Gordon Senior
Silent Har vest Ar t Space on Main Depar tment of Ar t School of the Ar ts
California State University, Stanislaus
300 copies printed Gordon Senior - Silent Har vest April 8–May 6, 2017 Art Space on Main Department of Art School of the Arts California State University, Stanislaus One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382 This exhibition and catalog have been funded by: Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus Copyright Š 2017 California State University, Stanislaus All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. Catalog design: Brad Peatross, School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus Catalog printing: Claremont Print, Claremont, CA Catalog photography: Courtesy of the artist. Photographs included are used under the permission of the artist. ISBN: 978-1-940753-28-7
CONTE N T S Director’s Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Nature, Man and Maker by John Sumser,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Gordon Senior by David Olivant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Curriculum Vitae. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
D IRE C TO R ’S FO R E WORD Silent Harvest represents a chance to view the work of my colleague, Gordon Senior. Time passes with unbelievable speed; for me it seems like only yesterday I was meeting Gordon for the first time. Thirteen years have passed and now Gordon is moving toward another chapter in his life, retirement from the University. Many of us have learned from Gordon and I am sure that this next chapter in his life will bring many delightful surprises. I am excited to be able to be part of this exhibition and to be able to share Gordon’s work for others to enjoy. I would like to thank the many colleagues that have been helpful in presenting this exhibition: Gordon Senior for the chance of exhibiting his wonderful work; Professor Emeritus John Sumser at California State University, Stanislaus and Professor David Olivant for their catalog essays; the School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the catalog design; and Claremont Print and Copy for the printing of this catalog. Much appreciation is also extended to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalogue. Their support is greatly appreciated.
Dean De Cocker, Director Art Space on Main and University Art Gallery California State University, Stanislaus
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Even when Gordon Senior was thrown off balance by the displacement and culture shock he felt moving to America, the core of his naturalist sensibilities continue to be seen in his work. His pieces quietly prod the viewers to contemplate their place on earth and their relationship with fellow inhabitants— the animals. By elevating these commonly overlooked creatures into the realm of art, Senior masterfully prods the viewer to consider their equal importance on this earth.
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—Allison Harrington and Nicole Ruiz Humboldt State University, California
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Between Land and Sea, Norfolk Series, mixed media on paper
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Tools of Unknown Use and Nature (3 & 4), mixed media on paper
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Nature, Man and Maker By John Sumser, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Stanislaus “Modernity’s impression of itself as the expression of ‘universal truth’ has led to a science and philosophy … which seeks to remove ‘man’ from nature…”1 I sometimes drift towards abandoning the distinction between man and nature altogether but then get brought short by an ancient Latin phrase: homo faber, man the maker. Homo faber comes bundled with an additional distinction between nature and artifact, and it is this distinction that Gordon Senior explores in his work. Much of Senior’s work blurs the lines between man and nature. He gives us canoes full of fleeing hares and migrating birds made of maps. He frames nature in ways that are disconcerting and so sheaves of wheat are found carved in the center of stones. In his series of drawings Between Land and Sea birds and mammals are juxtaposed with schematic drawings of sailing ships and in Tree with Friends and Foes a mysterious tool is shown deep underground as if nature emerges from artifact. And, finally, he throws the very essence of homo faber into question in his Tools of Unknown Use. Senior’s Tools look as if designed for very specific, but long forgotten, purposes. The use of tools may be what sets us apart from nature, but what if the rationale behind the purposive shapes escapes us? Then we have tools that embody rationality, but rationality without reason, which is irrational. This is a very Senior moment; a circle of reason and irrationality that is also a demarcation. The Tools Senior presents to us have the mysteriously intentioned business end dissolve into handles of unfinished sticks shaped not by any purpose but by the vagaries of nature. The handles, the very means by which we control our tools and our homo faber natures, are self-created and out of our control. The deepest tension Senior examines may be between the idea of homo faber and the bright plastic of so many of the tools. Are we just playing after all, with our endless making? Perhaps we are really just children and the tools we use to distinguish ourselves from nature simply toys rather than anything of lasting seriousness. Thomas Hobbes began his famous Leviathan with the remark that nature is the art used by God to make and govern the world. We imitate this, Hobbes claims, and make an artificial world. Some scholars have argued that the idea of a creator God makes everything an artifact because everything is made. What draws me most strongly to the work of Gordon Senior is that he makes us lose the sense of a distinction as well as any sense of direction; all that we are and do is woven tightly into relationships that are deep and ultimately beyond articulation and can only be shown. What is left of our certainties, I think, is a wordless sense of joy and good humor. Johnson, Jay T., and Brian Murton. 2007. Re-Placing native Science: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Constructions of Nature. Geographical Research 45, no. 2: 121-29.
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Tools of Unknown Use, (falling hare), mixed media including wood, wax, bronze, charcoal, pigment, and lime, 2003–2017 10
Tools of Unknown Use (red and yellow drawings), paper, pigment, pastel and watercolor, 30� x 20�, 2007
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Tools of Unknown Use (closeup), mixed media, 2003–2016 12
Tools of Unknown Use and Nature (drawing 1 & 2), mixed media, 2016–2017
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Unknown Memories, found objects, 2008
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Memories and Identity, wood, paper and polymer clay, 2010–2012
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Navigating Landscape, wood, wool, paper and alabaster, 12” x 8” x 8”, 2015
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Grain Tower (barley), laminated plywood, alabaster and polymer plaster, 24” x 8” x 8”, 2015 17
Grain Tower (oats), laminated plywood, alabaster and polymer plaster, 2015
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Inside Every Seed, laminated plywood, alabaster, paper and polymer plaster, 14” x 10” x 14”, 2016
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Gordon Senior By David Olivant Multiples, whether of hares, boats, crows, heads, apples, cows, tools, spades, snails, and so on have always been a staple part of Gordon’s output. In the recent work, the individual components resist immediate interpretation. They are generally ovoid or spherical (egg or globe) strewn on the ground somehow casually as if indifferently waiting to be stumbled upon, they are of a size that invites handling. They evoke seeds while simultaneously bearing their image either in positive or negative on their surface and the materials out of which they are made are not immediately obvious. Further it is clear that as meaningful semantic combinations these balls are strangely silent, passive, numb, resistant, obdurate, just “there”. They are like spores, markings or droppings. They hover between artifact and geological or archeological deposit. Even the cereal seed-head hieroglyphics behave as much like fossil imprints as they do ancient Egyptian negative relief sculptures.The hieroglyphs tease us into a reading and we could wax long and lyrical on: the domestication of wild grasses, settled agrarian cultures, biodiversity, barley as the staple diet of gladiators, the 144 million tonnes of it produced worldwide in 2014, at least if we felt so qualified. We feel a little like the pioneers of a future alien but happier civilization who have stumbled across them by chance and in this way they refuse to behave quite like art–objects and seem somehow out of place in a gallery setting reminding a little of Kounellis’s Untitled (12 horses) from 1969 minus the sense of shock. If we study the types of material juxtapositions in any single pod and attempt to replicate mentally, the building of these things, a few facts may surface at least by reference to physical processes as they typically occur on planet earth. Common to many of these orbs, pods or lingams is a stratified section or hemisphere, defined by layers of plywood, that mimics sedimentary stratification, which might itself suggest the social strata evolving from the development of edible cultivars such as are seen depicted on the caps of the orbs, pods or lingams and implied in their forms. This shaft or body is often crowned by a smoother section or cap at one of the poles on which is embossed or imprinted an impression pulled from a mold of a real grain seed-head. The contours of this cap usually bulge in continuation with the spherical or cylindrical convexity but on rare occasion they invert it. Sometimes the ovoid is split through its approximate equator (see Inside Every Seed) to reveal a section of solid interior, in the manner of a cracked geode. Here we might find a section of map opposed to a veined stony surface (see Navigating Landscape and Inside every Seed). Within the distinct oval sections or strata is an implied temporality that makes these forms as much a register of time as an occupation of space. In this sense, and I think back to a future of pioneering alien visitors looking for clues, these objects are time capsules of sorts. If we infer an obvious reference to geological time in the plywood strata, then we may contrast this highly compressed record of the past with the temporal implications of the seed head molds. Clearly, a mold or cast preserves the present physical surface of something in negative with exactitude and without compression. Add to this our understanding of the orbs as seeds and hence metaphors for compact potential futures (all futures are likely only stochastic) and the hieroglyphic qualities of their images as a quasi-code and we have a transition from “pastcompressed” through “present uncompressed” to “future compressed physically in the seed germ and encoded in the hieroglyph”. Past and future time are embedded and encoded in space, present flips between itself and its mirror image.
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Further stratigraphic speculation (back to the laminated plywood) shows that the temporality implicit in the layers is always linear and geological, never annular or concentric in the manner of tree rings. From this we infer that the roundness is coaxed persuaded or even extorted from approximate cubes or flat surfaces. There is no implicit core to these eggs, no nucleus. Hence, despite their apparent informality, their casual ‘thereness’, the sense of having been spawned or laid, each of them appears to have been sanded, hammered, stretched or eroded into their current ovoid incarnation more in the manner of pebbles on the beach than interstellar bodies. In this way the ‘capped’ orbs seem to receive their ultimate vertical extension in the lingam or vessel forms of Grains and Grasses, which add a more human, more insistently phallic and venereal aspect to otherwise chthonic forces. The Harvest Stones, while sharing certain formal and material properties with Grains and Grasses, are in most ways everything the Grains and Grasses are not, so that we might see them as gender opposites. The Harvest Stones are more ‘finished’, more insistently sculptural and more singular, and lend themselves to display on custom stands. Where the Grains and Grasses invite us to contemplate time and space interacting through shifting metaphorical elisions the Harvest Stones are a kind of terminus where time and space are frozen, bounded, memorialized. These forms resist investigation—tied or belted through their virtual waistlines by a ribbon of cast grain like giant candies or balls of wool, squeezed tight enough to resist unraveling. They are insistently horizontal and so grounded that they almost call out for the elevation they receive from the four-legged supports. The sense of completion, of almost premature termination, contained in these squashed ovoids perhaps reflect the artist’s ambivalence over a retrospective that marks an end to fifteen years of separation from his homeland even as he ties up the sale of his Turlock house and contemplates the packaging and shipping across the Atlantic of these same equivocal objects doing double duty as both pointers to fresh starts and as a long rehearsed conclusion of a self-imposed cultural exile. Gordon’s work has consistently been the reluctant product of a displacement about which he remains equivocal, in conversation at least. While this has probably undermined some of the structures he may have felt were essential for his artistic fertility it has simultaneously pushed him to greater levels of ingenuity and invention and to expanding his subject matter well beyond the familiar, the tested and the Anglo-centric. The recent works, made in the awareness of his imminent departure from California in addition to his retirement from teaching, represent something of a coda in the context of this larger retrospective and they seem divided between two contrary urges, the summative resolution and containment of Harvest Stones versus the imminence and implied potency of Grains and Grasses. To this extent at least, under the privileged but uncertain scrutiny of a friend and critic who has been privy to their creation and a beneficiary of the intriguing waste products of their facture, they inherit the discursive urge common to art objects rather than the opacity of nature and reveal a human dimension not readily yielded, and admittedly the, at least partial or possible product of anthropomorphic proclivities on the part of this writer. 21
Grains and Grasses, cement, wood and bronze, 2016
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Crow Series 1. and 2, mixed media, 12” x 16”, 2015
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Harvest Stone, bronze and cement, 16” x 10” x 10”, 2016
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Grasses and Grains, cement and sand, 2017 25
Harvest Stone, cement and wood, 15” x 8” x 8”, 2017
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Harvest Stone, cement and bronze 15” x 8” x 8”, 2017
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Everywhere Landscape (closeup), ceramic, 2014
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Opposite: Harvest Stone (installation), cement, bronze and wood, 2016
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Tools of Unknown Use (closeup), 2003-2017
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G ORDO N SE N I O R Independent Exhibitions
Group Exhibitions
2016 Hares, Birds and Butterflies, Carnegie Arts Center, Turlock, CA
2016 Silent Journeys: Gordon Senior and Eleanor Wood, Sculpture and works
2009 Residency Exhibition, Cortijada Los Gazquez, Velez Blanco, Almeria, Spain.
2009 Butterfly World, MJC Gallery, Modesto, CA.
2016 British Invasion, Lancaster Museum of Art, Lancaster, CA
2008 Tools of Unknown Use and Other Works, First Street Gallery, Eureka,
2016 Waveney Sculpture Trail, Bungay, Suffolk, UK.
2016 Gordon Senior and Eleanor Wood, Crossing Borders, Sculpture and
Humboldt State University, CA.
on paper, 1821 Gallery, Fresno CA
2007 Touching Earth, Rasmussen Art Gallery, Pacific College, Angwin, CA.
2007 Standing on Earth, Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno, Nevada.
2015 Cley 15, Contemporary Art, Cley North Norfolk, UK.
2006 Groundwork, Greenleaf Gallery, Whittier College, Whittier, CA.
2015 Bay Area Gallery Artists in a New Space, Part 2,
2005 About this Earth, University Art Gallery,
2015 The Crow Show, Art Institute San Diego and California Art Institute,
California State University, Stanislaus, CA.
Works on Paper, 1821 Gallery, Fresno, CA.
Don Soker Contemporary Art, San Francisco.
2005 Gordon Senior, Parks Exhibition Center, Idyllwild Arts, CA.
2015 Faculty Exhibition, Merced Community College Art Gallery, Merced, CA.
1999 Kelling Arts Festval, Kelling, UK
2014 Art Faculty On Main, Art Space on Main, Turlock, CA,
1996 Grizedale Centre. Grizedale Forrest, Cumbria, UK
2014 Revisited, Cley Contemporary Art, Norfolk, UK
1995 Crossing Open Ground, Norwich Gallery, Norwich, UK
2014 Inspired by Birds, Norwich Castle, Nowich, UK. 2013 Installations, Don Soker Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA 2013 Flight of the Spoonbill, Cley 13 Contemporary Art,
North Norfolk Project, UK.
2013 Art Auction 2013, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA. 2013 New Acquisitions, Don Soker Contemporary Art, San Francisco, CA 2013 Origins, Elemental Forms in Contemporary Sculpture,
Berkeley Art Center, CA.
2013 Paper Trail, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, CA. 2012 In Praise of Collecting, Carmegie Arts Center, Turlock, CA. 2012 A Celebration of the Myles Meehan Gallery, Darlington Arts Center, UK 2012 Many Faces of Clay, CCAA Mistlin Gallery, Modesto, CA. 2012 Gallery Artists, Don Soker Contemporary Art, San Francisco.
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AC K NOW LE D GM E N TS California State University, Stanislaus
Dr. Ellen Junn, President
Dr. Kimberly Greer, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs
Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Art
Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Chair, Professor
Dean De Cocker, Professor
Daniel Edwards, Assistant Professor
Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor
David Olivant, Professor
Gordon Senior, Professor
Richard Savini, Professor
Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Assistant Professor
Meg Broderick, Administrative Support Assistant II
Andrew Cain, Instructional Technician I
Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II
Art Space on Main
Dean De Cocker, Director
Nikki Boudreau, Gallery Assistant
Special Thanks
Special thanks to John Sumser Professor Emeritus at CSU Stanislaus and Professor David Olivant for their catalog essays, and to all the students at the
Art Department at Stan State. My thanks go to Nikki Boudreau the Gallery Assistant for all her support and help and to students who helped install
the exhibition. I would also like to thank Brad Peatross for designing the catalog and postcard, and Dean De Cocker, Gallery Director for his invitation
to exhibit.
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