Gallery 110
April, 2009
April 2 - May 1, 2009
Preview Reception: Wednesday, April 1; 6-8pm
First Thursday Opening: April 2; 6-8pm
Main Gallery:
UNDER THE SKIN:
Jenny Kemp, Gordon Nealy, Rosemary Powelson
Like the earth’s landscape, human bodies have visible, outer contours and surfaces that surround a deeper, hidden core that we can only see with the help of scientific technology. By investigating the landscape under our skin, artists Jenny Kemp, Gordon Nealy and Rosemary Powelson examine our physiological and psychological inner-workings in order to find a poetic and ethereal topography that may be closer to the truth than science.
Rosemary Powelson: “Inspired” by her husband’s heart attack and the medical science that kept him alive, Powelson’s ongoing series probes the uneven terrain of the human heart. Between his broken heart and his healing heart, time and space were suspended. Powelson uses materials and techniques that allow the color to bleed, soak, run, pool, gather, and clot. Like cardiac bypass surgery, she cuts and borrows from one source and adds it into a new environment to create fresh, alternative meaning.
Jenny Kemp: Working within the theme "Under the Skin" has been an opportunity for Jenny Kemp to skim the surface/touch on ideas of human anatomy. More specifically, it has been a personal journey through examining the illness that has taken the past fifteen years of her father’s existence—Hairy Cell Leukemia. Hugely descriptive to the ear, the words "hairy cell" demands from the artist an immediate visual clarification. This body of work has been a visual study of these words. It is the artist's intention to create a perpetual visual that resonates with the viewer - similar to how the disease will never exit it’s victim.
Gordon Nealy: Nealy's intention is to provide palpable forms and topography (resulting from the bas relief) that suggest familiar structures. He once described this work as ethereal demonstrations of thought, but in this series, he has moved from mind to body and put focus on the anatomical. In the pursuit of understanding our composition in all aspects, Nealy integrated allusions to calibration and analysis. Overlaid with these markings, one is reminded of periodic assessment; the valuation of life.
In the Loft:
David A. Haughton: Kindertotentanz
Twenty-three years ago, David Haughton began work as a pediatric resident for a cancer ward. Doctors and parents pursued the faint hope of newer medicines, more aggressive modalities, and novel combinations of treatments. When the children bled, grew feverish, or gasped for breath with overwhelming disease, Haughton was there to witness. The senior doctors seemed unavailable, tied up in meetings or presenting research proposals. The mothers held their dying children, facing the reality of disease.
Anger and helplessness compelled the artist and pediatric doctor, David Haughton to begin Kindertotentanz (Children’s Death-dance), a series of over 100 works that explore the darkness of disease and dying in children. The series title melds the names of two great Germanic works: totentanz and the Kindertotenlieder. During the time of the great plagues in medieval Europe, the “dance of death” was a popular theme for many artists. Only death leveled the inequalities of medieval society. A totentanz was a series of paintings or engravings that portrayed Death as a skeleton embracing, in turn, peasant and Pope, cobbler and King. Also inspired by the pain of man's mortality, Gustav Mahler composed the song cycle Kindertotenlieder in memory of his dead younger sister.
From the Te Maori of the New Zealand, Haughton borrowed the two talismans: the frightening bird-like creatures that seem to embody the malevolence of disease, and the lizard - a symbol of death and life. The infant holds the struggling lizard near his open mouth; if he swallows it he will die.
Image above: David A. Haughton, Kindertotentanz: Title Plate, etching on Arches rag paper, limited first edition of 25 prints
$250