A R T FAC U LT Y BIENNIAL EXHIBITION 2015
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A R T FACU LT Y BI EN NI A L E XH I BI T I O N April 4–May 31, 2015 Figge Art Museum 4th floor gallery, Davenport, Iowa
Organized by
The organizers would like to thank those supporters who helped make this exhibition and its related activities possible:
INTRODUCTION Welcome to the 2015 University of Iowa Art Faculty Biennial Exhibition presented by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and displayed in the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. The material on show represents some of the best work produced by the studio art professionals at Iowa’s School of Art & Art History, including the artists in the Grant Wood Colony fellowship program. This offering follows on the heels of a successful and popular biennial exhibition two years ago in 2013, and we look forward to many more to come in subsequent decades. For over a century, the University of Iowa has employed professional, worldrecognized artists as professors of studio art. Some of the most significant people in their fields have taught at Iowa, such as Grant Wood, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Mauricio Lasansky, and Hans Breder. Many of their students became famous artists in their own right: Raymond Parker, Elizabeth Catlett, Ana Mendieta, and Charles Ray, to name but a few. Today, this storied legacy is continued by the important and significant artists that teach and research at the School of Art & Art History, and who are represented in this exhibition. Many histories of art subjects, ranging from printmaking to metalwork, cannot be written without mentioning the careers of a number of the artists you see in this biennial show. The breadth and depth of the talent on display clearly demonstrates that the state of Iowa supports a vibrant art environment and contributes significantly to the international art scene. The creative students in the program have opportunities that few can imagine, and without doubt, the best of these graduates can, and will, become great artists. 2
The University of Iowa and its benefactors continue to support and develop this major academic program. The reach and expertise of the faculty has expanded in recent years as a result of the newly established Grant Wood fellowship program. This initiative has brought a number of rising stars in their respective disciplines to Iowa, and this exhibition features the two current holders of this prestigious award. As these people graduate from the program, and continue to develop their promising careers, their names will be added to the long list of distinguished artists that can claim a connexion with the University of Iowa’s studio art program. We would like to acknowledge the support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, School of Art and Art History, the Figge Art Museum, and the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost for their support in presenting this exhibition. We are confident that you will enjoy and appreciate the diverse artwork on display. We hope that you will be able to spend as much time as you would like taking pleasure in viewing this fascinating exhibition.
Sean O’Harrow, Ph.D. Director University of Iowa Museum of Art
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ELIZA AU Dimensional Practice (Ceramics)
Axis, 2011 Cone 6 stoneware 36 x 36 x 36 in. 5
ISABEL BARBUZZA Dimensional Practice (Sculpture)
The Permeability of the Veil, 2015 Found dictionaries and encyclopedias, water, glue, and wire 6
PETER CHANTHANAKONE Media, Social Practice, and Design (Animation)
Dance Pro, 2014 Video, 3:14 7
MONICA CORREIA Dimensional Practice (3D Design)
Lampyridae Lamp Plywood, lamp parts, and digital technology, 18 (W) x 9 (D) x 22 (H) in. 8
JOHN DILG Painting and Drawing
This Land, 2014 Oil on canvas 9
LAUREL FARRIN Painting and Drawing
The Green World, 2014 Acrylic on canvas (installation view) 10
ROBERT GLASGOW Printmaking
Aerials: A Culture in Decline, 2013 Edition color lithograph with hand coloring 22.25 x 34 in. 11
SUE HETTMANSPERGER Painting and Drawing
Untitled, 2014 Oil on linen, 30 x 27 in. 12
ANITA JUNG Printmaking
SAREE/SORRY/SARI, 2014 Relief from recycled matrix and ink, 30 x 44 in. (installation view) 13
SARAH KANOUSE Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia)
Black Hawk School, Burlington, IA, from the photo-text book Recollecting Black Hawk, 2015 Archival inkjet print, paired with text 18 x 32 in. 14
MICHELE LAURIAT Grant Wood Fellow in Painting
Untitled from the series “Phil’s Hill”, 2011 Gouache, watercolor, and dry media on paper 90 x 55 in. 15
AMANDA LECHNER Painting and Drawing
Maidenhair/270 Million Years, 2014 Egg tempera on panel, 11 x 14 in. 16
STEVE MCGUIRE Dimensional Practice (3D Design)
Design It, Build It, Ride It, 2015 Titanium 17
DANIEL MILLER Dimensional Practice (Sculpture)
Contained, 2010 Aluminum, steel, acrylic, electronics, LED lights, water vapor, video camera, video monitor, ultrasonic humidifier, microcontrollers, A.C. motors 48 (L) x 40 (W) x 60 (H) in. 18
VIRGINIA MYERS Printmaking
A Codex For Our Times, 2015 Foil imaging and soft pastels 40 in. x 9 ft. 6 in. 19
JEFF RICH Media, Social Practice, and Design (Photography)
Mouth of Yellow Creek, Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, Burnsville, Mississippi, 2013 Archival digital print 31 x 38 in. framed 20
RONALD M. ROZENCOHN Painting and Drawing
Blue Boy and Balloons, 2014 Oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in. 21
JAMES SNITZER Media, Social Practice, and Design (Photography) Printmaking
Untitled, 2014 Photogravure, 4.5 x 5.75 in. 22
MARGARET STRATTON Media, Social Practice, and Design (Photography)
Early Evening, Malecon, Havana. Cuba, 2014 From: “Cuba, A Spy In The House That Castro Built” Archival digital photograph, 40 x 20 in.
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SERINA SULENTIC Media, Social Practice, and Design
Metal tins, 2014–present Collage, photography, everyday objects, and computer End result: Hardbound 80+ photo cookbook + EPUB book 24
SERHAT TANYOLACAR Printmaking
Circus in Town, 2014 Laser-cutter engraving, combination print, 50 x 50 in. 25
BREANNE TRAMMELL Printmaking
Dinkholt & Heinbar (Breanne Trammell in collaboration with Jeff Barnett-Winsby) Sunset, 2015 Archival digital print 26
JOSH VAN STIPPEN Dimensional Practice (Ceramics)
Colloidal System, 2015 Stoneware, 84 x 48 x 1 in. 27
SUSAN CHRYSLER WHITE Painting and Drawing
Mazarine (in progress) Acrylic on canvas, Mexican serape, Plexiglas, steel, 144 x 120 x 8 in. 28
RACHEL WILLIAMS Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia)
Wilderness of Sin Aqueous media and collage on paper, 23 x 25 in. 29
JON WINET Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia)
Jon Winet | Katie Grace McGowan with Debra Pughe “Documentation | Facsimile: Virtual Drill Sergeant Training Case” Photograph: Camp Carpa, 2013 Mixed medium 30
KEE-HO YUEN Dimensional Practice (Jewelry and Metal Arts)
Bending Power, 2014 Ring: anodized aluminum, rock, cedar wood, lead, brass, acrylic paint, and laser printer ink, 3 (L) x 3 (W) x 4 (H) in. 31
ARTISTS’ STATEMENTS
ELIZA AU
VIRGINIA MYERS
ISABEL BARBUZZA
JEFF RICH
PETER CHANTHANAKONE
RONALD M. ROZENCOHN
MONICA CORREIA
JAMES SNITZER
JOHN DILG
MARGARET STRATTON
LAUREL FARRIN
SERINA SULENTIC
ROBERT GLASGOW
SERHAT TANYOLACAR
SUE HETTMANSPERGER
BREANNE TRAMMELL
ANITA JUNG
JOSH VAN STIPPEN
SARAH KANOUSE
SUSAN CHRYSLER WHITE
MICHELE LAURIAT
RACHEL WILLIAMS
AMANDA LECHNER
JON WINET
STEVE MCGUIRE
KEE-HO YUEN
DANIEL MILLER 32
ELIZA AU Dimensional Practice (Ceramics) I am interested in how systems work and how they relate to symmetry, repetition, and scale. My work is about using modules based on polygon forms to form a whole. The design on each module contributes to pattern of the entire piece. Using this method, I work with the mandala and the grid to express ideas about sacred space. Two concepts have been consistent within my practice: the translation of the two dimensional into the three-dimensional, by stretching a pattern over a three dimensional object or by creating individual two-dimensional objects that project into space.
ISABEL BARBUZZA Dimensional Practice (Sculpture) My practice oscillates between objects, collage, site specific, and installation. Discarded books, paper, artificial flowers, shells, textiles, salt, wax, dust, thread are some of the materials I use in my work. Most of these materials are the leftovers from situations of excess and abundance originating from the intersections of power, economics, and geography. I believe the seduction and need to consume and to possess erases any history and value of the “thing� being consumed and discarded. Since 1989 I have been working with discarded books, and I am interested in exploring the use of books as sculptural
objects. The dichotomy expressed by the book as meaning versus the book as an object, adds a new and more complex reading to the work.
PETER CHANTHANAKONE Media, Social Practice, and Design (Animation) My animations are autobiographical and offer a reflective space where I am able to imagine different scenarios and worlds that defy reality. These worlds are rooted in the places I visit which I document through photographs, from urban spaces in Europe to remote caves in Asia. Combined with animations that focus on characters who must overcome insurmountable obstacles, my three-dimensional animated films inspire audiences about the unrelenting spirit and the human condition. Both hope and crippling personal obstacles are constant themes in my work. Yet the human struggle, on a micro and macro level, offers endless possibilities for creative experimentation with animation and technology.
MONICA CORREIA Dimensional Practice (3D Design) Lampyridae Lamp was inspired by the form and warm light of fireflies. The design started as a three-dimensional model that was turned into two-dimensional slices. The shapes were cut in plywood using Computer Numerical Control (CNC) laser technology and assembled to create 33
the three-dimensional form. The process minimized packaging, weight, and left the material with dark edges that reinforce the initial intention of warmth. When lit, the light resembles the sunset light. My work focuses on the challenge of transforming ideas into functional and aesthetically pleasing unique objects, primarily working with digital technologies but also embracing traditional techniques.
JOHN DILG Painting and Drawing I invent landscapes and events that, with the assistance of memory, give me a portal, a pictorial entry into an independence from time. They act out the presumption of stopped time—“stopping time” in the mathematical meaning of “taming the continuum of time.” Related to this, I have also had a long-term interest in the idea of the pictorial object as a form of souvenir. One can say that the purpose of the souvenir is to stop time, through the form of the memory that the object reveals. The fact that landscape is the usual environment in my paintings has less to do with the American Landscape—as it was defined, for example, in the Hudson River School—than it has to do with my respect for the (so-called) “natural” landscape and my sense of regret as we increasingly abandon it.
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LAUREL FARRIN Painting and Drawing I wrestle to balance the cloud of digital noise with my gravitational presence in the world—to absorb information and glean meaning. My work wavers on the threshold between abstraction and recognition and is embodied in the slowness of paint and other materials that impose resistances, obstructions, turns, and flows. Familiar may become unfamiliar; pathetic may become humorous. I stumble into images I have unwittingly invented.
ROBERT GLASGOW Printmaking The “Aerials Series” resides in the realm of cultural fiction. Surface and subsurface migrations, penetrations, and traversings describe the flow of beings from both past and future. Evidences of conflict, avoidance, and isolation, as well as commonalities of purpose and direction are visible. The discovery of these movements encompasses archeological, geological, spectrographic, theoretical, and other, more advanced detective methodologies. Early
written language cues sometimes offer insights as to the configurations of panoramic migratory flow, detailed habitation sites, and always present political fractures.
of art. These combine with issues that focus on the act of making as well as waste, coupled with relationships between technology, machine, and the human hand. Through an ongoing collaboration with the Studio Art building, I reclaim castoff materials left behind from using laser cutting as well as the backing boards of CNC routers that are the records of the incidental marks of making.
SUE HETTMANSPERGER Painting and Drawing ITERATIONS, paintings: Painting is a unique fictive arena in which potentially anything can occur in an indeterminate, shifting space between abstraction and representation, analogue and digital referents. Serving as emblems of the current conflicted ecological awareness we embody as a culture, these works present a collision of disparate configurations, and iterated trajectories. Collaged spaces in these paintings weave together elements and systems of botanical form, fragments of detritus, traces of product packaging material, and a range of digital artifacts, while collapsing, dissolving, and questioning their boundaries.
ANITA JUNG PrintmakingÂ
SARAH KANOUSE Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia) Recollecting Black Hawk is a book-length, image-text essay exploring the commemorative landscapes of the Midwest. It brings together roughly two hundred photographs of historical markers and monuments, organizations, sports teams, consumer products, businesses, parks, subdivisions, and other places that reference the nineteenth-century Sauk leader Makataimeshekiakiak, more commonly known as Black Hawk. Each image is paired with an appropriated text drawn from a wide range of sources: press releases and scholarly histories, government reports and advertisements, and poetry and recipes published in tribal newspapers. The accumulated image-texts suggest a multiplicity of links between past and present, absence and presence, amnesia and survivance.
Traditions of the readymade, appropriation, and art as an everyday occurrence that investigates the act of making and the residue that is left behind is critical to my works 35
MICHELE LAURIAT Grant Wood Fellow in Painting My drawings begin with observations. I notice how the landscape shifts around me as I move through it. I notice how a bunch of leaves might start as a group, then separate out and become silhouettes of individual leaves, before becoming a group again. In the landscape I create plein air drawings and photographs to use as source material. In my studio I use water based paints and dry media to create large, disjointed, landscape drawings. My process, taking me back and forth between control and chance, is one of chaos barely tethered. Not unlike our relationship with the landscape.
Discovering, analyzing, and understanding phenomena are practices that artists and scientists share, but differ in approach. The profoundly strange and wonderful ideas offered by quantum physics, alchemy, and science-fiction find a visual adaptation in my work. Pseudo-sciences and supernatural investigations are also very intriguing as wellsprings for narrative potential. Through a combination of visual and narrative experiments, I explore the nature of reality, history, gender, and personal experience and hope to create images that are at once captivating and anomalous.
STEVE MCGUIRE Dimensional Practice (3D Design)
AMANDA LECHNER Painting and Drawing Through my work I envision moments of experimentation and discovery. My current egg tempera paintings embody the quest for narrative alternatives. The history of science and optics inform my recent work. This content meshes well with the alchemy involved in making paint from scratch using historically based recipes. What often interests me most about science is the story behind the research and discovery. Behind every theory and conclusion there is a human story, sometimes mundane, sometimes extraordinary. 36
Two decades ago accomplishing an event was separate from art making and as simple as saying, “racing on the Iditarod for three days in the dead of winter might make a great story.” Then, “sculpture” was an object pointing to the experience. Now, I commit craftsmanship and tens of thousands of miles to building a bike. Bicycles for the Colorado Trail, the Arrowhead and Tuscobia Ultras, and the Flint Hills of Kansas. Determining, for instance, bottom bracket height, fork offset, and capacity to carry eventspecific equipment involves intense interrogation of what has worked and didn’t, and a history of bicycle design.
DANIEL MILLER Dimensional Practice (Sculpture) Contained has at its center an acrylic dome with a scale model of Chicago inside. Every forty minutes a sun and moon complete a full rotation around this mechanical microcosm. Underneath the city, electronic and mechanical elements control lighting effects within the model. Within the dome “smog,” created by ultrasonic humidifiers, emits from the highway and the nearby coal-fired power station. This three-dimensional landscape has a looping time composition that approximates and condenses our daily cycle. This work was inspired by the now closed Fisk Energy coal-fired power station near Miller’s previous home and studio in Chicago, IL.
VIRGINIA MYERS Printmaking The Codex is a five-panel pastel and hot stamped foil work imaging a scathingly critical narrative of our times. Each panel is complete in itself but linked thematically to the whole. The surreal images newly utilize my own drawings archived over many years. The Codex marks a highpoint of technical achievement in my decades-long research validating foil as a fine-arts medium, triumphing over negative criticisms and even vilification, resulting in the patented Iowa Foil Printer, enabling artists to use
the thitherto commercial foil medium in their studios. I am currently working on a new foil imaging book to accompany the Codex.
JEFF RICH Media, Social Practice, and Design (Photography) This work documents the heavily-controlled and harnessed rivers of the Tennessee River Basin after eighty years of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s policies, ultimately showing the complicated effects of large-scale modernization. The Tennessee Valley Authority was the first government agency whose limits were defined by a geomorphological condition: The Tennessee Watershed. A common misconception of a watershed is that it’s all about the water. While water does play a large part, the land plays an even larger role by directing the water to a common point, such as a river or ocean. Thus, human impact on the land directly affects the water that runs over it. In “Watershed”, I intended to highlight this relationship between land, water, and man within the Mississippi River watershed, the largest watershed in North America. Every watershed is made up of smaller watersheds or basins, and the Southern portion of the Mississippi watershed is made up of three major river basins, the French Broad, the Tennessee, and the Mississippi. Each of these basins form a chapter of the “Watershed” project.
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RONALD M. ROZENCOHN
MARGARET STRATTON
Painting and Drawing
Media, Social Practice and Design (Photography)
In a universe where so little is seen let alone understood, confidence in artistic expression may be a meager illusion, yet standing in front of a great painting can be, for us in the lives we live day to day, clarifying. Images that linger in the imagination create reprieve. I use my past art to begin the next painting, yet once I get going anything can happen. The actual painting journey means getting lost (in the medium) so as, to find one’s way. The found way, if evocative and interpretable, is a new point of departure. The project of painting is discovery; all else is narrative.
“Cuba: A Spy in the House that Castro Built” presents the island nation as a puzzle of conflicting identities; the romanticized but impoverished ruins of Havana compete with the beaches and all-inclusive luxury resorts, demonstrating the country’s failed socialist model. A “Spy in the House that Castro Built” captures this conflict through the juxtaposition of scenes that depict the everyday lives of the Cuban people, and scenarios that reveal Cuba’s luxury economy and identify the island as an idyllic destination for international tourists.
JAMES SNITZER
SERINA SULENTIC
Media, Social Practice, and Design (Photography) Printmaking
Media, Social Practice, and Design
Photographs have always maintained a distance, in both time and space, between object and image and between image and viewer. These images are an attempt to replicate that singular moment of discovery embodied in the early processes of nineteenth-century photography. As objects, they possess an uncanny directness, but their ostensible authenticity only reminds us of the limitations of any photographic image, reproduction, or replica.
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Every memory I have of my recent grandmother consists of visits to her garage freezer to see what she made for our visit, or quick glances at the kitchen counter to see if there were tins of cookies ready for our consumption. For the past year I have been documenting recipes told by family members and some found in her precious recipe boxes. This ongoing project has become more than just words on a page. This project has been about documenting every day functions we do, but never taken the time to fully appreciate. Just like her recipes and stories, I wanted to make this project simple: recreate the beauty of simplicity through photographs and collages.
SERHAT TANYOLACAR
JOSH VAN STIPPEN
Printmaking
Dimensional Practice (Ceramics)
As an artist, my intention in artistic production is to use my daily life experience in satirical and ironical reconstructions often by utilizing nostalgia and national and cultural identity elements. The reconstructed (art) product then intends to create a visual dialogue between itself and its viewer in a two-way conversation. Especially since 2011 I have been researching different, radical, poetical, and innovative strategies to form a (more universal or global) dialogue between the art work and the audience, even if the subject is specifically the other, or the Orient.
Nanoparticles are too small to be seen with the human eye, so my work, Nanoscale, brings nanoparticles to the human scale. The shapes of nanoparticles captured through microscopy imaging are appropriated in my specimens. The size of nanoparticles determines their properties and is critical to research and development of materials. Across many scales, my work explores the positioning and irregularity of nanoparticles and the unique functions that are achieved only on the nanoscale.
SUSAN CHRYSLER WHITE BREANNE TRAMMELL
Painting and Drawing
Printmaking Dinkholt and Heinbar is the collaborative moniker of Breanne Trammell and Jeff Barnett-Winsby. We utilize collaboration and play to break free from the established narratives of our personal work. Our alternative curiosities and interests, that at times seem peripheral, can be explored more freely by utilizing collaborative efforts. Increasingly, our interests have ranged from the grotesque and beautiful to the lonely and the hopeful.
There is a basic human tendency to seek order in the current of experience in which we are constantly swimming. There are a variety of languages (scientific, artistic, and spiritual, as well as ordinary discursive) by which we attempt to organize our worlds, and they frequently borrow from one another—thus the richness of metaphor. My recent paintings strive to represent interior experience and its transitory connections among ideas and emotional states. How do you show the simultaneity of events, experiences of an unstable environment, an unstable relationship, and deep felt emotional responses in symbolic form?
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RACHEL WILLIAMS Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia) My work is diaristic and made over the course of many weeks. Often it begins in my sketchbook. Each layer and drawing influences the next. The pieces start as images and experiences. Sometimes the two are interlaced, sometimes they are distinct. Often through painting and drawing I make sense of the image or images and work to understand and draw meaning from the experience. Most of the themes in my work are centered on domestic situations, small backyard dramas, and interpersonal exchanges. I overlay these with family stories, historical events, and things I have read. Most of the paints that I use are various types of acrylic ink. I also use watercolors, gauche, collage, and bits of paper and maps.
JON WINET Media, Social Practice, and Design (Intermedia) In October 2013 CARPA (Craft Advanced Research Projects Agency) organized a camp at which artists were invited to pursue projects that investigate the military-industrial complex. Camp CARPA was held on a compound in the Mojave Desert town of Joshua Tree, California. At Camp CARPA, Winet and McGowan tested the alpha version of a mobile web application designed to introduce a new paradigm for programming the soldier athlete. 40
Rather than the physical and psychic trauma associated with boot camp, our goal was to play with the absurd notion of a humanizing form of military training. A soldier’s training regimen was turned upside down as a demonstration of a demilitarized-military training.
KEE-HO YUEN Dimensional Practice (Jewelry and Metal Arts) My work is a quest to whimsically comment on human emotion and interaction inspired mainly by Chinese literature. I also use it as a reminder for myself not to drift too far from the attitudes I believe to be important in life. Some of my work is purely an aesthetic and technical investigation. I employ an eclectic use of contemporary and traditional technologies and materials, ranging from combining advanced three-dimensional computer modeling with CNC machining, to traditional fabrication and enameling.
www.art.uiowa.edu uima.uiowa.edu