2015 Out of the Box Catalog

A JURIED OUTDOOR SCULPTURE EXHIBITION 10.02.2015–10.02.2016

featuring the work of :

Luke Achterberg (KY) Jeffie Brewer (TX) Gregory Johnson (GA) Hanna Jubran (NC) Deborah La Grasse (FL) Heath Matysek-Snyder (VA) Charles Pilkey (NC) Alex Podesta (LA) Adam Walls (NC) Mike Wsol (GA) Joni Younkins-Herzog (FL)

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JULE COLLINS SMITH MUSEUM OF FINE ART, AUBURN UNIVERSITY DESIGN BY Janet Guynn and Marcelo Blanco | PHOTOGRAPHY BY Mike Cortez © 2015 Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University. Auburn University is an equal opportunity educational institution/employer.

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We are also grateful to the staff of Auburn University Facilities. The successful installation of these works of art on the museum grounds were made possible with the skillful assistance of Nick Blair of Design Management and Steven Johnston of Landscape Services.

Acknowledgements

On behalf of all of us at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, welcome to our second juried outdoor sculpture exhibition, Out of the Box. The last few months have been very exciting, from the moment we received our first of more than one hundred entries, to seeing the juror‘s final selection, followed by preparing for eleven pieces to be installed on the museum grounds.

There are so many details to keep track of, so many arrangements, phone calls, emails, and issues to resolve along the way. All of this takes enormous patience and skillful coordination, and for that I thank the many people who have diligently worked together to bring this program to fruition. First, I want to acknowledge and extend kudos to Andy Tennant and Jessica Hughes who have once again led our OOTB team. They have done a fabulous job and we are grateful for their hard work and sense of humor throughout the process. They have been assisted by all of our very capable museum staff with special thanks to Mike Cortez, Danielle Funderburk, Janet Guynn, Todd Hall, Dennis Harper, Andrew Henley, Hayley Hillberg, and Delanne Robertson. Thank you for your expertise and willingness to get the job done.

Very special thanks to our juror, Willie Cole, who did an outstanding job in the selection of this handsome exhibition. Anyone who has ever juried such an exhibition knows how challenging this process can be and we are appreciative of his thoughtful consideration, resulting in this wonderful project. We are also grateful to Mr. Cole and his gallerist, Guido Maus at beta pictoris gallery in Birmingham, AL, for providing us with the exceptional opportunity to see a selection of Mr. Cole’s own artwork, which adds a wonderful dimension to our museum’s sculpture program.

One cannot have such an exhibition without the artists who are willing to share their creative energy, imagination, and technical abilities with all of us who will have the pleasure of experiencing their art over the next year. We thank you for being part of this exhibition and for acting as the catalyst for, what we hope will be for many, life-changing moments with art.

Finally, the museum acknowledges the generosity of those who have made this exhibition possible: Julian Roberts Haynes in memory of Dr. Lucile McGehee Haynes, David and Grace Johnson, The Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Partial funding for the project was also made possible through the Susan Phillips Educational Gift Fund.

Here’s to another great year of sculpture at JCSM!

MARILYN LAUFER, Director, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art

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A JURIED OUTDOOR SCULPTURE EXHIBITION The first installment of Out of the Box opened in October of 2013 in celebration of the museum’s 10-year anniversary. The ten sculptures that came together to form that yearlong exhibition helped to energize our grounds in a new and engaging way and resulted in the addition of two new sculptures to the museum’s growing permanent collection of outdoor sculpture.

Angles of Repose, purchased with funds provided by Judith and Thomas Chase in loving memory of Lucille Dickinson Allen and Joseph Wren Allen, and Dreams of Flying, purchased with funds provided by Julian Roberts Haynes in memory of Dr. Lucile McGehee Haynes, have been reinstalled in the gardens closer to the museum’s entrance, providing our visitors the opportunity to experience these wonderful artworks on their way into the museum.

That first exhibition exceeded and expanded our plans for outdoor sculpture here at JCSM, and led to the designation of Out of the Box as a recurring, biennial

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competition. It is our hope that Out of the Box will continue to garner community support and, overall, foster an appreciation for outdoor sculpture here at the museum.

This year’s exhibition once again brings together sculptures created by contemporary artists from across the country to enliven our museum’s grounds and extend the reach and impact of our gallery spaces. Moving outside of the traditional white box, or gallery, we have chosen to position the new works on sites uniquely situated along the Lethander Art Path (LAP) and in the museum’s south field. As visitors walk or drive by, we hope that they will find points of connection with these large-scale works by considering the materials, forms, and space used, as well as their collective interaction with our particular setting. We also encourage viewers to actively involve themselves with the artwork by moving around it—examining it from all angles—taking and sharing pictures (#thisissculpture), and discussing

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it with others—really participating in the special opportunity that this exhibition offers for engaging with art, JCSM, and our community.

As a bonus, we have expanded this year’s exhibition to include eleven sculptures! The featured works, chosen by juror Willie Cole through a blind-selection process, represent the highlights of more than one hundred submissions and offer the timely and relevant perspectives of artists working today. In addition to their exhibition here through October 2, 2016, three top prizewinners will also be chosen from among this group. It has been an exciting and fulfilling opportunity to organize this competition, and it is now our pleasure to present the 2015–16 exhibition, as we invite you to take a step out of the box!

(LEFT) ROBBIE BARBER (American, b. 1964), Dreams of Flying, 2011, welded steel, paint, found objects, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University; museum purchase with funds provided by Julian R. Haynes in loving memory of Dr. Lucile McGehee Haynes, 2014.10 (RIGHT) GREGORY JOHNSON (American, b. 1955), Angles of Repose, 2013, stainless steel on granite sub-base, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University; museum purchase with funds provided by Judith and Thomas Chase in loving memory of Lucille Dickinson Allen and Joseph Wren Allen, 2014.11

ANDY TENNANT, Assistant Director JESSICA HUGHES, Curatorial Assistant

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Juror Willie Cole Willie Cole (American, born 1955) is best known for assembling and transforming ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, and recycled plastic water bottles into imaginative and powerful works of art. Through the repetition and compounding of single objects to form his sculptures and site-specific installations, Cole imbues in them new and transcendent metaphorical meaning, often embodying a critique of Western society’s consumer culture.

Juror Willie Cole shown here with The Worrier.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Cole’s appropriation of the steam iron as a symbolic, expressive object brought him early attention during the 1980s; and that common household appliance continues to be a widely recurring motif in his work. His singular approach of imprinting or scorching the steam iron’s familiar pattern on a variety of materials reveals diverse decorative possibilities while referencing on multiple levels his African American heritage.

Cole wryly evokes European avant-garde traditions in his art— including Picasso’s Cubist sculptures, Dada ready-mades, and Surrealism’s transformed objects—in equal measure to African and African American influences.

Willie Cole’s artwork is found in numerous private and public collections and museums, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

“When choosing others’ work for an exhibition, and even when thinking about my own, I look for something that is transformative. Next, I would look at the piece in terms of storytelling. A lot of art is not abstract; it’s telling a story.”

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2015-16 Finalists

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Joni Younkins-Herzog (Florida, b. 1969)

Delirium, 2013

Steel, abaca fiber, horse hair, artificial human hair, and audio 94 x 42 x 42 inches

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Currently living in Sarasota, Florida, I received my MFA from Indiana University and my BFA from the University of Georgia.

My work is featured in exhibitions across the country, including New York, Miami, San Francisco, and the Art Prize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as internationally in Cortona, Italy; Pabianice, Poland; Cajabamba, Peru; and Sang Arts Village, Ghana. My residency in Ghana left me with an interesting synesthesia of feelings, sounds, and sights.

This work, Delirium, is an attempt to share my experience, including several feverish nights, the effects of malaria pills, loud, 5 a.m. Islamic calls to prayer, textiles, my thatched-roof mud hut, open-air markets, and the chaos of so many people in motion.

My search for beauty and purpose manifests into forms that abstract femininity and vitality. My sculptures combine beauty with absurdity, often blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. Utilizing many mediums, I lure the viewer in with colors, sound, and materials, to contemplate the content in close proximity. Within my work, the human body is displaced, retaining ranges of recognizable features, but what remains is an interest in the dispersal and fertilization of the feminine mystique.

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2015Ð16 Finalists

Mike Wsol

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

Lost Horizon #2, 2013

Atmosphere meeting land at the horizon provides a feeling of place—a sense of exact yet unknown coordinates, a point on an infinite spherical surface. Vast relative flatness offers a view of the sky that reveals the size of the globe and a person’s physical relationship to it.

(Georgia, b. 1973)

Steel and artificial grass 120 x 120 x 120 inches

With my Lost Horizon sculptures, I created a point of isolation and insulation that affords viewers an opportunity to focus on space, landscape, and self. This experience shows how we inhabit the atmosphere with our entire bodies while small parts of us touch the landscape.

This sculpture has an industrial form that is not out of place with the variety of implements, oil rigs, and other machines found in the landscape. Upon closer inspection, the viewer will recognize an entrance that allows access to the interior. Inside, the viewer can stand to raise his or her viewpoint into the green faux-grass-lined funnel. This space insulates sound and focuses the perspective from interior to surface to sky.

Sculpture or architecture can be designed to provide moments of introspection—moments that reveal to the viewer what it is to be a human moving through the atmosphere touching the earth’s surface.

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Charles Pilkey

(North Carolina, b. 1956)

Tree of Good and Evil, 2012 Painted steel and bronze 120 x 72 x 72 inches

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Tree of Good and Evil consists of tools, machine parts, and other found objects, along with bronze and steel figures that are welded to the side of a tree-shape. The work was inspired by the Old Testament parable in Genesis.

It is a metaphor for our ambivalent relationship to technology.

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2015Ð16 Finalists

Alex Podesta

(Louisiana, b. 1973)

Self-Portrait as Bunnies (The Bathers), 2014 Mixed media floating sculpture 54 x 26 x 20 inches above the waterline ARTIST’S STATEMENT: In all of my recent work I have culled the rich fantasies, daydreams, misconceptions, and experiences of childhood and re-contextualized them through the filters of adulthood, experience, and education. This effort has been made in an attempt to plumb the depths of the creative and comprehensive naiveté of youth—to illustrate, in engaging and serio-comic ways, the role of fantasy, “othering,” and conflict in nascent selfawareness; and, through the time-honored tradition of solipsistic navel gazing, to pick gently at the loose thread of wistful escapism inherent in a quiet, downhill slide into maturity.

The central character in my works is usually lost in a reverie of industriousness, paired with doppelganger or other machinations of his childish imagination. In concert, these figures toil at understanding, through experimentation or illustration, existential perplexities ranging from surmountable commonplaces—e.g., what is loneliness and how is it combated?—to metaphysical impossibilities—e.g., who is this god dude? And is he a hero? Like Superman? Or soldiers? Or knights on horseback? And what does hero mean anyway? Of course, no traction will really ever be gained with these pursuits. These boys and toys and bunny/man chimera will be forever locked in the Sisyphean toil of misapplication, miscomprehension, and misunderstanding.

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Hanna Jubran

(North Carolina, b. 1952)

Triad, 2015

Steel and paint 188 x 108 x 96 inches ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

Triad is a sculpture created to identify the power of the number three—the moment of counting to three and the number three used by all people to express “Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds” (a phrase referring to the basic tenets of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion of Greater Iran).

The interplay of elements—form, space, and colors—is seen in a variety of forms as they occur in nature and their relation to the landscape. Between nature, the viewer, and the sculpture, I am condensing time, space, and materials. They are ever changing.

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2015Ð16 Finalists

Adam Walls

(North Carolina, b. 1974)

Core 3, 2014

Steel 78 x 42 x 58 inches ARTIST’S STATEMENT: The majority of my sculpture is concept driven and is often highly viewer interactive. The conceptual component of my work is often derived from some memory that was stirred by the shape of some found object or from some memento that I have held on to since childhood. These things bring up thoughts and experiences that challenge me and guide me through the creative process. There are elements in much of my large works that are derived from my love of fantasy, escapism, and pop-culture imagery.

My sculpture does range in size drastically from minuscule to monumental. The interactive component of my work often involves the viewer’s participation in becoming part of the work. Some of my sculptures only require viewers to watch as they see themselves reflected atop a difficult and imposing staircase—which could represent the challenges we face in order to achieve our goals (as in my sculpture, The Ball and the Red Staircase).

In whatever way my viewer chooses to engage my work, or in whatever material I desire to work in, I find that it is not always necessary that the viewer understand my concept, but it is important to me that I provide a visually exciting experience that might encourage the viewer to see and engage with art more often.

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Deborah La Grasse (Florida, b. 1953)

Union, 2010

Aluminum 72 x 111 x 48 inches ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Some artists look outside the human condition to social issues and societal concerns, and other artists, like me, tend to look inside and question who we are and what is the purpose and meaning of life. We search for connectedness and union in life.

The profound material transformation that exists in nature and in the process of creating art is also something that I find engaging. For me, the process in the casting of metal and the immediacy of fabrication and forging metal express permanence, strength, and become a framework to express ideas.

I think of my sculptures as drawings in space; therefore, they are linear and free-flowing expressions of opposing forces. The conjunction of opposites is found in the union of two transparent cones, grounded by the “S” curve at the bottom and held together at the top by the casting.

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(Virginia, b. 1978)

Komíny-NBS Explore, 2013 Firewood, picnic table, desk, tricycle, paint, and steel pipe 108 x 144 x 48 inches

2015Ð16 Finalists

Heath Matysek-Snyder

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Intrigued by the visual patterns and textures of stacked materials, I investigate the bundling, stacking, and clustering of materials into and around forms. This grouping of materials takes shape as furniture, as sculptural installation, and as interior architecture. Over several years I have developed the Komíny series, a body of work that investigates themes of place and identity through the act of stacking firewood.

I, like many others, have a very specific and real history with the cutting, splitting, and stacking of firewood. Growing up, my family heated with wood and collecting it was a year-round family task. The Komíny (Czech for “stacks”) that I create incorporate meaningful objects directly into firewood stacks.

The embedded artifacts range from books to chairs to tractors, signifying different places, cultures, and histories, depending on the chosen objects and locations.

Komíny-NBS Explore was designed and first installed to commemorate the 30th anniversary of North Branch School, a small and brilliant alternative school nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Nelson County, Virginia. Each of the three objects in the stack represents one decade, as well as integral aspects of education at North Branch—community, learning, and play.

Firewood provided courtesy of Shiloh Firewood Company.

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Gregory Johnson (Georgia, b. 1955)

Centrum, 2015

Stainless steel 73 x 52 x 60 inches ARTIST’S STATEMENT: These new contemporary works, which were started many years ago, are built upon the concepts of traditional works— specifically, the classical qualities of the artwork and the detailed attention to surfaces and form. The modern works are my step in a new direction—works that suggest the pathways of life, the forces of nature, or emotions of our humanity. These works depict or suggest things that we see and are familiar with but cannot necessarily touch or quantify, like the warmth of sunlight or the crashing of a wave.

For the modern works, my starting point is the circle. As a thematic symbol, it reaches out to me with a cleanliness of shape, present in our everyday lives, and because it has no corners— just one beautiful line with no beginning, middle, or end. The circle is an incredible spiritual shape that invites interpretation. I use the entire circle, whole and complete, and contrast it with segments of the circle or shapes that have arcs in them.

I am currently working with maquettes and studies that feature both mirror and brushed finishes in the same work. For future works, I’m looking into adding color and colorful transparencies to be used as a fourth dimension, pulling and pushing shapes in space, visually altering their actual preset positions.

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(Kentucky, b. 1980)

Fettle, 2011

Painted steel 138 x 48 x 42 inches

2015Ð16 Finalists

Luke Achterberg

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: My work explores relationships between fine art and the subcultures of Americana found in automotivecustomizing culture, style-writing culture, and street art—all of which display extremely high technical values developed outside of academia. I identify with these values and am diligent in my attention to the quality and individuality of each work. While working, I think of the customization process that overturns the standardization of automobile mass production into vehicular uniqueness.

I continually play with balance, both physical and aesthetic, creating a visual smoothness or sleekness, what I would call “Super Sleek.”

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Jeffie Brewer (Texas, b. 1971)

Bunny, 2013

Steel 120 x 36 x 36 inches

ARTIST’S STATEMENT: I make things.

I show people how to make things.

I have an insatiable desire to create, to explore, to understand.

I work with my hands.

I work with my head.

My work’s intention is to provide just enough information, allowing for a narrative without delving into total non-representation. Leaving room for interpretation as well as a little mystery, I hope, adds to the viewing experience. My work in graphic design and general fascination with pop culture are heavy influences on my sculptural work.

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1. Joni Younkins-Herzog, Delirium 2. Mike Wsol, Lost Horizon #2 3. Charles Pilkey, Tree of Good and Evil 4. Alex Podesta, Self-Portrait as Bunnies (The Bathers) 5. Hanna Jubran, Triad 6. Adam Walls, Core 3 7. Deborah La Grasse, Union 8. Heath Matysek-Snyder, Komíny-NBS Explore 9. Gregory Johnson, Centrum

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10. Luke Achterberg, Fettle 11. Jeffie Brewer, Bunny

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