 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
||
|
Past Exhibitions | |
| 2006 · 2005 · 2004 · 2003 | ||
|
2003 Exhibitions: · James
Turrell: Knowing Light
James
Turrell: Knowing Light "Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile. I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. I want to employ sunlight, moonlight and starlight to empower a work of art."—James Turrell You've probably been hearing a lot about James Turrell in the news lately. His mammoth land, sky, and space art project at Roden Crater in Arizona is nearing the end of its 30-year construction and is sure to become one of the truly extraordinary works of art of our time. In 2003, Turrell designed a permanent, first-of-its-kind skyspace for the Henry Art Gallery Sculpture Court. The unveiling of the Skyspace marked the conclusion of the Henry's 75th anniversary in a prominent way, serving not only as a lasting legacy of the museum's commitment to contemporary art, but also providing an enduring link to the skyspaces in Turrell's Roden Crater. Throughout his career, internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell has thrilled visitors around the world with his light and space installations. To celebrate the unveiling of the Henry's Skyspace and give audiences a full taste of the vast range of Turrell's work, the Henry presented James Turrell: Knowing Light, premiering new large-scale light installations as well as models and drawings of his extraordinary 30-year Roden Crater project. Organized by Henry Art Gallery Director Richard Andrews, Knowing Light advanced Turrell's longstanding relationship with the Henry and with Seattle that began with four light installations in the early 1980s in the inaugural exhibition of the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA). In 1992, a major retrospective exhibition of his work (1967–1992) titled James Turrell: Sensing Space, was organized by the Henry. For
Knowing Light Turrell executed one of the largest, most ambitious
of his “Ganzfeld” works to date. Ganzfelds are evenly
illuminated and undifferentiated fields, first explored in perceptual
psychology. Turrell's works create homogenous, undifferentiated
light fields of saturated color that seem to hover, their distance
and location difficult to specify. Spread is a 4,000 square-foot
walk-in environment that occupied more than half of the Henry's
spacious Stroum Gallery. Shaffner, another walk-in installation,
is a "spectral wedgework" from the Milk Run Series. Entering
the darkened space the viewer sees a multi-hued "wedge"
of light that forms an illusory volume in an otherwise darkened
chamber. Also on view: Magnetron - an aperture work lit by
television - and a selection of models, drawings, as well as photographs,
documenting Turrell's monumental work at Roden Crater in Arizona. James Turrell: Knowing Light, organized by Director Richard Andrews, was sponsored by the Henry Art Gallery's Contemporary Art Fund, the Allen Foundation for the Arts, PONCHO, NBBJ Group; and Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects. In-kind support provided by Donnally Architects; Grand Hyatt Seattle; KrekowJenningsInc.; KUOW Public Radio; Northwest Partitions; and Rainier Industries, Ltd. Special thanks to our opening sponsors: Baci Catering and Cafe; Hogue Cellars; Mellon; and Pyramid Ales and Lager. Lee
Bul: Live Forever Lee Bul's futuristic installation includes a trilogy of video projections alongside three soundproof karaoke booths—white pod-like capsules lined with leather and body-conforming foam—that visitors are invited to enter one at a time for a private performance. Part road trip, part space odyssey, Lee Bul: Live Forever blurs the lines between art and entertainment, artifice and nature, and public and private performance. Lee Bul explains that in these pods, where the body is surrounded by a machine-like shell, “the act of singing becomes a performance only for the self, like dancing in front of the mirror.” The physical isolation of the capsule encourages each user to explore the personal fantasies and the collective memories evoked by popular music. Lee’s use of karaoke conveys her notion that everyone's life has a soundtrack that evokes a mixture of memory and desire, both distinctly individual and composed of elements of mass production and public consumption. Each of the karaoke pods corresponds to a video and song list that addresses a specific theme. The first pod is lined in black and explores the notion of journey. Visitors can choose from songs including Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen and California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas. The accompanying video depicts couples dancing in the Tonga Room of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and explores relationships between lounge singers, tourists, and businessmen in transient hotel culture. A second pod lined in orange is devoted to a collection of love songs such as Every Breath You Take by The Police, and One by U2. The video captures a group of Korean schoolgirls dancing and playing in nature. Silver-blue leather lines the third pod, which combines imagery and songs about urban life. The fast-moving video depicts a nighttime journey along a six-lane freeway in Seoul. Blurring headlights and neon signs speed by, accompanying songs such as I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones and Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Lee Bul has exhibited worldwide at venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 1999, she represented Korea at the Venice Biennale. Lee Bul: Live Forever has traveled to the San Francisco Art Institute, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, The New Museum of Art, New York, Orange County Museum of Art, The Power Plant, Toronto, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art before its final stop in Seattle. Lee Bul lives and works in Seoul. The works in Lee Bul: Live Forever were produced by the artist in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Art Institute. Support was provided by the Korea Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, and Mr. and Mrs. James E. Douglas, Jr. The exhibition was organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Pamela Meredith, Assistant Curator with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, PONCHO, and the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, and in-kind support from the Grand Hyatt, Seattle. The
Gladiator Nun: Fellini's Women Drawing was a major part of celebrated Italian film maker Federico Fellini's life from childhood until his death in 1993. He began his career as a cartoonist and sketches were the method by which he conceptualized each new film. Some of the works in this exhibition relate to specific films, for example a profile of the voluptuous Anita Ekberg from La Dolce Vita and costume designs for Il Casanova. Others highlight Fellini's unique, exuberant style, his personal conception of women's and men's bodies, and the exaggerated, ambiguous relationships he created between genders in both his films and his drawings. Sequences from Fellini’s most loved films will be projected continuously in the gallery alongside the drawings. The Trevi Fountain scene from La Dolce Vita, Guido in his imaginary harem from 8 1/2, Casanova's dance with the doll, and other clips will provide a familiar soundtrack for viewing the little known drawings. Humorous, oxymoronic, and naughty—like the films and the man himself—the drawings may puzzle, titillate, aggravate, and entertain, all in the name of understanding Federico Fellini the filmmaker and artist in a more complete fashion. This exhibition, organized in conjunction with the University of Washington's Felliniana Conference (October 29 – November 1, 2003), presents drawings made throughout Fellini’s life. The drawings, now owned by the Fellini Foundation in Rimini, are mostly unpublished and very few have been exhibited beyond the Foundation’s walls. The Gladiator Nun: Fellini’s Women was curated by Ricardo de Mambro Santos, University of Rome, La Sapienza and organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Pamela Meredith, Assistant Curator, in collaboration with the University of Washington's Felliniana Conference. The Henry Art Gallery wishes to thank the Fondazione Federico Fellini, Rimini for its invaluable participation in the loaning of artworks, without which this exhibition would not have been possible. Flirting
with Rodchenko In
1921, Russian avant-garde artist Alexander Rodchenko executed what
were arguably the first true monochromes (artworks of one color),
and proclaimed “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion
and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed:
this is the end of painting.” For artists of the Russian Revolution,
Rodchenko’s radical action was full of utopian possibility.
It marked the end of easel painting – perhaps even the end
of art – along with the end of bourgeois norms and practices.
It cleared the way for the beginning of a new Russian life, a new
mode of production, a new culture. Artists represented in the exhibition include Anne Appleby, Sue Arrowsmith, Fandra Chang, Annette Lemieux, Sol LeWitt, Florence Pierce, and Richard Tuttle. Flirting with Rodchenko was organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Robin Held, Associate Curator. The Short Stories series, organized by Henry Art Gallery curators, is sponsored by the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle and the Henry Art Gallery's Contemporary Art Fund. In-kind support provided by the Grand Hyatt Seattle.
Architecture
and Light Through light and shadow architecture acquires shape. Light lends a building its contours and shadow, its depth. Through light and shadow architecture also acquires meaning. This selection of mostly photo-based work highlights the ways in which dramatic shadow and light animate varied structures, from church interiors to tents. Striking examples include Height and Light by Frederick H. Evans who sought to capture the “soul” of cathedrals in his photographs and would spend weeks living in a church, studying the way light and shadow defined forms and created a spiritual atmosphere. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images of ornate movie theaters built in the 1920s and ‘30s are lit purely by cinematic light, as the length of exposure for each photograph is the precise length of the film being screened. Also included is Seattle artist Victoria Haven's Supermodelcity, a three-dimensional exploration of architecture and light, and an exciting addition to the Henry’s collection, purchased in 2003 with funds provided by the Henry Contemporaries. This exhibition, selected primarily from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection of Photography, was inspired by the James Turrell Skyspace in the Henry's Sculpture Court. Architecture and Light was organized by Pamela Meredith, Assistant Curator. The Short Stories series, organized by Henry Art Gallery curators, is sponsored by the Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, City of Seattle and the Henry Art Gallery's Contemporary Art Fund. In-kind support provided by the Grand Hyatt Seattle. An
Inspired Legacy: Elizabeth Bayley Willis (1902 - 2003)
Elizabeth Bayley Willis died in June of 2003 at the age of 101, after an important career as a collector, curator, consultant, and art historian. In tribute to her extraordinary collection of Indian textiles and Japanese ceramics, much of which now resides at the Henry, a small exhibition of ceramics and textiles was presented on the mezzanine wall of the Henry Art Gallery. Mrs. Willis was a curator at the Henry from 1946-48 and acting assistant director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where she organized the first retrospectives of Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. She is also credited with introducing contemporary Japanese folk art to the western world with a 1951 exhibition that circulated for six years. The Henry is indebted to Mrs. Willis's prescient ability to see the importance of collecting and preserving examples of the traditions she encountered on her extensive travels, and for her consummate eye in choosing the best pieces for such an extraordinary collection. While
a UN advisor to the Indian government from 1955-57, she worked on
developing the handloom industry. During that time she amassed the
majority of her outstanding textile collection, nearly 1,900 costumes,
textiles, and decorative works from most of the states of India.
She was a resident of Bainbridge Island. Hover:
Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White With a textile work resting on the floor and a paper mobile hanging in space beside it, Hover: Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White explores connections between two contemporary artists whose work revels in its hybridism, fragility, and extreme beauty. Both Flying Hearts by Apfelbaum and Grotto by White have a strong sense of spectacle and movement, consist of hundreds of handmade fragments that make up a whole, and while neither is a painting, both refer to the language of painting. Polly Apfelbaum has come to international recognition with installations of what have become her signature material and technique: hundreds of pieces of hand-cut, dyed velvet, placed on the floor in highly organized patterns of shape and color. As though an abstract painting has melted or "fallen" off the wall to form vibrant puddles, Flying Hearts also evokes the patterns of Islamic art, patchwork quilts, and kitschy, black-velvet paintings. Pae
White's dense paper and string mobiles nod to Alexander Calder's
mobiles, as well as Marimekko's organic textile designs, but can
also be seen as "paintings in space," dense color fields
recalling pointillism, pixels, or camouflage. So delicate that a
soft breeze causes the paper cut-outs to twist and turn changing
the work's entire composition, White herself refers to the mobiles
in such cinematic terms as "stills" or "dissolves."
Hover: Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White was curated by Pamela Meredith, Assistant Curator. Support for the exhibition was provided by the Contemporary Art Fund. In-kind support provided by the Grand Hyatt Seattle. Claire Cowie: Flying Ladies of Leisure Seattle artist Claire Cowie has received critical praise in the Northwest for her strange, dreamlike works. Characterized by spare brush strokes and dizzying shifts in scale, her creations are rendered in a wide range of media. With printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing and photography, Cowie gives life to a vast menagerie of creatures. Penguins and kittens, ballerinas and hunters, gnomes and flying ladies, as well as several breeds of human-animal hybrids, are all inhabitants of Cowie’s personal landscape. Drawn from various sources, including Japanese woodblock prints, celebrity culture, mass-produced novelty items, and the artist’s dreams and memories, these images constitute a fantastic world with its own internal logic. Claire Cowie: Flying Ladies of Leisure features an “open studio” artist residency by Cowie, who worked in full view of the public for a period of three weeks in July of 2003. During her residency, Cowie created new work to be exhibited alongside selections of her art from the past five years. Also on view through September 28, 2003, the exhibition Stagings: Claire Cowie and the Monsen Collection Photogravures, features Cowie's own photogravures alongside a selection of works from the collection that inspired them, with photogravures by contemporary artists from the Henry Collection, including John Baldessari and Kiki Smith. Claire Cowie: Flying Ladies of Leisure is part of a series of exhibitions demonstrating the Henry's commitment to the best art and artists of the Northwest, providing artist residencies, commissioning new artwork, facilitating access to the Henry’s collections and curatorial expertise, and offering other opportunities for the creation of new work by artists of the region.
Crosscurrents: From Willie Cole's Domestic Shield comprised of iron scorch marks on an ironing board cover to Yoshitomo Nara's stylized Little Pilgrims who seem to sleepwalk up the walls, Crosscurrents: Contemporary Art from the Neuberger Berman Collection is a dazzling selection of work that reflects various prevailing trends in contemporary art. Neuberger Berman is a New York based financial investment firm. Roy Neuberger, a shrewd collector of contemporary American art, founded the firm over 60 years ago. The exhibition includes approximately 55 works of art, created primarily since 1990, which reflect the diversity of the firm’s international contemporary art collection, which includes nearly 600 works housed in Neuberger Berman's corporate headquarters in New York and satellite offices in cities across the United States. Crosscurrents is a portrait of the diverse international art practice with an emphasis on painting and photography by emerging to mid-career artists. Olafur Eliasson's photographs of certain natural wonders in his native Iceland are infused with both a sense of the scientific and the sublime. Gregory Crewdson's staged landscapes explore the dark, psychologically tense side of suburbia. Paintings in the exhibition range from abstract works by Karin Davie whose intensely colored ribbons fill the canvas in undulating waves and Ingrid Calame, who traces the shape of stains on the sidewalk, then transfers them to aluminum in enamel, to figuration as in Laylah Ali's cartoon-like, round-headed figures seemingly engaged in scenarios suggestive of racial oppression, and Marilyn Minter's highly realistic rendering of a woman’s open mouth. Crosscurrents celebrates the energy, sense of exploration, and perpetual diversity of contemporary art. The exhibition premieres at the Henry Art Gallery and subsequently travels to Chicago, West Palm Beach and Tampa, Florida.
On Wanting to Grow Horns:
With a flurry of activity and exquisitely intricate detail, Thomas Knechtel invites the viewer to step up for a closer look at his imaginary landscapes. His various inspirations range from puppet shows, Kabuki theatre, fairy tales, and zoological prints, to the work of earlier artists such as William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. In his idiosyncratic paintings and drawings he transforms the refinement of Renaissance “realism”—with its passion for both nature and the allegorical—into modern existential struggles and celebrations. Knechtel's province is that of the grotesque and the ravishing, the intimate and the spectacular, the jubilant and the melancholic. His is a literary, poetic consciousness filled with the stuff of language: metaphor, rhyme, character and narrative. But as a visual artist, he is equally in love with formal values, the raw material of paint and the rigors of scrupulous technique. Known for a technical virtuosity and for the range of his works on paper, Knechtel has explored the media of watercolor, gouache, pastel, charcoal, silverpoint, graphite, and ink, in each case keeping a pure relationship between method and mark-making. In 1985, he began to paint in oils, desiring to loosen up his precise and meticulous technique. The phantasmagoric works that resulted set forth intricate and meandering narratives, which delight the viewer with a labyrinth of private fantasy and stylized, colorful spectacle. Knechtel’s work is shameless in its exploration of the sensory pleasure of art. On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theatre of Tom Knechtel is a mid-career survey spanning three decades of the Los Angeles artist's work.
University
of Washington
Painting: Jennifer
Braje , Stephanie Dennis , Christopher Jagers , Matthew Pappas, Jill
Stutzman Brian Jungen: Cetology The first solo presentation in the U.S. of Vancouver-based artist Brian Jungen, this East Gallery exhibition might at first glance appear to be more suited to a natural history museum than a contemporary art institution. Cetology is a giant sculpture in the form of a whale's skeleton fashioned from dismantled plastic patio-chairs. The metaphor of the endangered Bowhead whale crafted from mass-produced, globally-ubiquitous consumer items provides many associations, enriched by the artist's own First Nations ancestry. Jungen's work is transformative - common store-bought commodities become evocative objects. Also on view is one in a series of Nike Air Jordans re-fashioned into replicas of North West Coast masks. First Nations iconography, global economies, and art worlds collide in Jungen's work, creating dialogues ripe with humor and allusion. In December of 2002, Jungen received $50,000 as a winner of the prestigious SobeyArt Award, a Canadian prize recognizing contemporary artists under 40 years old. Cetology was organized for the Henry Art Gallery by Chief Curator Elizabeth Brown, with Assistant Curator Pamela Meredith. The Henry Art Gallery would like to acknowledge the assistance of Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, B.C. PONCHO provides support for the Henry Art Gallery's Artists-in-Residence program. In-kind support provided by the Grand Hyatt Seattle.
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
