NOVEMBER 3 - 27
Opening Reception
Friday, Nov 5
6-830 pm
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Gallery I
"Free Radicals "
Betsyann Duval
For the past ten years I've been posing questions in my work about the impact of art, culture, and politics on women's sense of self.
I began this current series of paintings by wondering what forces shaped the lives of women who broke free from the female stereotype to make major contributions in their time—the women who became the icons who influenced a whole generation. I wanted to look inside them and see what caused them to rebel, to put myself in their place, to be Zelig .
I saw these paintings in my mind as monumental portraits of women in the context of their era: tributes, not to the workers of America, but to women , similar to the WPA murals of the 30s.
Drawing on images of historical and cultural events that surrounded them, I re-imagined them and placed them in jarring social, political, and cultural juxtaposition. As I was putting images together, it struck me that war and violence formed a context for each life.
Starting from a positive desire to celebrate these women, I found myself composing collages that were darkly ironic. These disturbing images popped, unbidden, into my mind without reference or source. What started as large-scale murals evolved into something more intimate.
www.duvalart.com
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Gallery II
"A Wild Edge "
Tim McDonald
While my art practice is broad and I use a variety of visual languages, recently, drawing, as a primal action, has become a principal focus.
These drawings began, in large part, as an evocation of wild nature, but I quickly saw that what I was doing was more a holistic and ritual activity of the body. I see the moment of making a mark as the ground of imagination (located in the body) and understand perception to be a natural system; an ecology of mind in which the perceiver is not separate from that which is perceived.
The initiation of a mark is a primary point of contact, of clarity, that is before language, before thought--an original root experience of imagination, a manifestation of our animal mind operating along a wild edge.
As I employ a variety of materials, from charcoal, graphite, and ink, to fire, ice, pollen, and clay, drawing, as a practice, offers me, as poet Gary Snyder has written, "an open space to move in with the whole body, the whole mind."
tim mcdonald
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Gallery III
Gallery
Artists
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