Tula Telfair: Reverie by Forum Gallery

TULA TELFAIR Reverie

FORUM GALLERY

TULA TELFAIR Reverie f e b r ua ry 7 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; m a r c h 30, 2 0 1 9

FORUM GALLERY N E W YO R K

MAKING THE UNFAMILIAR FAMILIAR, AND THUS THE FICTIVE REAL “When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: ‘So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school.’ ” 1 Sigmund Freud’s first visit to the Acropolis did not represent his first experience of the ancient temple. His “joyful astonishment” demonstrates that his classes could not make the existence of this physical place wholly true to him. Yet, it also reveals that neither did the relic exist for the psychologist as merely an academic abstraction. His palpable “incredulity” at the encounter (and his protracted rumination about it in a letter to a friend) demonstrates that this ancient place held an exalted place in his imagination, presumably unlike most of the many other places about which he had learned. Before his Greek sojourn and without reliance on the building’s material presence, his internal Acropolis stood saliently on his mental landscape, the story of its significance undoubtedly interwoven with Europe’s history of classical accomplishment. Humans are creatures of place, and our narratives frequently reflect this. The Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Bible, Herodotus’ Histories, Muhammad’s biographies, and Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives all weave strands of story through specific places. Places serve as the locative warp for the narrator’s weft because readers, reciters, and audiences partly define themselves relative to identifiable locations. A Sydney-born Muslim or a Connecticut-raised Greek may never have stood physically in Mecca or before the Hagia Sophia, but those places may yet feel familiar through the stories, descriptions, and pictures shared by family and communi2

ty. While hearing or reading a pilgrimage travelogue, vacation story, ritual rendition, or teacher’s history lecture, they recall the un/ seen and imagined non-imaginary place like someone fingering a bead on a rosary while hearing a prayer litany. Most fiction authors shape places as the ground along which their tale proceeds. Indeed, we have to know where and what “there” is in order to follow Bilbo “There and Back Again.” Paradoxically, part of the delight of that hobbit’s journey stems from his abandonment of the familiar and his traversal of terra incognito. In contrast with Freud’s travel to a memorable landscape he had never before visited physically, other voyagers have long delighted their home communities by offering tales about places beyond the horizon of their knowledge. Pliny, Faxian, al-Biruni, Marco Polo, and Babur all included descriptions of new places whether or not they had visited them. While some of these early travelers’ depictions came from their imaginations and some from reports of other people, Enlightenment Europeans—increasingly entranced with the empirical—made a motto of “seeing is believing.” Europeans finding new places continued to pen descriptions but, when they got home, commissioned artists to illustrate their published travel accounts. James Cook went a step further, bringing an artist—William Hodges—aboard the Resolution for its three-year Pacific voyage. Not only Cook’s published account but also Hodges’ paintings could make the coveted claim of having been rendered from experiences “on the spot.” Readers could stand assuredly in the verbally and visually virtual shoes of the explorer.

Visual culture increasingly erases the borders between fictive and actual landscapes. Three hundred years after James Cook, James T. Kirk enduringly and imaginatively explores “where no one has gone before” on Star Trek. Klingons and Vulcans continue to colonize American minds even as pilgrims perpetually trek to Kirk’s future birthplace (Riverside, Iowa). In other fictional universes, fan tourism booms as devotees descend on the former film sets for fictive places of fantastical lands, whether it be Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine home in Tunisia or Middle Earth’s battlefields in New Zealand. Tula Telfair’s work registers in many of these keys. She provides audiences with land-, sky-, and water-scapes in which they try to find mental and visceral footing. “Is that a real place?” one finds oneself wondering, despite efforts not to. One wants to know, “After seeing this picture, can I say that I have seen this place?” We feel obliged to determine whether or not we are viewing a real or fictive locale—like establishing the genre of a film or book—in order to determine how we will judge the image. If it depicts a real place, we ask ourselves, “How accurate is this to how it really looks?” If we suspect it doesn’t visualize an “actual” landscape, Tula’s art prompts us to wonder, “What is the story of this view? How did I come to see this?” in consonance with the fantastical and exploratory reflex of fixing place within a narrative of discovery. But Tula denies us the answers we seek. She deliberately deters us from knowing by offering enough verisimilitude to spark nascent recognition yet enough majesty, somberness, mythicness, and/or even (occasionally) irreality to undermine our certainty. And then we realize

that the truth for which we sought in these places will not be achieved from their precise mapping onto geographic place or within established narratives, but from our recognition of how the paintings help us feel connected to the world of locations—and the location of our world—that we bodily and cognitively inhabit. Unlike Freud’s emotiveness as the Acropolis’ physical reality collided with his schoolboy memories, our awe/delight/trepidation/wonderment at encountering Tula’s work arises from our brains’ stubborn endeavor to plot such potent feelings onto real places. One painting takes us over a luminous, sprawling landscape, as we might float in our dreams. Another dangles us just below the edge of the atmosphere, leaving us to peer below at the frail skin that stretches across our fragile, cosmically lonely orb. And others drop us into our own shoes in a cascade-chiseled tropical forest or cloud-enshrouded glacial wilderness. These paintings offer us the adventure of exploring what we think we know and what we sense we feel from unfamiliar vantage points and within indeterminate narratives—which is as much as any discoverer ever did.

Peter Gottschalk Professor of Religion Wesleyan University

1 Sigmund Freud. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII (1932-1936): New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works. James Strachey, ed. and trans. London: The Hogarth Press, 1964. 238-248.

ITS MEANING HAS SHIFTED

2019 Oil on canvas 58 x 98 inches

ONE ACCOUNT OF NATURE REPLACES ANOTHER

2019 Oil on canvas 58 x 98 inches

ORDER MASQUERADING AS RANDOMNESS

2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 80 inches

OSCILLATIONS OF THE HEART

2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 76 inches

PRESERVING THE SECRETS OF TIME

2019 Oil on canvas 55 x 78 inches

SET TO RUN FOR ETERNITY

2019 Oil on canvas 68 x 90 inches

WITH FRICTION THE RELATIONSHIP BECOMES COMPLICATED

2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 76 inches

THE QUEST TO RECALL DISCOVERIES

2019 Oil on canvas 60 x 80 inches

VISION TRANSFORMED THE SITE

2018 Oil on panel 24 x 36 inches 20

REMEMBERED AFRICAN LANDSCAPE 1

2018 Oil on panel 11 x 14 inches 21

SEGERA

2018 Oil on panel 22 x 28 inches 22

REPRESENTS ONLY A PART

2018 Oil on panel 20 x 30 inches 23

TULA TELFAIR born

November 30, 1961 Bronxville, NY

education 2001 1986 1984

M.A.A., Wesleyan University M.F.A., Syracuse University B.F.A., Moore College of Art

solo exhibitions 2019 2017 2016 2015 2014 2012 2011 2010 2008 2006 2005 2004 2002

Tula Telfair: Reverie, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair: Invented Landscapes, Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, CT Tula Telfair: Invented Landscapes, Forum Gallery, New York, NY A World of Dreams: New Landscape Paintings by Tula Telfair Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Baton Rouge, LA A World of Dreams: New Landscape Paintings by Tula Telfair Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan, University, Middletown, CT Out of Sight: Imaginary Landscapes by Tula Telfair, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair: Imagination and Tradition, Conde Nast Building, New York, NY Tula Telfair: New Paintings, The Durst Corporation, New York, NY Paintings by Tula Telfair, Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, CT Tula Telfair: Landscapes in Counterpoint, The Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT Located at the Edge of a Momentary Convergence: New Landscape Paintings by Tula Telfair, Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Paintings, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Selected Works, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair: New Paintings, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA New Work, Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Landscapes by Tula Telfair, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA

2001 1999 1998 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1986 1984

Tula Telfair: Paintings, Marquard Bank, Hamburg, Germany Tula Telfair: New Paintings, DFN Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair: New Paintings, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Tula Telfair: New Work, DFN Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair, Arsenal, New York, NY New Paintings, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Tula Telfair, New York Life Building, New York, NY Constructed Landscapes: Series III, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Constructed Landscapes: Series IV, DFN Gallery, New York, NY Tula Telfair, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Landscapes, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA New Work, Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, CT Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Xerox Building, Chicago, IL Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT Kirkland Fine Art Gallery, Millikin University, Decatur, IL Sampson Art Gallery, Thiel College, Greenville, PA Five Points Gallery, East Chatham, NY Blue Hill Gallery, Hudson, NY Paula Allen Gallery, New York, NY Paula Allen Gallery, New York, NY Michael Rockefeller Gallery, SUNY at Fredonia, NY Mid-Hudson Science and Arts Center, Poughkeepsie, NY Smith Gallery, Syracuse, NY Smith Gallery, Syracuse, NY 25

selected group exhibitions 2018 2017–18 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 26

LAND & SEA & SKY, MM Fine Art, Southampton, NY Artists by Artists: The Artist as Subject, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Reach for the Sky, Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV Favorite Things: A Holiday Exhibition, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Forum Gallery Celebrates 55 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Annual Alumni Exhibition, Moore Gallery, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA 20/21 Twenty 21st Century Visionary Artists, Forum Gallery, NY Nature Unbound, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Works From the Permanent Collection, Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV Re-presenting Representation VIII, Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY Works From the Collection, The Hudson River Art Museum, Yonkers, NY Art in Embassies, Sofia, Bulgaria Singular Vision, Forum Gallery, New York, NY W. O. P., Forum Gallery, New York, NY 45th Annual Collector’s Show, Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AR Five Decades: Art and Artists of Forum Gallery 1962-2012, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Art in Embassies, Sofia, Bulgaria Art in Embassies, Colombo, Sri Lanka Vantage Point 2011, Forum Gallery, New York, NY The Power of Land, American Embassy, Colombo, Sri Lanka Group Exhibition, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Contemporary Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture: A Summer Selection, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Group Exhibition, Forum Gallery, New York, NY The Power of Land, American Embassy, Colombo, Sri Lanka The Platonic Ideal, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Summer Selections, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Scene in America, Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC Gallery Artists: New Work, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Gallery Artists, Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999

Gallery Artists, New Work, Forum Gallery, New York, NY New Acquisitions, Forum Gallery, New York, NY The Contemporary Landscapes Show, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Modern and Contemporary Landscapes, Forum Gallery, New York, NY The Art of the Gettysburg Review: Representation in Contemporary American Painting, Schmucker Art Gallery, PA The Importance of the Environment, American Embassy, Dhaka, Bangladesh Landscape, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA The Faculty Show, Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, CT The Importance of the Environment, American Embassy, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Work by Gallery Artists, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Summer Exhibition, Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Summer Days, Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Gallery Artists, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Contemporary Landscapes, Forum Gallery, New York, NY DFN Gallery, New York, NY American Embassy in Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal Works by Forum Gallery Artists, Forum Gallery, New York, NY Works on Paper, Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, Pa Skies and Scapes, DFN Gallery, New York, NY Contemporary Landscapes, Forum Gallery, New York, NY NY City, DFN Gallery, New York, NY Forum Gallery, New York, NY Forum Gallery, New York, NY Stux Gallery, New York, NY DFN Gallery, New York, NY Tom Androla Gallery, Houston, TX Stux Gallery, New York, NY New Gallery, Houston, TX DFN Gallery, New York, NY Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA The Discovery Museum, Bridgeport, CT New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, Summit, NJ Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY DFN Gallery, New York, NY

1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991

TIAA CREF, New York, NY Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Forrest Scott Gallery, Millburn, NJ DFN Gallery, New York, NY Delaware Art Museum, Annex Gallery, DE Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL DFN Gallery, New York, NY Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA Elaine Langone Center Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA Hurlbutt Gallery, Greenwich, CT Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Peter Joseph Gallery, New York, NY Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Bent F. Larsen Gallery, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM State of the Art Gallery, Ithaca, NY The Hammond Galleries, Lancaster, OH Redding Museum of Art, Redding, CA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY Five Points Gallery, East Chatham, NY College Art Gallery, SUNY at New Paltz, NY Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Stedman Art Gallery, Rutgers University, NJ A.I.R. Gallery, New York, NY Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, CT Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI

1990 1989 1987 1986 1984 1983 1980 1978

Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Erector Square Gallery, New Haven, CT Graham Horstman Gallery, Denton, TX Westminster College Art Gallery, New Wilmington, PA Redding Museum of Art, Redding, CA Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, TX The Nave Museum, Victoria, TX Cultural Activities Center, Temple, TX Dishman Art Gallery, Lamar University, Beaumont, TX Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX Shore Art Gallery, Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX Dutchess County Armory, Poughkeepsie, NY Holman Gallery, Trenton State College, Trenton, NJ Valeur, Rhinebeck, NY Hopkins Art Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH The Alternative Museum, New York, NY Mid-Hudson Science and Arts Center, Poughkeepsie, NY Paula Allen Gallery, New York, NY Michael Rockefeller Gallery, SUNY at Fredonia, NY Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY Cheltenham Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Paley/Levy Gallery, Philadelphia, PA State Capital Rotunda, Harrisburg, PA Harrisburg Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA

public collections Arkansas Art Center Barclay’s Barnabas Health Beck’s Beer Brauerei Beck & Company Cablevision The Chubb Group City of Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Creedon Keller and Partners Deloitte Touche Epoch Investment Partners, Inc. The Federal Reserve Bank General Electric Corporation The Grand America Hotel Hanseatic Corporation Hudson River Museum The Huntington Museum of Art Invenergy Katten Muchin Rosenman L.L.P. Marquard Bank Mastercard Corporation Medicis Corporation Metropolitan Life The Millbrook School Moore College of Art NBC Universal The New Orleans Museum of Art Oblon, Spivak, McClelland, Maier & Neustadt, P. C. Omni Hotels Redding Art Museum Russ Corporation Ruth Chenvin Foundation Savoy Restaurant Seven Bridges Foundation St. Barnibis Health Care Systems Southpoint Capital Advisors, LP Steelcase Corporation Syracuse University TD Bank Tower Group 28

Trenton State College U.S. Department of State VanGuard Collection Vlasic Corporation Wesleyan University Wiley Publishing Women’s Health U.S.A. Zilkha & Company

grants, awards & fellowships 2018

Djerassi Resident Artists, Woodside, California

Thomas and Johanna Baruch Fellowship