalized through a photographic process, we may be enticed to look. We could be attracted just to know why the subject is significant to the photographer. If we are stirred, our attention held, a certain sensuousness of the medium and subject could continue to embrace our gaze to entice a deeper study.
Sensitive silver salts exposed to light will congeal to express a fugitive instant in two-dimensional form; the black and white negative: white values become dark and dark ones bright. A fertile moment condensed, framed and flattened—mediated. Complex worlds are pressed into these thin sheets of film.
The viewfinder brings into reach news of the nearby and faraway. Striving to read the history told by the image, we consider ourselves witnesses to times and people lost to us without the magic of photographic reproduction. For more than a hundred years, ‘we’ have come to know the ‘other’ and they us through the photograph. We allow ourselves to step into homes, spaces, dreams, histories.
Private and public spaces retain or create intimacy through the photograph. We become comfortable. The eye behind the camera directs our gaze, but in all fairness to the subject we cannot hold its truth as our own. Seeing is such a personal endeavor, eh? We might register the photographer’s point of view, but how we approach a photograph depends much on our personal visual histories. We are creatures who like to look, to watch, to stare even. We want to trust in the photograph, especially when beauty—qualified by the eye of the beholder, of course—is involved.
Ah, beauty—we fall all over ourselves to witness it, to gaze in awe and reverence. Its sweetness can be seen in so much of life: the soft curve of a back; the expression of spirituality; the open landscape; and youth. There is a strange flipside to such loveliness in the surrender to aging and mortality. Through the lens a mundane subject can become spectacular, elevated to the sublime. A landscape can become a mirror to hope. Sometimes the subject looks back through the frame, literally or figuratively, to step into the world of flesh—tugging at the gut, pulling at baser instincts. A glance intended for someone else can slice into a place that frames questions of knowledge and desire. Does the viewer have a sense of dissatisfaction in not being able to replicate that first look of the photographer? May be looking again, and again, one can slip into the image.”
Velocity of a Single Gesture, or How to Build an Empire on view spring of 2007.
“In an interview by journalist Ron Suskind, a senior White House adviser is quoted as saying “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” In the exhibition “The Velocity of Gesture, or How to Build an Empire,” artists are recognized as rulers of their picture planes, creating their “own reality” through personal sensibility and gesture.
Conducting with a baton, making the sign of the cross, waving a magic wand or saluting a crowd—all are acts in which the drama and tempo of a hand movement have significance. Power lies in the character of the motion, its location in relation to the body and a reading of the culture from which it stems. Communication is nothing without gesture—the lift of an eyebrow, the flick of the hand under the chin. Gesture can become spectacle: the sharp finger cutting quickly horizontally across the neck (one need not even say “off with her head!”); the chilling hail to the führer with arm quickly angled outward, palm flat; Madonna’s hand gripping her crotch. Movement will embody tradition, as with a Flamenco dancer’s snap of the fingers or a circle of women singing, sewing and stitching—needles pushed in/ pulled out, pushed in/pulled out—the rhythms of communal gesture solidifying kinship. Then there is subconscious movement and matters of survival, such as bending away from a hot stove or undesirable suitor.
The artists in the exhibit distill force to its essence, commanding our attention with spectacular movement or quiet seeping and understated subtleties that express a universe through nuance—the whispered vibration of a gesture, an unhinged mark on paper. Grounding can fall away as gravity loses earthbound specifics that we, the viewer, have come to know, as evidenced in the work of Andrea Prince and Teresa Bramlette Reeves. Artists like Avantika Bawa negate actual space by flattening the picture plane to build new dimensions, fabricating unreal depth using various signatures of perspective. Others, like Fereydoon Family, draw changes in space and time by manipulating line and color. Steven Sachs uses only worn, flattened materials—that on which the universe has left an aggressive mark. Personal sensibilities are laid bare; Brent Fogt for instance, draws quiet methodically repetitive lines where others—Albino Mattioli—are vigorous in their approach, breaking the surface with dense slashes so colorful and broad that line becomes shape and shape is planetary. One can try to read artwork like a seismograph, making tangible the artist’s electrical pulse.
Breaking from known paths as process takes the reins, the artist’s hand/body moves with its own intelligence. Myrtha Vega allows her pen to flow parallel with her scope of vision, seamlessly ‘collage”-ing sites to form cohesive landscapes. Artists like Allan Ludwig and Sid Garrison run headlong up daunting slopes, disappearing around uncharted corners, mapping out subconscious landscapes. They make material the direction and speed of their route, evidence of their journeys. Gregor Turk, in his sculpture series “Limits”—where he fantastically charts boundaries through strange wormy forms—tells of the culture of shifting borders, both literal and imaginary.
These artists are visionaries, making policy for their territories, designing a cosmos from personal truths to find a way of understanding the boundless universe. Alex Kvares scratches into the membrane between public and private worlds of the performer/hermit, stepping open into the spotlight only to crawl back into the cave. Torkwase Dyson considers the bling of hip hop culture, focusing on a nihilistic road paved with wheel spinners and engines with decadent grills, raining teardrops of oil.
Within such acts of making empires are borne, vibrating with particular momentum and atmosphere, each a soliloquy in its own private universe. These artists gathered under a grandiose title are pushing out from a concrete and bloodied Empire, breaking through layers to pull at a buried reality, coffins hidden from sight. We, the viewer, become archeologists with the hope of digging deeper, visually cutting into the foundation of these new civilizations, studying the webbed fields of electricity and symbolism. Cartographers of interior lands, marking explorations from point A. to point D., these artists bring to the surface unknown worlds and newfound kingdoms tightly drawn with pen, paint, video and clay. What could be more real than that?”
Blackbird on My Shoulder on view fall 2006 organized with support from The Margaret Virginia Philip Art Endowment Fund.
Blackbird on my Shoulder featured visual artists, writers and performers who were unshakably attached to the southeastern United States and were inspired by auto(biography) and storytelling. Stories, song and poetry were installed among photographs, drawings and sculptural installation. From the marrow of the South tales grow like beanstalks, reaching towards the patient sky. Blackbird on my Shoulder was organized with support from The Margaret Virginia Philip Art Endowment Fund.
Pink Days Azure Nights on view Spring 2006 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“This exhibition does not revolve around a theme. Pink Days, Azure Nights was borne from a call that brought forth artists unknown to the organizer in addition to new ideas from familiar ones.
This exhibition does not revolve around a theme, but connections are made. Is it something in the air, or burning questions that have evolved over centuries time of artists and culture makers? That which is occurring in the world around us is dredging up unavoidable complexities linked to raw emotion and new action. The volcanic eruptions and digging down of Julie Puttgen and Celeste Roberge knock on tectonic plates and a wryness of living. Anthony Greco reaches into the void fabricated from chaos, therein, finding a rhythm in the hurricane – the same form and energy inspiring Jennifer Beuno’s mirrored installation that projects our world fragmented into parallel systems, as she asks: “What do we desire?”; They think alongside Nell Ruby, who gives us a place to witness, a home/not-home made from sections and conflicting perspectives. As space unfolds, opening, the turning dancer in Hyun-Jean Lee’s video makes us feel connected, turning with her. Pieces segmented, running on and overlapping, cropped – still framing the simultaneously mundane and majestic moments of Terri Dilling, Brian Bishop, and Niklas Sven Vollmer. Fragmenting the moment is T.W. Meyer and Judy Parady, breaking things down to their smallest denominator. All of the artists in Pink Days, Azure Nights inspect how we look at our role in the world, or are told what our position should be – the often randomness of psychological diagnosis leads them to step into our spaces as we step into theirs.”
limbs heart tongue & teeth on view fall 2005 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“These fleshy vessels, our bodies, vehicles for our being, push into our surroundings. Form merges and turns as we respond to our environment. Moving, measuring time, we keep beat with our hearts. Gravity tethers us while the earth turns, propelled through space. We gather knowledge through our senses. Semi permeable membranes brush up against molecules that we inhale, absorb, sometimes reject.
How do we begin to understand our bodies? As babies we recognize ourselves as extensions of our parents’ hands, breasts, arms, feet. (Funny how as we age that knowing returns as sentiment when we see similarities in our own anatomy.) We learn about our apparent differences as children from our skin color to cultural or religious signifiers to our sex and size. All bodies cannot perform the same. Some require tools to operate. Some reside deep in their corporal form, grounded, breathing fully with their environs. The unbearable being floats above the body, unable to deal with mortal truths. Our body surrenders to thoughts and feelings, flooded with emotions that involuntarily take over the face or posture is determined by outlook. History, the brunt and joys of our experiences, mark the body. If we live long enough time will lay her rage on our faces, sloughing away flesh or adding weight.“
limbs heart tongue & teeth presents artists who consider how deeply we understand our bodies and how we experience our relationship to our surroundings through these fleshy vessels. Different aspects of the body as phenomenon are addressed including body language, formlessness, disability and the religious body.
Tender Landscapes on view Spring 2004 curated by Lisa Alembik.
“Artists will tread the broad, awkward, often absurd boundary between humans and nature, negotiating various roles – mediator, interloper, documenter, amateur scientist. Some directly engage the land, feeling an undeniable bond because they, of course, are of nature. A sense of responsibility calls for them to be caretakers as best they can. They dig, peel, gather, nurture. The landscape, encompassing both flora and fauna, provides solace. The natural world enters their art through a deep understanding of the landscapes subtle and monumental power, and respect for human collaboration with the earth.
The artists in Tender Landscape responded to their natural environment through curiosity, humor, or empathy. A concern for how humans affect the environment, and in turn how the environment shapes us, is a current running through the works. These artists asked their audience to carefully inspect their surroundings, to look closely and listen carefully, and be aware of the possibilities held by all-encompassing nature.”
No Agenda But Their Own on view Fall 2002 curated by Jerry Cullum.
“I tried very hard not to curate this show. It illustrates the point I’m trying to make that in the end, a few of the artists wouldn’t let me avoid it; more than one of them told me to quit trying to interest a woman curator in the topic of shifting sensibilities among women artists, and just do it.
These are not your father’s feminists.* But neither are they that misleading or meaningless rubric, “post-feminist”. They’re something else altogether. They’re simply autonomous, not paying much attention to anyone else’s attempts to restrict their artmaking and their reflections on their own condition. If they confront the fresh upsurge of misogyny and sexism in society, they do it on their own terms. If they’d rather focus on the issues suggested by their own lives, then that’s what they do, without feeling obligated to say that the personal is political.
When they think about childbearing (some of the artists are mothers, some are facing the classic decision of whether children have any place in their already crowded life), they don’t feel compelled to use the visual clichés of any political position. But neither do they feel compelled to avoid historically loaded visual metaphors; if they address “fruitfulness,” for example, they do so however they feel like doing it, and pretty much don’t care what anyone else thinks.
This air of insouciant independence carries over into work about traditional male authority figures; both literal fathers and spiritual or intellectual fathers get analyzed with an eye that makes it clear that it is the artist who’s the decision-maker here.
On the other hand, this attitude of autonomy isn’t restricted to assertive personality types; meditative dreamers have also created studies of their desires and visions independent of any mainstream demands for including or avoiding certain types of imagery. For this reason, I’d rather drop the subject after these few clues and let the artists speak for themselves. (But I can’t; I have to justify why I chose these artists, and I will.) Despite the fact that the artists decline to make it an issue, I am painfully aware that men have spoken for women for way too long already. Some of these artists have grown up speaking for themselves for so long and so intensely that it’s no longer an issue for them. Others, decades older, simply engaged in a dialogue from the beginning and never allowed it to be an issue.
Nevertheless, for a male heterosexual to curate a show about women artists is problematic. The flaws, paradoxes, and blindness involved aren’t just historical; they’re immediate and frequently all too evident. Only other people can rescue the curator from destructive self-delusion in such cases; and in this case I have to thank Lisa Alembik, whose skeptical commentary, combined with sympathy for aesthetic stances that are different from her own metaphorical preferences, provided yet another example of wryly tolerant strength and analytical independence.
Dr. Harriette Grissom provides another corrective balance in her own catalogue essay; any remaining mistakes are, of course, my own stupidity at work.
*I use this twist on the contemporary cliché with considerable forethought; it was one of the women artists whose work I particularly admire who long ago told me the joke, “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? ‘That’s not funny!’” By and large, these artists have confronted the perceived humorlessness of feminist topics by developing a deliberately outrageous jokiness that further exemplifies their feeling of being in control of the situation, at least internally. They’re very much aware that they’re not in control of the society around them, but they have a fresh sense of knowing why and sensing just how much or how little that can do about it. Again, they’re exactly as activist as they wanna be, and in exactly the way that they want to be.”
-Jerry Cullum, Dalton Gallery curator for No Agenda But Their Own
