In My Likeness

IN MY LIKENESS

Mequitta Ahuja | Michelle Dickson | Kyle Hackett Julia Oldham | Sheldon Scott | Alessandra Torres

THE SILBER GALLERY

Goucher College Athenaeum

“I always take a close look at those who lose themselves in self-portraits. They are solitary souls, prone to introspection, who have really grappled with their existence.”

— Young-ha Kim

In My Likeness brings together six contemporary artists who each feature themselves as the subject in their works. Through sculpture, painting, performance, photography, and video, the artists explore different aspects of selfhood that are far removed from the typical self-portrait. Instead, their works focus on the fluidity of identity and the different selves we portray. Historically, self-portraiture has been used as a didactic tool in teaching budding artists how to draw the human form from observation; armed with a mirror—or a photograph—they themselves are a readily available model. Undercutting the traditional and more formal aspects of self-portraiture, artists today confront a multitude of complexities relating to the self. In today’s culture we simply cannot perceive ourselves without subconsciously knowing that other people’s perceptions play a significant role. Thus, self-portraits are ultimately signifiers of self-consciousness. They offer fertile areas of exploration in terms of cultural and social identities, gender, class, race, physical abilities, and sexual orientation.

Personal power over imagery and context is also paramount in self-portraiture; this attempt to control how one is perceived is exemplified by our obsession with modern day selfies. Sometimes, the self-portrait is less about personal identity and more a fictional or historical character embodied by the artist. These fictitious depictions allow artists to illustrate autobiographical narratives in a seemingly safer way; the artists are able to remove some of their vulnerabilities in favor of subversion. In the broader spectrum of contemporary visual art, the use of oneself is not that common. However, in other art forms such as dance, theater, poetry, and music, it is so commonplace we fail to recognize it as self-portraiture. Whether performing directly for an audience, or documenting a performance through video or photograph, artists use their bodies and voices to tell a story that connects us emotionally and physically, while peeling away layers that cloak and bind us all. Expressive in their emotional density, the works in this exhibition offer multiple entry points to the always elusive question, who am I? — Laura Amussen, Curator

MEQUITTA AHUJA

Mequitta Ahuja’s project is to unmask and consolidate the figurative tradition and to stage an intervention. In the series Performing Painting, she positions a woman of color at the fulcrum of a discourse on representation, making the tradition of figurative representation clear by distilling its form to its salient motifs, including one-point perspective, architecture that frames a narrative, and the allegorical figure. In a single work, Ahuja combines different types of representation—realism, schematic design, and stylized form. She uses free brushwork alongside controlled description in concert with methodically constructed surfaces of layered paint. The result is highly textured, large-scale paintings that visually catalog ideas and approaches to painting across time and geography, including Egyptian form, Giotto frescoes, Hindu figuration, and early American painting. By working strategically within painting’s pasts, Ahuja knits her contemporary concerns, personal and painterly, into the centuries-old conversation of representation.

Performing Painting is a form of tribute, pedagogy, and intervention—tribute, out of the artist’s sincere admiration; pedagogy, by making something vast comprehensible; and intervention, by unmasking the tradition, making pointed substitutions to the tradition, and by positioning a woman of color as the figurative tradition’s agent and progenitor.

Performing Painting: Birthday, 2016 oil on canvas 52” x 80” 7

MICHELLE DICKSON

Each time we recall a memory, it is a little less detailed, a little less accurate. The instability of memory, along with time’s observable effects on the body and our relationships to each other and our environment, serves as the foundation of Michelle Dickson’s work. She attempts to reveal the thin lines that separate presence and absence, tension and release, the beautiful and the grotesque.

Dickson combines the texture of skin, bark, and the surface of walls to highlight the similarities among our environment, our collective memory, and ourselves. Each of these textures functions as a barrier to delicate interiors. That juxtaposition reveals an inherent fragility—the danger of the protected becoming exposed.

Dickson’s work emphasizes the dependence humans have on their natural environment for survival and the paradox of its continual abuse and destruction. Time and its effect serve as a connective thread. There is an anxiety in memory—in remembering, misremembering, and forgetting the details that make up a life, but the collective memory goes deeper. It’s in the bark of a tree, the skin of a person, and the surface of the walls that simultaneously exist and deteriorate around us, functioning as a testimony that our fates are forever intertwined.

Neither Mine Nor Yours, 2015/2016 birch plywood, oil paint, and encaustic wax 12” x 7” x 6.5” photo by: Joseph Hyde 8

KYLE HACKETT

Kyle Hackett believes that art can shed light on histories and traditions that are concurrent with the social and cultural conditions of a particular time. Painting is a way for him to reassess his position within this timeline.

Manipulating the authority of representational portraiture, Hackett deconstructs historical ideas of secure identity and fixed-painting techniques. He highlights the tension between self and the constructed image as he attempts to clarify his contemporary hopes, fears, and insecurities about racial and socioeconomic progress. By putting himself in the position of sitters from precarious 19th and 20th century modes of portrayal, Hackett’s work is rooted in the need for empathy and a historical desire for connection and feeling.

Using academic, multilayered painting approaches, his work deconstructs the technical and social fabric created by, but not limited to, painting tradition. Through forms of self-representation, Hackett emphasizes conflicts of inner vs. outer in hopes of fostering new realities and new ways of being understood as not brown or white, wealthy or poor, but human. Often acknowledging classical method’s incapacities for telling the truth, Hackett stresses ideas of vulnerability, false glamorization, and the anxiety of reconciling the past with the present.

Forward Restraint, 2015 oil on panel 32” x 24” 11

JULIA OLDHAM

In her time-based work, Julia Oldham combines live action video with animation to create narratives about science and nature.

The character she plays in her video work is a fantastical self: the self that has a love affair with a coyote, discovers the infinite, and splits into matter and antimatter. Her characters are guided by unrequited longing and desire, a reflection of the artist’s impossible desires to understand the unknowable and transcend humanness. In performing, Oldham goes through the same journey process as the character. Physically moving through a story changes the narrative structure when the body disagrees with a movement or environment, creating new gestures by chance.

Oldham uses animation as a means of making the impossible visually possible and blending the real world with invented ones, hand drawing each frame on a light box. This process of drawing is visible in the squirming, scratchy lines of the characters’ wrinkles and fur, and in the strange and uncanny transitions between drawings. Oldham superimposes these rough animated characters onto the real and imagined landscapes of her live action video worlds. These visual elements pull the dreamworld into her narratives to create a visual language that moves seamlessly between the sweet and the creepy.

Still from In the Beginning There Was Nothing, 2015 HD video and animation 4:15 12

SHELDON SCOTT

Sheldon Scott is a performance artist whose practices include sculpture, photography, installation, storytelling, objects, and ephemera. Scott’s work lives at the intersection of race, economics, and sexuality, while contesting the mythologies of physical exceptionalities of the Black male form. As a performance artist, Scott makes bodies of work to support his ephemeral practice and narratives. Scott uses his identities of Black, Gay, and Gullah/Geechee to inform his work, which is largely autobiographical, and to craft narratives to reach broad audiences through evoking the empathetic.

Sweet Boy, 2013 C-print on archival paper 38” x 26” ed:20 Courtesy of Connersmith 15

ALESSANDRA TORRES

At birth, Alessandra Torres was placed in an incubator blindfolded and naked, forcing her to understand the world through physical sensation. Torres’ childhood in Puerto Rico allowed her an unrestricted physical exploration of the world: running around naked, mimicking the local exaggerated hand gestures and body language, and dancing to the multi-layered beats and rhythms of the island’s music.

The body is the starting point for all of Torres’ work. She explores its ability to function as a mark-making tool and to communicate thoughts and emotions. She also plays with the body as form with the malleable nature of physical identity. Torres allows herself to be directed by physical impulses. She seeks to blend seamlessly into foreign landscapes: Her reclining body becomes a mountain; a thirty-foot long braid of blonde grass connects her to sandy dunes. Photography captures these moments of transformation and connection—when her body merges with its surroundings, when a dance or movement becomes a drawing, when her figure becomes a character in a fairytale. Torres hopes her artwork will help make viewers aware of their physical presence in space, to challenge and modify their movement, and to encourage the use of the body as a means of communication and connection.

Personal Space, Closet Study, 2011 archival digital photograph, limited edition of 10 24” x 36” unframed 16

ARTIST BIOS

Mequitta Ahuja holds an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. In 2007, Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote of Ahuja’s NY debut exhibition, “Referring to the artist’s African-American and East Indian background, the pictures turn marginality into a regal condition.” Museum exhibitions include: A Woman’s Hand at the Saatchi Gallery, State of the Art at Crystal Bridges, Marks of Genius at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Portraiture Now at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Houston Collects African American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, and Dancing on the Hide of Shere Khan at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Ahuja has been an artist-in-residence at the Core Program, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy. Ahuja’s work has appeared in Modern Painters, and in 2010, she was featured in ArtNews as “An Artist to Watch.”

Michelle Dickson is a Baltimore-based artist who received an M.F.A. in 2011 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Maryland, Illinois, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York. She was recently included in the Baltimore Artist + WPA exhibition curated by Mera Rubell at Marianne Boesky Gallery in NYC. She was a resident at Teton Art Lab in Jackson, WY and Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD. Currently she is a resident artist at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, MD. In 2015, Dickson had two solo exhibitions: Hillyer Art Space in Washington, D.C. and Julio Fine Arts Gallery, Loyola University, Baltimore, MD. Kyle Hackett is based in Washington, D.C. He earned his M.F.A. in painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art, and his B.F.A. in fine arts as a McNair Scholar from the University of Delaware. Hackett has completed multiple residencies and has received numerous honors and awards, including Best in Show at the 2014 Bethesda Painting Awards Exhibition. His work has been featured in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. Additionally, Hackett was a semifinalist for the 2016 BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK. Hackett’s work is notably supported and collected by Ethan Cohen New York, Wangechi Mutu Studio and University of Delaware’s Museum of African American Art. He has exhibited work across the country. Hackett’s upcoming 2016 exhibitions include solo shows at NOVA (Sterling, VA), Strathmore (Bethesda, MD), and Yellow Door Studios (Leonardtown, MD).

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Julia Oldham studied art history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and Eugene, OR. Oldham’s work has been screened/exhibited in New York at Art in General; MoMA PS1; The Drawing Center; the Bronx Museum of Arts; and the Dia Foundation at the Hispanic Society; as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. Her work has been supported by Artadia, New York, NY; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY; Outpost Artist Resources, Ridgewood, NY; the Oregon Arts Commission, Portland, OR; and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago, IL. She has participated in numerous residencies across the country. This summer her work is included in the Portland Biennial at Disjecta, Portland, OR. Oldham also collaborates with artist Chad Stayrook, known together as Really Large Numbers.

Sheldon Scott, of Pawley’s Island, SC, received his B.S. in psychology from Francis Marion University. After years as a practicing psychotherapist, he began his creative practice as a storyteller in 2005. He has since performed four sold-out solo storytelling shows in the Capital Fringe Theatre Festival and various venues including Busboys & Poets and the Hirshhorn Museum. Scott’s creative focus has now become his fine art practice. He has exhibited his works at (e)merge art fair, WPA Select Auction, Arlington Arts Center, Delaware State University, Art Miami, and the Smithsonian National African Art Museum. He has also been invited to participate in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s new series, IDENTIFY: Performance Art as Portraiture, his first museum show, in the fall of 2016. He is represented by ConnerSmith Contemporary Gallery. His upcoming book project, a memoir, Shrimp & Griots, is based on his storytelling narratives of the same name.

Alessandra Torres, raised in Puerto Rico, received a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an M.F.A. in sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University on a Jacob K Javits Memorial Fellowship. Torres’s performances, installations, and photographs have been widely exhibited in venues and exhibitions including: the “Options!”

Biennial, Washington D.C.; Art Basel Miami; Exit Art’s “Reconstruction Biennial”; Kim Foster Gallery and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York City; the Arlington Art Center & Artisphere, Arlington, Virginia; the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Akademie Kunst Industrie, Holland; Keith Talent Gallery, London; and Bilbao, Spain for her first international solo exhibition at Fundación BilbaoArte Fundazioa. Torres’ work is included in numerous private and public art collections, including the Art in Embassies Program and the D.C. Art Bank. She has participated in such prestigious residencies as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Sculpture Space, Vermont Studio Center, the Prague Summer Theatre Program, and the Creative Alliance.

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IN MY LIKENESS Mequitta Ahuja | Michelle Dickson Kyle Hackett | Julia Oldham Sheldon Scott | Alessandra Torres

June 21 – August 14, 2016 ARTISTS’ RECEPTION AND TALK

Thursday, July 21, 6-9 p.m.

THE SILBER GALLERY

Sanford J. Ungar Athenaeum DIRECTIONS

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

GALLERY HOURS

11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday – Sunday 410-337-6477

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.

This is a satellite exhibition in conjunction with Artscape and the Gallery Network presented by M&T Bank. You may also want to attend the reception for Towson University’s Artscape exhibition, Mission Universe: A Curanaut’s Journey, happening concurrently, July 21st, 2016 from 6 to 9 p.m. Sponsored by M&T Bank and BCCAS.

www.goucher.edu/silbergallery