The Annual Faculty Exhibition highlights recent artwork by permanent and visiting studio art faculty from Davidson College’s Art Department. From digital media to painting and printmaking, this exhibition celebrates the variety of processes and techniques of the studio art faculty.
Tyler Starr Assistant Professor of Art societal perceptions of the land around us. The forms of the visualizations are influenced by printed ephemera such as touristic brochures that present digestible history of sites with troublesome associations, souvenir postcards, and used car classifieds found at truck stops. Information for imagery is gathered from intelligence reports released through leaks and the Freedom of Information Act that were generated around desperate solutions to complex problems and violent opposition to civil rights.
Tyler Starr, Redress Papers: Descry, 2016, Photogravure, 15 x 22 in.
Combining research, direct observation and poetic associations, Tyler Starr’s mixed-media works on paper visualize political and social conundrums in such forms as geographic backdrops of tragic events and prophetic KKK motorcades from declassified FBI documents. Meticulous investigation of primary documents is used to shed light on unresolved civil rights issues, fringe movements, and
Starr received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Minnesota. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland. In 2011, he graduated with a PhD in Studio Arts from Tokyo University of Fine Arts where he was a recipient of the Japanese Ministry of Education Scholarship. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including a 2011 Grant Wood Fellowship at the University of Iowa, a 2013 Christiania Researcher in Residence in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a 2014 OMI International Arts Center residency. His work has been featured in many exhibitions, including Yale University’s Haas Arts Library, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Liège, Belgium, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.
The William H. Van Every and Edward M. Smith Galleries play a fundamental role in the life of Davidson College. The Galleries support the academic mission of the College through the presentation, interpretation, and discussion of primarily contemporary artworks in all media, for students, members of the Davidson community, and the public. Gallery exhibitions and programs nurture individual thinking, develop visual literacy, and inspire a lifelong commitment to the arts. Van Every/Smith Galleries Katherine and Tom Belk Visual Art Center 315 North Main Street, Davidson, NC 28035 704.894.2519 www.davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org Gallery Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10am–5pm Thursday, 10am–7pm Saturday & Sunday, 12–4pm while classes are in session Lia Newman, Director/Curator, linewman@davidson.edu Elizabeth Harry, Assistant Curator, elharry@davidson.edu Publication © 2017 All rights reserved. Images: Courtesy of the artists. This publication was produced in conjunction with the Annual Faculty Exhibition, curated by Elizabeth Harry, Assistant Curator, featuring the work of Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, Katie St. Clair, and Tyler Starr, presented at Davidson College’s Van Every Gallery, March 16–April 14, 2017. Design: Graham McKinney Printing: Boingo Graphics
on the cover: Katie St. Clair, Detail of hanging material left as a by-product from time-based painting installation, 2017
VAN EVERY GALLERY
Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, Katie St. Clair, and Tyler Starr Annual Faculty Exhibition
Joelle Dietrick
Owen Mundy
Katie St. Clair
Assistant Professor of Art
Visiting Associate Professor of Digital Studies
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Soho20, New York, and has permanent public artworks at the University of North Texas and the City of Tallahassee, Florida. She is a MacDowell Colony fellow and has attended several residencies, including the Künstlerhaus Salzburg, Austria; Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Village, Colorado; and the Banff Center, Alberta, Canada. Her current research about transnationalism through the lens of seaports is supported by a 3-country Fulbright to Germany, Chile, and Hong Kong.
Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, Box Experiments, 2017, Animation still, 1920 x 1080 px.
Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy are a North Carolina–based collaborative art team. Combining Dietrick’s formal training as a painter and Mundy’s programming skills, the resulting artworks present aesthetically appealing spaces to consider the human impact of larger automated systems. Dietrick’s artworks have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, MCA San Diego, Long March Space, Beijing,
Whether deep in a cave or hiking over a volcanic mountain, Katie St. Clair gathers inspiration from the rich sensations of living or dying life, the crunching of pine nettles under foot, or the specific texture of lichen on stone. These perceptions inform her subject matter and working methods in the studio. Katie’s paintings reveal themselves as complex layers of paint, experimental processes, collage material, and photographs that reflect upon the natural world. Her time-based installations extend the space of the paintings by engaging the viewer’s senses. The installations are a series of melting ice spheres comprised of local found natural debris, detritus and pigment that are hung above canvas, actively melting in the gallery. As the forms melt, jagged objects come to the surface of the ice, some balance and others fall onto the wet canvas. Pigment and ink in the ice ball disperse in the water and create a painting.
Mundy’s work is best known for his online interventions that have been reviewed by over 300 international news media outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Wired UK. Recent exhibitions of his work include solo and group exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin. With past support from Florida State University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst DAAD), and the Fulbright Commission, among others, his current research focuses on visualization of data sets — like smells, margins of error, and emotions — that are a challenge to define. Their joint collaborations have been shown at Transitio_MX, Mexico City, TINA B Festival, Prague and Venice, Temporary Home, Kassel during Documenta (13), and Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC. They have also completed public art commissions at the Coleman Center for the Center for the Arts, York, Alabama, and the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communication, Gainesville, Florida.
St. Clair received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, magna cum laude, from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and her Master of Fine Arts from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. After graduation, she was awarded an artist residency at Albion College, Michigan in 2014; an artist residency and the Visiting Teaching Fellow position at Burren College of Art, Ireland, in 2015; and returned to Albion College as visiting professor in 2015.
Katie St. Clair, Swale, 2016, Acrylic, collage and an assortment of experimental techniques with dye, loose pigment, graphite, spray paint, gesso and rice paper on canvas, 66 x 56 in.
St. Clair’s paintings have exhibited nationally and internationally at the Burren College of art, Ireland, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and the Zhou B. Art Center, Chicago to name a few. She received Best in Show at the 95th Toledo Area Artists Exhibition, curated by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, for a large-scale triptych painting titled Swilind. Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, selected the award winners.