The Exhibition:
Studio Concepts/Historical Perspectives places work by emerging Eastern Michigan University artists in context with broader art historical themes, and in conversation with the art historical canon.
The French Realist painter Edouard Manet shocked Salon audiences in 1865 with Olympia, in which he reworked a celebrated Renaissance painting, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, to present the female nude not as the classical goddess of love but as a modern Parisian prostitute. Viewers were scandalized by Manet’s perceived attack not only on their bourgeois sensibilities but on the European canon. Rendered with a pronounced lack of idealism, with visible brushwork and imprecise spatial illusion, Olympia rejected “traditional” values of art that emphasized ideal forms and elevated subject matter. Olympia’s success depends upon our grasping the art historical reference. It assumes knowledge of the conventions and history of the nude, so that we can understand Manet’s provocative disruption of those conventions.
Conversations between past and present are an essential part of the making and viewing of art. Students in the European academies, for example, used to learn their craft by copying the “Old Masters” and Michelangelo famously studied fragments of ancient sculpture in the Medici Palace gardens. Artists have long incorporated others’ motifs and styles, or more generally reacted to images and practitioners that came before them. Some, like Manet, deliberately work within—or against—tradition to define their own practice. Sherrie Levine and Kehinde Wiley are two contemporary artists for whom appropriation is often central to their point of view. More broadly, throughout the history of European art, artists and viewers have variously contended with the complex legacy of classical antiquity. Art never exists in a vacuum.
Curated by students in the Survey of Western Art II, this exhibition explores the potentials of such a contextualized approach to contemporary work. The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections dedicated to gender, politics, nature, reality, and death. Our goal was to examine the ways in which artists have variously approached these ideas, finding common ground and significant divergences.
Some of the artworks in this exhibition, like Cristin Bobee’s The Nightmare, intentionally engage with art historical examples. Others have been put in dialogue with historical works chosen by student curators, who sought meaningful points of contact around the exhibition themes. These comparisons allow us to identify shared iconographies, contrasting approaches, and enduring questions and ideas. They uncover unexpected connections and new layers of meaning. Most importantly, they reveal the rewards and the relevance of the history of art to the art of today.
The Artists and Curators:
Studio Concepts/Historical Perspectives was curated by students in ARTH 263, Survey of Western Art II, in Winter 2020, supervised by Assistant Professor of Art History Pamela Stewart. It represents multiple collaborations: between past and present, between art history and studio art, and between students and faculty. The artworks shown were created by EMU undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni. Interpretive labels for each work of art were written by the student curators, who also determined the themes and selected the artworks. The exhibition and section introductions were written by Prof. Stewart.
Studio Concepts/Historical Perspectives thus celebrates excellence in student work in art history as well as studio art. And this exhibition is intended to showcase not only the diverse disciplines that make up the School of Art and Design but their synthesis. When we come together in a collective intellectual and creative endeavor, we make our own—and each other’s—disciplines stronger.
We particularly acknowledge the heroic efforts of the student curators, and all involved in the exhibition, who completed this work during a semester profoundly disrupted by COVID-19.
Special thanks to: Gregory Tom, Allison Shearer, and Rebecca Reeder.
Cristin Bobee, The Nightmare
Cristin Bobee’s The Nightmare reimagines a painting of the same title by the Romantic artist Henry Fuseli (1781). The Nightmare is part of a series of photographs by Bobee, collectively called “Women Folk,” that examines contemporary women’s experiences through the lens of canonical artworks.
Fuseli’s painting articulates anxieties about the unconscious during a moment of broader cultural critique of Enlightenment values of reason and logic. As a young woman sleeps, she is set upon by demons: an incubus, a spirit that preyed sexually upon sleeping women, and a horse called a mara that suffocated sleepers. When the conscious mind relinquishes control, all manner of horrors can emerge.
In Bobee’s version, the woman is beset not by the unconscious mind but by the responsibilities of motherhood. The homage is tongue-in-cheek: her sleep disrupted by a cherubic child, the woman makes eye contact with the viewer to include us in the joke, and we commiserate with her exhaustion. Concealed in shadow at the top left, a large dog contentedly appropriates the mother’s pillow. The intruders here are clearly beloved family members, rather than supernatural monsters. And yet, who can deny the nightmarish—even demonic—fog of sleep deprivation? The loss of rationality and logic in the face of extreme fatigue?
Pamela Stewart
GROUP 1: GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE BODY
Clothed and unclothed, male and female, the human form is one of the most common subjects in art. Indeed, the world’s oldest surviving artwork, the Woman of Willendorf, ca. 25,000 BCE, depicts the nude female body. In the European tradition, knowledge of anatomy and expertise in representing the human form was long considered a benchmark of true artistic achievement. The body has been a vehicle for narrative and allegory and used to symbolize civic values and spiritual truths.
The works of art in this section depict the body as it relates to ideas about gender and sexuality. They are particularly concerned with the female body and femininity, and many engage with art historical traditions of the nude. Several grapple with the (male) gaze: the ways in which images can frame women’s bodies as objects for visual consumption. These works ask what it means to look and to be looked at—and who has the power to do so.
Others utilize natural imagery to consider gendered conceptions of nature or stereotypes relating to fertility and reproduction. In Trisha Schultz’s Motherhood, a garden of moss and flowers springs out of an earth-toned plaster cast of a pregnant torso. Danny Kuba’s What is Femininity? and Abigail Volpone’s Flower Power more explicitly explore associations between flowers and female reproductive organs.
Several artists investigate nuances of gender norms and desires, or challenge unrealistic standards of beauty that have long been codified by visual art. There is an ambivalence to Taylor Orr’s Bridget, who engages our gaze but conceals the shape of her body under baggy clothing. Like Manet's Olympia, Bridget both invites and forbids us to look at her. Her awkward, foreshortened, pre-adolescent pose invokes the taboos of Balthus and Egon Schiele. Anne Buford’s Cut critiques unattainable ideals and can play with viewers’ assumptions if we instinctively read the un-gendered body as female due to the suggestion that this body must be “improved.”
Ultimately the objects in this section ask us to not only consider the role of the (female) body in the visual arts, but the ways in which images can alternately reify and challenge our understanding of gender.
La Grande Odalisque
This photograph is a modern twist on a famous Neoclassical painting and shows a modern woman compared to an idealized woman in the 1800s. Upon first glance we see a woman lying on her bed with her cat. It appears she has just taken a shower and she wears a pink robe and a towel wrapped around her hair, and no makeup. She is surrounded by “feminine” objects and toiletries: a doll, a pink hair bow, dried flowers, deodorant, a hairbrush, and hairspray. Strong contrasts between light and shadow focus our attention on the woman and her feline companion.
Bobee’s photograph is based on La Grande Odalisque by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Ingres depicts a woman in a Turkish harem. She is nude, with elongated and unrealistic body proportions, and looks provocatively over her shoulder at the viewer. Bobee mimicked some important things like the pose and the lighting. But the differences are what is most important. Having this be a photograph shows a “real” woman with realistic proportions. She is shown in her place of comfort, all wrapped up rather than nude and on display like in the painting, and rather than holding a fan she is being kept company by her cat.
Ingres presented viewers with a fantasy; Bobee gives us reality.
Sierra Ellis
Anne Buford, Cut:
Cut depicts close-up view of a person’s stomach. In the foreground, a dialogue box, reminiscent of old computer software, gives the options “Cut”, “Copy”, and “Paste”, with “Cut” being highlighted as the option chosen. Other details included are the person’s blue jeans, that they are unbuttoned and unzipped. The identity of the figure is ambiguous. Interestingly, nothing indicates gender or sex, except for the suggestion that this “imperfect” body should be modified.
A flat stomach is ideal in our society. This body is in a relaxed state and the stomach folds over as bodies naturally do when they are sitting down. The unzipped jeans seem to represent containment—or lack thereof. In the virtual space of computers, to “cut” is to delete instantaneously, and the “cut” option is selected in the dialogue box. Cut reveals how technology has altered our view of the “ideal” body. Buford seems to suggest that we tend to treat bodies in the same way we treat things in the virtual space. Bodies cannot be altered instantaneously like a document on a computer can, although we often act as if they should be able to.
The juxtaposition of decontextualized images and brief declarative text is reminiscent of the work of Barbara Kruger. Kruger’s work often deals with subjects such as society, gender, politics, feminism, consumerism, etc., as seen in Your Body Is a Battleground. To me, Cut speaks to the desire to manipulate bodies to achieve an imposed ideal, treating bodies—especially women’s bodies—like consumable objects that can be altered instantaneously.
Cheyenne Thomas
Cheyenne Thomas, All You Are Is Meat
In this work, a canvas is painted with realistic looking meats and organs, overlaid with a burlap sack painted with a headless female body. There are torn sections in the sack revealing organs underneath and the body is strung up by bright red meat hooks. The cool blues and warm reds create a contrast between the dead shell and the living organs. The ribs are prominent and the appearance of all life is completely drained from the body. The glossy acrylic paint makes the meat and organs glisten and contrasts with the rough burlap. The overall impression is of a headless body hanging, revealing their most inner and private parts, almost as if that is all they were good for.
The body is presented as an object—food to be consumed—rather than a human being. Alternately, the work may suggest our fragility and mortality. Or Thomas may be trying make the viewer feel uncomfortable with their bodies. Thomas’s treatment of the female body is unlike traditional nudes, like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, where the body is presented for visual pleasure and consumption, and is closer to still lifes like Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox from the Dutch Baroque. In this painting an ox hangs upside down, hanging from meat hooks. Both Rembrandt and Thomas depict dead animals with their legs, arms and head removed. Both also reveal the internal organs and are in a meat shop setting. What does this say about the nude as a genre? What does say about how we view women’s bodies?
Celia Schroeder
Flower Power – Abigail Volpone
Flower Power connects the female body to nature and the beauty found in the natural world through the juxtaposition of drawings of female sex organs with flowers. The association made by Volpone between flowers and female genitalia is reminiscent of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, such as Black Iris III. This painting shows flower petals in the shape of a vaginal opening. While O’Keeffe employs a different medium and style, both works appear to depict the vagina as one with nature. For O’Keeffe, the link between flowers and genitalia is only implicit—and O’Keeffe, in fact, resisted the connection—while Volpone makes it explicit and deliberate
Flower Power consists of drawings of flowers and female body parts, such as nipples, vaginal openings, and the uterus and ovaries. The composition is dense but evenly spaced, creating balance and rhythm. The contrast between the white background and the black pen work allows the viewer to focus solely on the drawings, and not get distracted by the background. The arrows pointing to the vaginas make them a visual centerpiece, drawing the viewer’s eye and guiding the viewer to discover the artwork’s hidden imagery. They also make it clear that the genitals are important to the artwork’s meaning. Ultimately, the work underscores a link between nature and beauty and female anatomy.
The significance of this link is left open for interpretation. Perhaps they signify fertility and reproduction; perhaps the artist wanted to embody the natural beauty that vaginas hold. The flowers surrounding the drawings of the vaginas signal to the viewer that there is beauty—and power—to vaginas.
Jo Chelar
Women’s Rights - Joy Williams
Joy Williams’s photo-collage addresses the female nude and how it is looked at and sexualized. In the center of the image is the nude figure of a woman, taken from the painting La Maja Desnuda (ca. 1797) by Francisco Goya. The asymmetrical arrangement of the other figures around this central nude, and the nude’s comparatively large scale, directs our focus to her. Her face has been removed and replaced with empty white space, putting more emphasis on the body and denying her personhood. This presentation of the nude as an object for the male gaze contrasts with the work’s empowering title, “Women’s Rights.”
Like other artworks in this section, “Women’s Rights” directly addresses the sexual objectification of the female nude by its viewers. Williams includes figures from other paintings that address the idea of the “gaze,” and how the female body is looked at by society, such as the Black servant from Manet’s Olympia. The inclusion of several women of color, many of whom are cast in servile roles, raises questions about race and intersectional feminism.
We can compare this piece to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Made for the erotic pleasure of a Renaissance nobleman, Titian’s painting also addresses the sexualization of the nude. The Venus of Urbino gazes out toward the viewer, inviting us to look at her. Williams’ nude does not have a face and so cannot look back at us, which is less inviting. It may also comment on the ways in which images of the nude, like the Venus of Urbino, can strip women of agency.
Megan Waggoner
GROUP 2: POWER AND POLITICS
From statues of ancient Roman emperors to anti-government murals during the Arab Spring, the visual arts have always been employed to define, assert, and challenge political power. The artworks in this section are primarily concerned with political and social activism, rather than with ideas of rulership. And while, historically, structures of patronage have meant that “political” art was primarily made by or for those in authority, most of the contemporary works seen here challenge structures of power, rather than reinforce them.
These examples reflect many urgent political and social concerns of today, including questions of racial and gender equity. Keiffer Heino’s pointed critique of NASCAR gains new relevance following the groundswell of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. Other artists, like Arianna McElmeel, respond to political violence and warfare.
The spirit of political awareness and activism in these works resonates especially with art produced in the nineteenth century. Movements like Romanticism and Realism began to discard the universalizing historical themes characteristic of the “Grand Manner” in favor of contemporary subjects that addressed current sociopolitical conditions. Realists’ focus on the everyday lives of the working class dovetailed with the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx, and their work was often considered subversive. These historical examples help us recognize effective visual approaches that artists still employ today. Francisco Goya’s Third of May 1808 (1814) and Honoré Daumier’s Rue Transonain (1834), for example, both condemn government brutality through unflinching portrayals of violence that appeal to the viewer's emotions.
Many of the contemporary works in this section employ visual strategies from graphic design, and accessible, everyday language to get their messages across. Natalie Knight exhorts women’s empowerment through a pastiche of images and text inspired by protest posters, including familiar “Strong Feminist” icons like Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Rosie the Riveter. By “de-facing” the Spanish royal family in a famous portrait by Goya, and depicting the portrait cradled in a pair of Black hands, Joy Williams upends legacies of white supremacy.
What these diverse works share is a belief that art can serve as a catalyst for political and social change. The historical comparisons confirm art’s enduring power to do so.
Keiffer Heino, Two Lefts Don’t Make You White
This work protests the lack of diversity in NASCAR. It refers specifically to the Craftsman Truck Series race at Portland International Raceway on April 22, 2000, in which Bill Lester and Bobby Norfleet both competed. This was the only time in NASCAR history that two African-American drivers competed in the same race.
The triptych format makes us wonder if there are multiple sides to the story. At first glance the composition appears simple, with minimal colors and a relatively plain background. As we observe longer, we discover the text embedded throughout. Heino uses contrasting colors, with everything in black and white except for the message repeated throughout in bright and eye-catching red: “Two lefts don’t make you white.” Referring to the two left turns on NASCAR tracks, this phrase laments that even though African-Americans can compete and do the same jobs as white people, white privilege always prevails. Trophies labeled “privilege” make the allusion to white privilege explicit, while “no wins” suggests that in this biased system there is victory.
Heino provides a timely commentary on racial inequality in the United States. After this work was completed, NASCAR banned the Confederate flag at its events, prompting new discussion about the sport’s lack of diversity and inclusion. The content and form of Two Lefts can be compared to Grillo by Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist of Haitian and Puerto-Rican descent. “Grillo” is Spanish for cricket, another historically white sport. Like Heino, Basquiat also combines text and images, although his activist message is less overtly stated.
Patrick Williams
Arianna McElmeel, In Memory of Tragedy
Arianna McElmeel collages together not only different media but an amalgam of tragic emotions about bombings, destruction and chaos.
At the top left is a mushroom cloud, with distorted ghosts escaping from its blaze. The warm reds, yellows and burnt colors add to the sense of destruction by fire. On the right there appears to be silhouette of a person made of torn newspaper and magazine pages. The torn pages have words such as “bomb,” “life” and “panic” on them. As the eye moves to the middle of piece, we discover tiny burn holes as if someone touched this artwork to a lighter. The newspaper clippings resemble peeling burnt skin and the collaging of torn and overlapping newspaper contributes to the sense of chaos. All these horrors seem to emerge from the person’s head, like memories.
Warfare is political. We can contextualize this work within a long tradition of art that has protested political violence. The chaotic composition and subject matter of McElmeel’s collage are similar to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, which condemned the bombing of a Spanish town in 1937 by the Francisco Franco’s fascist government. Both works emphasize fear and human emotion to make a political point.
Abigail Mendez
Trisha Schultz, Sex Sells
“Sex Sells” critiques the gendered power dynamics of modern capitalism. The phrase refers to sexual imagery in marketing and denotes a cultural tendency to view women’s bodies as commodities. The sculpture’s tantalizing form is the familiar and supportive shape of brassiere cups: a symbol of feminine sexuality. The pink stripes and soft feminine colors are reminiscent of popular lingerie branding. It is fabricated with money, the swell of the cups quite literally worth every cent. But this voluptuous phantom bust exists only in the fantasy of the male gaze.
Sex Sells confronts a legacy of images that sell gendered fantasies and reduce women’s worth to their sex appeal. In La Grande Odalisque by Ingres, reproduced in the section on gender, a courtesan’s body is displayed for consumption by men—both visual and physical—and is manipulated to satisfy their desires. She is exoticized and idealized, with elongated features. Bending her anatomy to fit these ideals locates her value solely in the grace of her figure. Interestingly, Ingres engages in false advertising: selling both an “impossible” body and a fictional Middle East to white Europeans.
There is power in the female body. The political nature of Sex Sells lies both in its connection to feminism and the struggle for body autonomy and in the politics of using sex as an advertisement. It comments on women’s ownership their bodies vs. a product for others and the greed that fuels industry using sex as a weapon of capitalism. In modern culture we attribute monetary value to all things—even the bodies of women. What dollar value does your body have?
Tabetha Chaney
Joy Williams, Family
Joy Williams challenges classic imagery of political families and the power they exude in the piece Family. This digital collage features Francisco Goya’s Charles the IV of Spain and His Family and extending out from the portrait are a pair of clasped hands. The naturalistic detail in hands and the jewelry that adorns them is distinct from the smoothed over style of Goya’s painting.
Williams has removed the faces of the Spanish royals by placing cutouts over their faces. The stark white that has been used to mask the faces contrasts to the green, brown, and red palette that consumes the collage. This may connect the piece to themes of race as the royals are covered in white and the foreground of the piece places attention on a pair of black hands reaching out of the painting.
Portraits of royal families were often used to assert dominance and an air of wealth in their imagery. Francisco Goya’s Charles the IV of Spain and His Family is a large oil painting from the Romantic era, commissioned by the Spanish royals in 1800. Where Goya’s original portrait enlarges the figures, Williams has made the figures seem miniscule in comparison to the realistic hands in the foreground. The royals become unidentifiable, small, and emotionless, therefore stripping the portrait of the ability to show their ownership of wealth and power.
Allison Shearer
GROUP 3: THE NATURAL WORLD
Throughout history, human beings have explored and represented the natural world in a variety of ways, from sites invested with political and spiritual meaning to vehicles for scientific study. In the nineteenth century, monumental paintings like Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains visualized “Manifest Destiny,” romanticizing the grandeur of the North American landscape during the westward expansion of the United States. In early modern Europe, coinciding with the invention of the microscope, artists like Rachel Ruysch used still-life to probe the minute details of natural objects.
In this section, artists consider human beings’ relationship to nature primarily through the genres of landscape and still-life. Nature is seen here as alternately almighty and vulnerable. Several artworks present a sublime view of nature, an idea with its origins in the Romantic period. In Guanhua Yao’s photograph we are awed by the rough power and massive scale of the American southwest, while Myron Brownie immerses us in a more placid, but still “wild,” setting in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Others, like Amberly Gascon’s Letterbee, engage with the urgent issue of climate change. Robert Jones’s two Items likewise suggest a tension between nature and the man-made objects that threaten to overtake it.
Some artists regard nature as an idealized place of retreat, tapping into long traditions of the pastoral and the “locus amoenus” (“pleasant place”) dating back to Roman antiquity. And a few consider the ways in which nature can function symbolically or allegorically. Like the vanitas still-lifes of the early modern period, Domenique Annoni's Awake offers a meditation on death and rebirth.
Many of these works aim not only to represent nature but to immerse viewers in its sensory experience. Shelby Poleykett employs dense linear patterns to evoke the textures of sand dunes, while Myron Brownie uses impasto to simulate rough rocks and a churning waterfall. As Jules Castagnary wrote of the French Impressionists in 1874, “they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.”
Monumental or miniscule, powerful or in need of protection, the varied ecologies represented here speak to nature’s evolving role as a source of artistic inspiration.
Domenique Annoni, Awake
This is a photographed still-life of natural objects: a wasps’ nest, bumblebees, and other natural materials that people often see in the world. Nests and hives are made again and again by bees, and bees are essential to the reproduction of plants, suggesting a cycle of life, death and rebirth. The composition as a whole seems to be very gloomy, which contradicts the work’s title. There isn’t a lot of light and many of the colors are heavily muted or drowned out by darkness. The dark and muted colors make this piece disconcerting to look at, but at the same time, something about it draws you in. Only a little bit of yellow on the two bees is visible, and the yellowish green of the leaf at the bottom. Even in darkness, or death, there is still beauty.
Putting Awake into a broader art historical context helps us understand its meaning. Awake is connected to a specific type of still-life called a vanitas, which became extremely popular during the early modern period in Europe. A vanitas is an allegorical still-life that contains symbols of death to remind viewers of the transience of life and the impermanence of material things. In Awake, the empty wasps’ nest suggests decay, just as the flowers in Adriaen van Utrecht’s Vanitas Still Life with Flowers and Skull will eventually wilt and die. The promise of “awakening” and resurrection in nature can also connect to religious images, such as Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ from the Italian Renaissance.
Samantha Maple
Myron Brownie, Upper Peninsula Small Falls
Upper Peninsula Small Falls depicts a river in a forest with water flowing down small waterfalls. Its aim seems to be to express the beauty of nature. The piece creates a three-dimensional design where we see finer detail to the landscape in front of us and it loses that detail in the background, making the river be the main focus of the piece. The fluent design of the flowing water made by the clean brushstrokes help create a sense of tranquility. This artwork follows the traits of Romanticism with its view of untamed nature, imagination, and feelings. There is no sign of man-made augmentations anywhere within the piece, just elegant nature with no physical disturbance and a feeling of calmness.
Brownie’s landscape has similarities to The Oxbow by Thomas Cole. Both depict American landscapes, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Brownie) and in western Massachusetts (Cole). Both paintings focus on the beauty of the untamed and unaltered nature. When seeing the light-filled landscape within The Oxbow, we get the same feelings of tranquility we find in Upper Peninsula Small Falls. While Upper Peninsula Small Falls creates more details within the foreground rather than the background, both still follow the concepts of seeing the wonder of nature while giving us the same feeling that the artists that created these pieces might have felt.
Brody Stark
Amberly Gascon, Letter Bee
This digital print addresses the decrease in the population of bees in the world and the threat their decline poses to the earth’s ecosystem. Gascon uses warm colors and emphasizes organic shapes. The bees are located in the center of the print and appear more vibrant against the bright orange. The repetition of the same bees in composition keeps the viewer looking around from left to right, up and down. This movement helps build a rhythm in the composition that is simple but engaging. The repetition also helps clarify the work’s main focus.
The sealed letter in the midst of the bees is presented as if it is a message from them. Around the edges of composition are the words “if I die; if we die; you die.” These words are strong and try to show the viewer in a blunt way the important role that bees play in our shared environment.
We can contextualize Gascon’s print alongside art historical examples that address the effects of industrialization on nature. This is a common theme in the work of the French Impressionists, whose landscapes and scenes of modern life often addressed the loss of the natural world during the Industrial Revolution. Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise, for example, depicts the French port of Le Havre, where the masts of boats are indistinguishable from smokestacks and clouds mix with steam. Letter Bee is about the costs of our never-ending need to expand our man-made environments.
Keiffer Heino
Robert Jones, Item 3 and Item 13
Robert Jones’s two assemblages combine natural and synthetic materials, and are linked by their natural, sandy colors and their focus on natural found objects.
In both pieces there is a tension between the organic and inorganic, the decayed and new. The fabricated plastic inItem 3 is engulfing the organic matter, which can touch on the problem of littering and man-made objects that resist decomposition. The rib bone could also suggest death and the fragility of life. The hammer in Item 13 is a tool used to crush and slam objects into the ground—and looks almost like it was smashed into the surface itself. Placed next to a bug, it causes us to consider the crushing of that insect. Together these Items appear to suggest the mortality of nature, and that these man-made objects might ultimately take over.
While Jones presents nature as something potentially fragile, other artists have explored nature’s power. This is especially true of art from the Romantic period, such as Joseph M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship. This painting portrays a ship going into a deadly storm at sunset, showing how nature can overcome us at any time. The Slave Ship depicts nature as overwhelmingly extravagant and terrifying, so that that we want to bow down and give in to nature right then and there. Items 3 and 13 seem to deal with the opposite situation, saying that man-made items will overcome us in the end.
Skyler Newman
Guanhua Yao, Untitled
In Yao’s composition, contrasting visuals of light and dark allow viewers to see the rigidness of the canyon, juxtaposed alongside the softness of the horizon and sky. The inclusion of one single, small figure just to the right of the center conveys the magnitude and power that this natural structure holds. Strong contrasts of light and shadow create texture and depth across the composition. The contrasting lightness and darkness expose deep ridges on the canyon walls. The darker elements present near the bottom allude to a depth of the canyon that is not present. The lightness in the upper portion of the composition create a calmness and balance to the texture of the lower half.
Yao’s photograph emphasizes the grandeur of nature and the power it holds, showing nature as sublime, or awe-inspiring, as seen particularly in landscape paintings from the Romantic period, like Albert Bierstadts’s dramatic vistas of the American West. It focuses on grandeur, not mediocracy. Yao’s canyon is also reminiscent of the work of Ansel Adams. Adams’s Canyon de Chelly from White House Overlook (1941), is also a black and white photograph that relies heavily on light and shadows. Adams’s photograph shows the deep ridges of the stone and vast scale of the rugged Arizona landscape, evoking the sense of the power nature holds. Both Yao and Adams are able to show the sublime of nature through similar visual elements of light, shadow, lines and texture.
Olivia Stuck
GROUP 4: REALITY, ILLUSION, ABSTRACTION
The story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, concerns a contest between two artists. Zeuxis painted fruit that looked so real that birds tried to eat it. But Parrhasius won when his rival tried to pull back the “curtain” covering his artwork, revealing that the curtain was itself a painted illusion. Zeuxis had fooled animals, but Parrhasius had fooled human eyes. In Pliny’s story, art is judged and valued by its ability to create a convincing illusion of what we see.
At various points in history, and across cultures, artists have grappled with what relationship art should have to the “real.” Medieval Europeans often avoided imitating nature, believing abstraction, geometry, and pattern to be closer to divine perfection. In the Renaissance, however, naturalism was held at a high premium. Artists observed from life and developed techniques like linear perspective to suggest three dimensional spaces and forms on flat surfaces. In the twentieth century, artists experimented with pure abstraction and the idea that art did not have to imitate or represent the world at all.
Most of the artworks in this section explore art’s potential to communicate meaning through modes other than naturalism. Some begin with “real” objects, like Domenique Annoni’s still life, which then manipulates the photograph until they are virtually unrecognizable. Many emphasize the formal elements of line, color, texture, shape, light, shadow, space, and composition over subject matter or content.
Several artists play with the boundary between the represented and the real. Chadwick Noellert’s strategic use of shadows and Timothy Turner’s trompe l’oeil “cubes” both explore art’s ability to trick the eye. Others, like Mary Murphy, contend not with artistic illusion but with the deceptiveness of appearances. What we see may not always be what we get.
Across these diverse styles, subjects, and approaches, the works of art in this section blur the boundaries between the real, the abstract, and the illusory, and test the connections between visual art and the visible world.
Chadwick Noellert, A Gesture Forever Anterior
Reality is not always what it seems, especially when it comes to art. A Gesture Forever Anterior is made from mixed media: wood, metal, and plastic along with print and paint. It is definitely somewhat abstract and combines real objects and space with projected shadows. The printed shape of the wire cutters could allude to the cutting of the metal used to make the sculpture. This connects to the theme of illusion by referencing how the artwork was made in an illusionistic way.
The artwork is three dimensional, and yet at the same time it looks flat. Shadows from the three-dimensional parts increase the abstraction and the illusion. From a distance, it is difficult to tell what is shadow and what is wood, plastic, ink, and metal.
In these ways, Noellert’s sculpture is similar to Max Ernst’s Surrealist work Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. It is an oil painting on wood in a large wooden frame, along with found objects. The way that the people are rendered gives the painting a dream-like quality, making it seem to take place outside of reality. Both artworks seem to have two and a half dimensions to them: they look flat from a distance, but they have some level of depth to them, and they use shadow to confuse the eye, again linking to the theme of illusion. They both mix two-dimensional painting with three-dimensional elements, such as wood and metal. Both also combine realism with abstraction, and this juxtaposition makes them even further removed from reality. By making their artwork more abstract, the artists are able to create pieces which are open for interpretation.
Kyle Scott
Claire Moore, Crisis
This abstract piece communicates feelings of doubt and anxiety in an intimate, emotional fashion that is also seen in art from the Romantic period. Acrylic, colored pencil, and charcoal combine to create a large abstract mass of shadow. Thin strings of black draped across the smokiness and interlaced geometric forms give the form more weight while retaining its ethereal, billowing appearance. The upward movement suggests a feeling of invasion, as though it is slowly growing to fill in the remaining corners of empty white space, and soon everything will be smothered by it.
As the title suggests, looking at this piece feels uneasy and suffocating, with a sense of impending doom that calls to mind the “black cloud” metaphor often associated with depression. In other words, it is an abstract representation of a feeling. Even without any imagery or language to explicitly declare it, Crisis still feels like a crisis. It illustrates how abstract images can evoke emotion just as effectively as literal representations.
Fransisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters explores many of the same themes, albeit in a more literal sense. Goya represents negative feelings as various beasts tormenting a man as he sleeps. There is still that same sense of uneasiness in both works, and Goya’s use of animals as metaphors for torments is a different way to interpret Romantic ideas of subjectivity and emotion. Goya conveys these ideas through figuration; Moore through abstraction. Both of these pieces are rich compositions on their own, but these parallels across mediums, content, and even time periods add a whole new layer to explore.
Erin Crnkovich
Mary Murphy, Beyond Judgment
This watercolor is done in a realistic style and seems to be based on something in real life. It is a still life of objects that seem familiar and personal. The colors that are soft and muted, browns and yellows with little dabs of red and blue. The objects included in the scene give us a sense of the person who occupies this room. Murphy depicts two types of whiskey, a gavel, some photographs, and quite a few books around the room that the scene is set. One gets the feeling of a family-oriented man, perhaps a judge, who could be fond of drinking this particular variety of alcohol—or possibly have a drinking problem.
The artist has written about this painting that it “portrays the illusion of a judge, a loving father, political leader on the outside. But behind that facade, a fallible man struggling with alcoholism, a disease that smashes dreams, family life and trust.” It is a very convincing scene that one can picture and relate to.
The realistic style and content of Beyond Judgment resembles Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, an American Realist painting. Both paintings have muted dark colors with pops of brighter color. Hopper depicts a late night diner in New York City with very few people inside. This piece seems to look for solace in strangers or for a cup a coffee to keep from getting a hangover. Like Murphy, Hopper also suggests the deceptiveness of appearances. The diner is a social space but the painting ultimately conveys loneliness and isolation.
Audra Poucket
GROUP5: DEATH, CREATION AND DESTRUCTION
Where do we come from? Where are we going? Human cultures have nearly always been preoccupied with fundamental questions about life and death, and artistic engagement with metaphysical themes has taken many forms. The grave goods of the ancient Egyptians were designed to provide eternally for the dead in the afterlife. Tombs, memorials, and monuments, such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., give visual form to memory and mourning.
Ideas about creation, death, and the afterlife are often deeply embedded in systems of religious belief. Several artworks in this section are compared with examples from medieval and early modern Europe in which reminders of death recalled viewers to the importance of faith and salvation. Hans Holbein’s celebrated French Ambassadors, compared to Talan Wall’s Vulture, juxtaposes portraits of two wealthy and powerful men, surrounded by costly material possessions, with an anamorphic skull. The message? Life is short and neither earthly goods nor worldly power will buy you immortality.
While most examples here are about endings, a few consider origins. Amberly Gascon’s Coins and Buttercup and Tabetha Chaney’s retelling of the ancient Greek tale of Persephone both demonstrate the enduring power and appeal of creation myths.
The majority of these works, however, are concerned with death. Some consider death's allure or intersections between death and sexuality. Many address the passing of time, evoked through symbols like clocks or through the incorporation of ephemeral objects. Several employ long-established iconographies, such as the use of a skull as a memento mori (literally “remember that you must die”). Rebecca Reeder’s uncanny Traditional Portrait, for example, brings the viewer face to face with the fleetingness of life.
By superimposing a skull on a famous sculpture, Erin Crnkovich's Ephemeral makes us consider not only our own mortality but that of art itself. In some ways the creation of images has nearly always been linked to ideas about mortality. In the Italian Renaissance treatise On Painting (1435), Leon Battista Alberti wrote of painting’s “divine power”—almost necromantic—to “make the absent present...and represent the dead to the living.” Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait of 1500 includes an inscription that he has painted himself in “undying colors.” Although often assumed to outlive its creator, art, too, may eventually face death.
Tabetha Chaney, Seduction in a Suit
Seduction in a Suit is a modern depiction of the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades. Abducted by the god of the underworld, Persephone must spend half of each year with him there, creating the “dead” seasons of fall and winter. There is a clear divide between Persephone’s “spring-like” side and the colder “wintry” realm of Hades to which she will descend on the right. On the left are symbols of growth: warmer colors, green plants, and illuminated lights. On the winter side the lights are obscured by autumn leaves, the colors are cool, and there are skeletons strewn on the floor. Here, Persephone is willingly seduced by Hades, evidenced by her outstretched hand, ignorant of the future of captivity that lies ahead, signified by the caged bird.
Death and sexuality are often connected in art, as they are in this work. The extravagant foliage, hint of sexuality, and carefree attitude of Persephone is reminiscent of paintings from the Rococo period such as The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Fragonard depicts a romantic “intrigue”: a girl in a pink, frothy dress is pushed on a swing while her lover looks up her skirt. She flirtatiously kicks off her shoe, a symbol of lost virginity. While other works from the Rococo, like Watteau’s Return from Cythera, reminded viewers that love and youth cannot last forever, Fragonard’s impetuous heroine has no such qualms.
Fragonard’s romp thus provides an interesting contrast to the darker edge of the game of seduction in Chaney’s piece. For the girl on the swing, summer will never end.
Elizabeth Mayhew
Erin Crnkovich, Ephemeral
This print challenges the viewer to confront their transient human existence, incorporating a grim color palette and a placing a memento mori upon an apotheosis of classical art.
The limited colors in this piece convey a feeling of despair. Reminders of death are present in the stark reality of the skull, the Roman numeral 13 looming in the background, and splatters of texture that suggest decay. Yet we are also reminded of the beauty of life with the allusion to the Hellenistic sculpture Venus de Milo; the highlighting of artistry and soft purity in the white marble, and the halo crowning our hauntingly beautiful figure. Crnkovich obscures Venus’s facial features with a skull, making the viewer keenly aware of their own mortality—and the ancient artwork’s as well.
Ephemeral makes a bold statement about the fleeting nature of creation: art is not nearly as permanent as we would like to believe. Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn explores similar themes of transience, and evokes feelings of despair with a monochrome palette. Like Alexandros of Antioch, the nearly-forgotten sculptor of Venus de Milo, we know little about creator of the 2000-year-old Han dynasty urn that Ai shattered. Ai used this ceremonial urn to make a controversial statement about cultural preservation and loss. Crnkovich similarly asks us to consider the importance of classical art. If art is irreparably altered, does it lose or gain value? The conditions in which humans exist—and the things they create—can change at any moment. Ephemeral challenges us to confront mortality head-on, by staring death in the face.
Orion Hart
Cheyenne Thomas, My Open Wound
Here we witness the time between this work’s creation and organic deconstruction. The sculpture’s base is the bust of a woman wrapped in burlap, and where the head should be there is a clock with no hands that seems to be bleeding. Two “open wounds” on the bust are emphasized by torn holes in the burlap and bloody red markings. The contrasting colors draw the eye to the large wound in the center of the chest, which exposes the figure’s heart. The work’s title and imagery suggest that it is about a wounded heart and its gradual decay.
The flowers that adorn the sculpture were fresh when it was installed—alive and full of color—but over the course of the exhibition they will die, becoming dingy and grey. The clock indicates time and, together with the flowers, may refer to the passage of time between life and death.
The passage of time and fleetingness of life are common themes in Northern European Renaissance and Baroque art, and we can relate this work to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch. Bosch’s triptych depicts the progression from creation on the left, to a life of beauty and excess in the center, and finally to pain and judgment in Hell on the right. Like Thomas’s decaying flowers, the earthly delights in Bosch’s garden will not last. Both works rely on symbolism to convey their message. In My Open Wound the clock indicates the passing of time. The Garden of Earthly Delights contains numerous complex symbols, such as a crystal ball referring to the Flemish saying “happiness is like glass, it soon breaks.”
Shannon Le Tarte
Talan Wall, Vulture
Vulture conveys the beauty of death, creation and destruction with emphasis on the circle of life. This is an oil pastel piece that makes use of the paper surface as a three-dimensional element, with the torn edges suggesting both violence and decay. Vultures are scavengers, which connects them to death and destruction, but they can also allude to creation and the circle of life. The vulture shows that even in death, animals can be used as energy for other life. There are many colors used in the vulture’s feathers to show the beauty in something that would otherwise be seen as ugly, scary, or destructive.
Hans Holbein’s The French Ambassadors from the Northern European Renaissance also utilizes optical illusion and symbols of death. The French Ambassadors combines a double portrait, a still life, and an anamorphosis. The connection may not be clear at first; Holbein’s painting appears mainly to focus on wealth and fortune. But on a second glance we see the anamorphic skull, a clear symbol of death. Holbein places the jarring anamorphosis of the skull in the center of an otherwise naturalistic piece, blending naturalism and surrealism while Wall’s entire piece feels surreal due to the iridescent colors of vulture’s feathers and the three-dimensional aspects of the paper. Holbein’s allusion to death is almost hidden while Wall’s is more overt.
Although both pieces are very different in style, they both employ surrealistic imagery and emphasize symbols. Holbein’s painting can help us understand the inevitability of death and further grasp the circle of life concept that Hall’s work conveys.
Dominick Hanson