QX.net Nude 2010
January 16 - March 27, 2010
View the QX.net Nude 2010 Online Gallery
Exhibition Statements
Make no snap judgments, nor take it for granted. The nude may have been with us for a long long time, but it is as ever-changing as it is persistent. It is as it has always been, a continuum: an extension to various ends, to its own or an extension to no end at all.
As 2009 came to pass, therein lies the need to somehow set the decade in review. We did indeed, by trusting the artists themselves, hope to survey some of the tendencies emerging over the last few years. We were also aware, if made overly comprehensive, the viewer would fail to appreciate the richness of possibilities that almost all of these tendencies are yet to inspire. So without assuming a mainstream, there is a scattering of multiple viewpoints, offering their own subcultures as context, which overlap, influence or contradict each other in various and in just as exciting ways. In fact, the Loudoun’s interior is probably the most ideal space for entering a dialogue of this kind. One can handle a diversity of experiences and still feel at home. There are intimate corners and gathering halls, dark stairwells and bright window rooms, and other areas for both self-reflection and discussion. Perhaps as the nude itself, it is living and breathing space, where the hardwood floor creaks as you step along. Even if only for our clarification, therefore, we suggested phrasing this exhibition room by room or foyer by foyer, with each space becoming a pulse point entering the dialogue with the other and informing the next.
The QX.net Nude is one of the most important on-going annuals in our midst. For which, we are indebted to all the artists, their receptive audience, the Lexington Art League and many others who made this wonderful tradition into the enthusiastically anticipated art celebration.
- Boris Zakic
The wealth of exciting work submitted to this exhibition was a challenge and an inspiration. I came to the task with one set of preconditions: to look for art that demonstrated an understanding of the figure. When the title of the exhibition is The Nude, there is an implicit assumption that the work entered must, to some degree, involve human anatomy and movement. An image containing a figure without these may be an excellent work of art; there are other shows for that piece. This exhibition is for artists who have a demonstrated understanding of the figure. Within these limitations, we had entrants who were able to take that training and make the figure expressive, challenging, provocative, visionary.
At the suggestion of my co-juror, Boris Zakic, we eventually came to the organization of the individual categories that you see in the exhibition, there by allowing us to process and address the wide variety of approaches submitted.
What I found particularly gratifying about our selections is that we were able to subvert the common notions of the nude as being an academic subject or one with sexual overtones…. which of course it can be and often is…but that is hardly the whole picture. The art in this exhibition reflect what it means to be human. We are who we are because of our bodies…we experience the world through them. Our bodies are ourselves. The selections in this show depict the figure in all of its complexities…the humor, the passion, the myth, the vulnerability, as well as the grace and beauty.
- Esther E. Randall
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Generously Odd: Craft Now
October 23 – December 22, 2009
Exhibition Statement
Generously Odd: Craft Now explores the uniquely rich territory currently being examined by today’s avant-garde craft artists. The exhibition focuses on contemporary craft objects that engagingly experiment with material, form and concept, with a particular emphasis on works that explore abundant decoration, obsessive techniques, and peculiar narratives.
Craft, as a field of creative inquiry, is typically characterized by handmade, utilitarian forms, created in specific materials (clay, metal, fiber, wood, glass) with a long world history and deep cultural connection. Traditional methods of construction and accepted object formats likewise typically define craft. But while the artworks represented in Generously Odd may have some familiarity to our everyday lives, they are not typical. Rather than strictly adhering to traditional approaches, contemporary craft artists, these artists in particular, manipulate materials and processes, as well as ideas related to function and body adornment to skillfully craft their own innovative, often challenging, works.
All of the artists included in this exhibition have, very generously, poured their knowledge and the best of their unique creative abilities into their works. And six site-specific arrangements, including several with wall-drawn narratives, were created in response to the ornamented fireplaces, windows, and shelves of the Loudoun House itself. The resulting exhibition, flowing from one gallery to the next with unexpected visual and conceptual connections, is a collection of awkwardly interesting bodies, ambiguous biomorphic blobs, strangely beautiful adornments that transform the wearer, meticulous objects that defy utilitarian expectations, and subversively nostalgic things loaded with metaphor and memory.
- Travis Townsend, Exhibition Curator
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LAL Open
July 18 – August 29, 2009
Exhibition Statement
For this group exhibition LAL opened its doors to all who make art in order to encourage a dialogue between artists and the general public. There were no parameters, theme, or limit regarding concept or execution for the artists to consider. Artists were challenged to submit work that was important or meaningful to them, work that they wanted to represent them, as artists.
As a result the LAL Open presents a platform where people can share thoughts, feelings, and opinions through visual art mediums. Like all LAL exhibitions, this show is a conversation between artist and viewer. As a collection of art chosen by the artists themselves, the LAL Open allows the public to view, through the eyes of the artist, what is on their minds.
New York Times art critic Holland Cotter recently asked a valid set of questions, “How does cultural history get written? Who chooses which portraits will hang in the hall of fame, which art will live on in museums, which books will end up on the classics shelf, which music will be standard fare in tomorrow’s concert halls?” With this in mind, the LAL Open seeks to give these 110 participating artists a chance to weigh in on the conversation.
How Artists See Their World
May 9 - June 27, 2009
Exhibition Statement
How Artists See Their World is an exhibition of Outsider Art, gathered over the past 40 years, by dealer and collector Daniel C. Prince. This grouping of artists with developmental disabilities and diagnosed mental conditions represents a different world of art than that which is conventionally promoted or displayed. Emotional, vibrant, colorful, and direct – the work they have created is based on their reality.
The artists whose work is presented in this exhibition take full advantage of their vision and senses. They do not use filters, conventional art education or learned techniques to make their point. This method of art-making demonstrates how Outsider artists tap their intuition, unconscious, sense of discovery, and creativity at its most primal level, allowing us a clue to the actual mental locations of artistic conception. The initial inspiration for these artists comes from their own experience, completely bypassing a formal process of analysis - they don’t over think the work.
Some categories in the exhibition include: Portraiture (Hallway), the Figure (2nd Floor), Landscape (Miriam Woolfolk Gallery), Architecture (Lillian Boyer Gallery), Narrative (Neil Sulier Gallery), and Things (Zygmunt Gierlach Gallery).
About the Daniel C. Prince Collection
The Daniel C. Prince Collection began in 1969 when Mr. Prince started his freshman year at Vanderbilt University. For the past 40 years Prince has curated and written extensively on the subject of Outsider Art (his most notable book is Passing In The Outsider Lane). Other material included in Prince’s nonprofit Self Taught Artist Resources (S.T.A.R.), is in Special Collections, Central Library at Vanderbilt University.
What is Outsider Art?
The term Outsider Art refers to the English translation of French artist Jean DeBuffet’s “Art Brut.” This genre it is not based on subject, style, or technique, but rather on the artists who are typically children or developmentally disabled or mentally challenged adults. To this extent, they do not take their cues from formal training or the customs of the art world. Sidney Janis wrote about this type of work in his book They Taught Themselves (1948), which led to the umbrella term of Self Taught (Outsider artists are by definition not formally trained). Others included in the definition of “self taught” is the work of artists taking their cues from social tradition, communal history, and ethnic practice such as Folk Art.
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Paintpresent
March 14 - April 26, 2009
View Paintpresent Online Gallery
Juror Statement
First, I would like to thank LAL for providing me with this opportunity. It was a rewarding and enriching process to discuss contemporary painting with staff at LAL, and it was perhaps more interesting still to see the emergence and evolution of those ideas in the works submitted. I am grateful for the chance to engage the Lexington community in a discussion of contemporary art, including its unusual manifestations and exciting creations.
If there is one defining element of contemporary art, it is that there is no one defining element. Contemporary creative activity is as marked by a plurality of motivations and manifestations as is the world in which it is made. As culture fragments and history accelerates, art brings in an ever-widening group of creators with diverse desires. The mode in which one’s creative work can be engaged by an audience likewise grows ever more varied. Artists can utilize contemporary galleries, such as the Loudoun House, and museums to exhibit their work, but artists are increasingly combining that activity with work that is distributed via the Internet or even in commercial venues that would have been shunned a generation ago. Each of these works and audiences is brought together by the artist’s creative vision.
With that context as a backdrop, we identified three threads that may mark an image as responding particularly to our current moment.
First, creative work now is frequently quite dense, even decorative. The arrival of hyper-density in contemporary painting could be seen as a response to a hyper-stimulating contemporary world filled with icons and diminutive data points that constantly vie for our attention. In a world of cell phone-controlled and Facebook©-facilitated interaction, is it any wonder that contemporary creative work overflows with small, precise forms?
Secondly, empty manmade spaces form a contrasting pole to hyper-decoration. Contemporary painters seem to be drawn to architectural spaces devoid of their creators. In this way, a house or building is rendered not only as information, as a schematic but also as an abstraction of psychological states. If a room doesn’t hold other subjects, perhaps it holds our moods. As the images are freed from people or subjects, our own subjectivity rushes into the space itself to contemplate ourselves.
Lastly, figuration has returned to painting in a strong and considerable fashion, but the figures are often strange detours from ordinary representation. We are surrounded by ourselves as celebrities. We are inundated with people who are, in reality, ordinary, but by virtue of mass media, rendered as extraordinary. These ur-people emerge in contemporary painting as superheroes, demigods and cryptozoological oddities.
There were a great many excellent works submitted to the show (some 700 paintings from around 100 artists). We could have had three to four shows of work from the submissions and continued with each exhibition to discover new points of interest and excitement. So, narrowing the works down to 50 selections was immensely difficult.
I leave you with an invitation to linger over the works in the exhibition. My selections and comments are only the beginning of what the artists on display offer. These humble thoughts only start a conversation, which each work here ably extends in unexpected, enriching and intoxicating directions. I thank LAL and the participating artists for allowing me to join the fun.
Bobby Campbell studied art at Transylvania University, where he completed a BA in Philosophy in 1998. Following five years of professional practice as a graphic designer, he entered graduate school at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Upon completing his MFA in 2006, Bobby was awarded a Fulbright Student Scholar Grant to study for the 2006-2007 academic year at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, Ireland. He is in his second year of teaching as an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Morehead State University where he teaches digital art, painting, graphic design and drawing. Bobby has exhibited art in diverse locations including Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Beijing and Dublin.
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Nude 2009
January 9 - March 1, 2009
View Nude 2009 Online Gallery
Exhibition Statement
The human figure in art is timeless and universal and has reverberated throughout historical and contemporary art practice. Some contemporary artists have refocused our gaze on personal identity as a viable and engaging conduit for explorations of modern life, modern identity, and the social and sexual politics that impact us all. Other artists use the human figure as a way of looking inward and showing pure beauty, or in the words of artist Courtnee Bennett, “worthy of respect and laden with meaning.”
From Edward Kennedy’s Pecs and Abs of Steel and Lawrence Tarpey’s She was the Point of Contention to Dhiman Dam’s Luv and Marlene Steele’s Rest at the Bench one can see a variety of treatments of this classical subject. New materials have come in to play, like the knitted work of Matthew C. Glover in Jamie, Standing and digital manipulation in Carleton Wing’s Shower. The purpose of this exhibitionis to showcase a range of interpretations of the human form.
Artists confronting social politics and history within their works are E. Gibbons, whose painting Witness, according to the artist, “[addresses the ninety year old model Blanche’s] youth and her friends who died in the holocaust.” While Blake, whose sculpture Rockeye CBU is named after landmines found in “post conflict” regions like Vietnam and Kosovo.
Faith Holland’s Untitled photograph from her “Voyeurism Series” gives one a sense of exposure and vulnerability. While Esther Randall’s surreal assemblage Harpy portrays the human figure as awkward, mechanized or disassembled. Others, such as David Hancock, Michael Seif, and Helen Rose Gotlib, study the nude form because they view it as the pinnacle of artistic beauty.
Exploration of identity is also presented frequently, as in Tyler Dearing’s My Better Half (parts 1 and 2) and Christine Wuenschel’s Self-Portrait: Slight Inclusion No.’s 1 and 2 and Untitled Self-Portrait No. 12. These artists ask today, as so many have asked before: Who am I and what defines me?
For Nude 2009, Ruth Adams, Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Art at the University of Kentucky, Mike Deetsch, Exhibitions and Programs Director, Lexington Art League, and Robert Morgan, Lexington artist and gallery owner, anonymously juried all entries and selected the 64 artworks on exhibit.
Click here to view the Nude 2009 Walk-thru notes
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KY7 Biennial
October 18 - December 21, 2008
View KY7 Biennial Online Gallery
Statement
Welcome to the premier exhibition of KY7, a regional survey of contemporary art produced in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and its seven contiguous states: Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. In January 2008 LAL made a call to artists to submit work to KY7; through a three-month process, the curators carefully selected 33 artists from seven states and a total of144 portfolios. The result is a dynamic exhibition of 44 pieces representing a wide-range of media from painting, to video, to installation.
KY7 is more than just a survey of meaningful art. It is a vehicle to promote our region’s most forward-thinking artists. In the service of those artists and contemporary art, the selection goals were to choose artwork that is innovative in production and concept, culturally relative, and addresses important political and social issues. It is our hope that KY7 will grow to be an important exhibition where artists from Kentucky and the mid-Atlantic/Midwest/Southern regions will be recognized with increasing critical interest. As KY7 grows, we look forward to the conversations and debate about trends and answers to the question of what it means to be an artist from this region.
Art critic and author David Hickey recently stated in a 2007 interview, “I am not in favor of art—I’m in favor of the art I like.” 1 With similar candor, we, as curators, recognize that this biennial ultimately is a selection of our own biases. Recognizing the fallibility of this process, we invite the audience to “express their ideas by participating in the collective production of meaning”.2 Moreover, we invite you put your human faith in artistic magic and believe, just as we do, that art matters, today more than ever.
Mike Deetsch, Exhibitions and Programs Director at LAL
Andrea Fisher, Director of the Morlan Gallery at Transylvania University
Kate Sprengnether, Director of the Tuska Center for Contemporary Art
1 Heti, Sheila. “An interview with David Hickey,” The Believer. November/December 2007: 11.Timothy McSweeney’s.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200711/?read=interview_hickey
2 Brenson, Micheal. “The Curator’s Moment.” Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985. Ed. by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 2005
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