Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Fresh A.I.R. Revisited

What:
Artists-in-Residence Biennial Exhibition

Where:
UT's Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard. Call 974-3200 for information.

When:
Thru Feb. 2, with a slide lecture by Frank Holliday, this semester's visiting artist, on Jan. 22, at 7 p.m., AA Bldg. Room 109.

A quartet of artists-in-residence exhibit their work

by Heather Joyner

Advancing years appear to provoke the acceleration of time—isn't UT's current visiting artists biennial exhibition at the Ewing Gallery happening far too soon? Have four artist/teachers come and gone since the last such show? Hard to believe.

Established more than 20 years ago, UT's Artist-in-Residence Program (or A.I.R.) owes much of its success to faculty members who invest time and energy in choosing artists from different backgrounds to visit the School of Art. Says painting professor and Program Coordinator Michael Brakke, "[A.I.R.] has been the most direct, prolonged, and extensive means of bringing the values and mechanisms of the larger 'art world' to our students."

As for the biennial show, only the last resident artist in any given cycle is on hand for its duration, settling in for a semester and displaying work alongside his or her predecessors. It's a noteworthy event, and it serves to remind us to pay more attention to what's happening on campus while it's actually happening.

Speaking of which, there's always something going on in the art department. It seems whatever lacks refinement tends to be remarkably energetic, at least; it's amazing more non-students aren't milling about to soak up a bit of the buzz.

Contributing to that energy level is constant change, and artists-in-residence are part of an ongoing dynamic. Certainly, a strong core faculty is essential, but visiting artists can shake things up and round things out by offering students an alternative perspective. In the case of this crop of exhibitors, all New York residents, that perspective belongs to a variety of urban professionals.

Visiting the Ewing Gallery during the show's installation, I had an opportunity to talk with three of the four artists involved: Frank Holliday, here for the new semester, and David Brody and Joan Linder—both present for a few days to complete wall drawings unique to the exhibition (Charlotta Westergren was expected for the opening reception). What struck me most about them is their ability to articulate what they're doing in their work. And that is, of course, very important when it comes to teaching.

Four days prior to the opening, Brody had only just arrived from Brooklyn to transfer a complex image onto the gallery's somewhat uneven west wall. A veteran of prior large-scale wall drawings, he seemed unruffled by the task. In addition to the installation, a cluster of "black and white paintings" and a striking canvas titled "Region 38" are on display. He explained that his drawings emerge from a very different process than do his paintings, which he calls "family disputes between Order and Derangement."

Whereas Brody might spend as long as a year on a single painting, with marks "fighting to define each other spatially," his isometric grid-based drawings evolve swiftly on the computer. The artist remarks, however, that "...even though the drawings use an ideal, geometric vocabulary and default to an assumption of symmetry, they are as much about accident, anomaly, and variation as plankton, trees, or cathedrals." Incidentally, after he began using the computer as a drawing tool, Brody realized the grid for his images was identical to the pattern found in bubble wrap. Consequently, he used bubble wrap as a template for enlarged versions of his drawings.

That same day, Linder was enjoying a head start on a wall drawing even larger than Brody's. Featuring electrical towers derived from photographs taken in numerous Knoxville locations, the expansive scene is flanked by two works on paper—one showing a sofa, and the other, a television set. For those individuals familiar with Linder's images of Xerox machines and overweight naked men, the humor is recognizably hers. As for the towers, they're both imposing and vaguely fragile. Linder says she likes their banality and their symbolic role as "structures of power." The cheap furniture she draws likewise functions as cultural iconography.

Holliday's contribution to the biennial show—in the form of two huge canvases and five smaller ones—is most traditional in terms of "the what." But "the how" of his brand of abstraction breaks a helluva lot of rules. As Brakke puts it, "[Holliday's] cornucopia of painting styles threatens to render irrelevant any painting theory of the past 50 years." The artist himself says, "It's Cuisinart....it hovers between the formal, the art historical, and the cultural."

The gestural energy of Holliday's larger oil-based paintings is reminiscent of Motherwell and Pollock, while complex layers of semi-translucent color evoke Frankenthaler's delicacy. At the same time, he achieves a kind of pictorial depth without recognizable subject matter. His colors are often as brash as graffiti but do not overwhelm other aspects of the work. If what's on view is any indication, Holliday's students should find him open to a range of attitudes and approaches.

As Brody and Linder attended to their walls and the show went up, students in a space across the atrium from the gallery sat at a long table, painstakingly attaching tiny discs to pins for Westergren's mammoth installation. The colorful sequin-like discs called "paillettes," when pinned to color coded markings on foam-core panels, recreate a photographic image (if you've seen her iceberg piece now at the KMA, you get the idea). When subjected to moving air, Westergren's paillettes tremble, producing an undulating surface—sorta like animated pointilism. The artist says that she likes landscapes that are "both familiar and otherworldly."

Brought together, pieces displayed in the biennial show make for a lively mix, and they give us a sense of what each group of artists-in-residence is all about. Visiting artists attest to the School of Art's savvy in selecting candidates with diverse talents and methods. The students are lucky to have them as teachers, and our community is privileged to have access to their art.