InChoate and Sublime

Artist Bio Born: 1948, Hayward, California Resides: San Antonio, Texas Artist website: www.kentrush.com Academic Experience: Professor Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1982 – current MFA University of Texas, Austin, 1979 MA University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1975 BFA California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, 1970 Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2006 Art Gallery, Center for Fine and Performing Arts, Texas A&M International University, Laredo 2003 Amarillo Museum of Art, Texas 2002 Legion Arts/CSPS, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 1998 McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas 1995 Artpace, San Antonio, Texas 1994 Martin Museum of Art, Baylor University, Waco, Texas 1993 Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico 1992 Dowd Fine Arts Center Gallery, State University of New York, College at Cortland 1990 University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Perú The Photographer’s Gallery, London, England 1988 Galeria Del Taller De Las Artes Plásticas, Oaxaca, México 1986 Art Space, Los Angeles, California 1984 Bluxome Gallery, San Francisco, California McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas Selected Group Exhibitions: 2008 Stephen F. Austin University, Nacogdoches, Texas 2007 Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe 2006 University of Toledo Visual Art Gallery, Ohio

Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England, Bristol, England 2005 Fort Worth Community Art Gallery, Texas 2004 Cal State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California 2003 McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana 2002 Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, Texas 2001 Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, Texas 808 Gallery, Boston University, Massachusetts 2000 San Antonio Art League Museum, Texas 1999 Louisiana State University Union Art Gallery, Baton Rouge 1997 Parchman-Stremmel Gallery, San Antonio, Texas 1995 Richard Levy Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico Arkansas State University Art Gallery, Jonesboro 1994 Diverse Works, Houston, Texas Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas The Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York 1993 California State University, Chico Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi 1992 Arlington Museum of Art, Texas Longview Museum and Art Center, Texas 1990 Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey 1989 Baylor University Gallery, Waco, Texas 1986 San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas Recognition and Awards: Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Artist’s Fellowship in Photography, 1991-92 Invited Artist-in-Residence, Tamarind Institute, 1991 President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Creative Activities, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1990-91 Partners of the Americas Grant, Lima, Perú, 1990 Invited Participating Artist, 9th Drake Print Symposium, Drake University, 1990

Senior Fulbright Fellowship, Research/Lectureship, Oaxaca, México, 1988 Selected Public Collections: Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, New Mexico Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana Instituto de Obra Gráfica de Oaxaca, México McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas Museu de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional, Brazil Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas Oakland Museum, California AT&T Center (SPURS Arena), San Antonio, Texas University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque

Kent Rush

InChoate and Sublime September 23 – November 28, 2010

Front Cover No Title, 2009–10 gelatin silver print 48 x 48 inches Inside Fold No Title, 2009–10 gelatin silver print 48 x 48 inches

Please call our Audio Cell Phone Tour 210.280.4028 to hear the artist talk about his work.

300 Augusta San Antonio, Texas 78205.1216 ph 210.224.1848 | www.swschool.org

Southwest School of Art

EXHIBITION DATES September 23 – November 28, 2010

Kent Rush:

InChoate and Sublime Russell Hill Rogers GallerY I NAVARRO CAMPUS

PUBLICATION SUPPORT Michael C. Powanda, PhD and Elizabeth D. Moyers, PhD ARTIST SUPPORT University of Texas at San Antonio

In a world dominated by digitally mediated images (fine art and otherwise), emphasis on reproduction quality, image manipulation, technology, and postmodern discourse on the implications of it all frequently take precedence over the picture itself. While it would be a vast oversimplification to say that Kent Rush’s artwork is a formalist, object-maker’s rejection of these ideas, there is something immensely gratifying about the unstudied simplicity of his images, the low-tech way they are made, the quiet curiosity they arouse, and the sensual physicality of the photograph itself.

manufacture. Curiously formed chunks of concrete rubble, isolated architectural fragments, inverted objects and industrial sacks of obscure purpose lose their functional potential and meaning to the grainy, offkilter perspective of the photograph. The scale is often confusing, monumentalizing small objects, or presenting in actual scale what we are used to seeing as much smaller in reproduction. Truth can be stranger than fiction, and it is the hunt for an ambiguous image, paired with the possibility of aesthetic transcendence, that intrigues Rush.

Rush began his career as a printmaker, steeped in the techniques of drawing and painting. He incorporated photographic processes and elements early on, including photomontage and drawing in his paintings, and experimenting with various photo techniques within traditional printmaking processes. It was at this time, in the 1970s, that he was presented with the gag-gift of a cheap, plastic Diana camera. Catapulted to cult status in recent years, the Diana was originally an inexpensive Chinese novelty, quickly phased out of the consumer market because its all-plastic body and lens made it almost impossible to control. Rush didn’t use it until 1988, when he spent a year teaching in Oaxaca, México. In part because he was outside his typical visual and physical environment and in part, he says, because his primary means of transportation was a bicycle, it slowed things down and brought a different focus to his surroundings. It was this original set of images featuring isolated, ambiguous forms and textures, enlarged and printed on 4’x4’ sheets of paper, and wet-mounted to aluminum or wood panels, that led to the ongoing series of large, square format prints presented at the Southwest School of Art.

The printmaker’s hand is always present in Rush’s photographs, from the manipulated surfaces of earlier works to the weight and texture of the heavy paper, the carefully controlled character of the pigment densities, the labor-intensive traditional development process, and the accidental (though often accentuated) atmospheric quirks of the camera itself: light leaks, dark patches, blurred fish-eye perspective, and the occasional “eclipse” effect produced, according to Rush’s theory, by the plastic “aperture” holes (there are only three settings — small, medium and large) not slipping into exactly the “right” position. However spontaneous and uncontrolled the photographic process may be, Rush is anything but haphazard in his printing. The velvety textures — both visual and physical — are part of the seduction, inviting the viewer to linger on the surfaces, forms, and images.

Rush often refers to the forms in these images as “dumb” in both senses — they tend to be clumsy and unrefined, and are generally mute in regard to their real-world function, or the questionable circumstances of their

This formal seduction is somewhat paradoxical, because it operates in tandem with the literalist impulse, when confronted with a photograph, to figure out what the depicted objects are, where they might be, and how they function in the “real” world. If Rush came to photography through the back door of printmaking, it was a door left intentionally open to lure curious passersby into his realm of formal transfiguration. However unintentional the actual objects in the photograph may be, the fact that they are somehow man-made is neither accidental nor incidental. That they are of little or no interest,

notice, or aesthetic value until photographed and printed in such a way as to accentuate the formal and aesthetic qualities asks the viewer to reflect on the impulse to figure it out, to make some logical sense of what we’re looking at. Ultimately, the formal qualities of these works — the ambiguous shapes, the interplay of light and dark, focus and blur — are what captivate us, precisely because the objects are so nondescript. This exhibition also includes a new series of images, which Rush refers to as the Sentinel Series. In them, leafless trees are covered by barren vines, creating tangled masses and volumes that appeal to Rush’s sense of inarticulate, clumsy configurations transformed through the photographic process. The soft surface of the carbon print allows the viewer to linger on the tonalities, the layered brambles becoming tangles of light and dark lines, suggesting the texture of an obsessive graphite drawing. Taken with a large-format camera, the images are printed from an actual size negative using the carbon transfer process, one of the earliest photo-fixing techniques. Again, the connection between photography and printmaking is revealed in Rush’s compulsion to create a hand-pulled print, and to revel in the textures, surfaces, tones and elegance of his intentionally ambiguous, uncontrolled images. Shifting his focus from human made to naturally occurring forms, Rush claims the Sentinel Series is too new, to his mind, to fully determine what’s going on or where it will go. For an artist who considers the past 22 years of image making as a single series, this is perhaps understandable. Yet in all his works, there is a quirky humor tempered by careful observation, a curiousness that compels us to take a second look, and to ponder the visual and poetic possibilities in the mundane details and accidental grace in our physical, visual world. Diana Roberts Art Critic, San Antonio, Texas

Above From Sentinel Series No Title, 2009–10 carbon transfer print 8 x 10 inches

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