Helen Mirra & Sean Thackrey @ BAMPFA, Berkeley - No Horizon

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
July 3 - August 25, 2019

An exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) showcases new series by two Bay Area artists whose work is influenced by Zen Buddhism. No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey marks the first dual exhibition of work by Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, two artists based in Marin County whose respective practices emphasize simplicity, texture, and a deep awareness of place. The exhibition features more than a dozen recent works by each artist, most of which are receiving their first museum presentation.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by Without Horizon, a series of works created by Sean Thackrey in collaboration with the artist and composer John Cage. A winemaker and art dealer who cofounded the San Francisco gallery Thackrey & Robertson in 1970, Sean Thackrey has sustained a decades-long photography practice, producing works he describes as “objects, marks on paper, produced by photography. . . meant to be objects of contemplation.” The BAMPFA exhibition presents work from Sean Thackrey’s latest extended series, created between 2012 and the present: photographs of weathered slabs of Venetian stone, capturing the subtle yet expressive transformations of Venice’s distinctive limestone surfaces as they slowly decay over time. Each of  Sean Thackrey’s photographs are mounted on dyed panels of wood, meticulously crafted by the artist to resonate with the distinctive texture of each image.

Sean Thackrey’s photographs invite viewers to engage with the uncanny beauty of seemingly ordinary surfaces, evoking through their simplicity a mood of contemplative repose that reflects the artist’s interest in Zen Buddhism. A fellow Zen practitioner, Helen Mirra arrives at a similar effect through her own distinctive series of works, a set of intimately scaled woven objects that capture her somatic experiences and the outdoor geography of the North Bay landscape. Named for the month in which they were made, these works are generally between two and three feet in size, and are characterized by subtle variations in color and texture that seem to shift when viewed from different angles. The nuances of the material—mostly linen, with some wool, cotton, and silk—combine with a restrained palate to convey intuitive sensations of place, atmosphere, and season. The exhibition at BAMPFA includes excerpts from this series of works created between 2017 and the present.

Emerging from different generations and working in different media, Sean Thackrey and Helen Mirra have both created bodies of work that similarly capture the ephemeral beauty of being and time. The minute variations of color and texture in their works reward close viewings and relaxed concentration, recalling the Zen instruction to “do nothing” as a stance of open engagement with the world. Notably both artists have chosen to focus their attention, and that of their viewers, on seemingly everyday materials, highlighting aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions in the simplicity of fabric and stone.

“We’re honored to bring together at BAMPFA two great Bay Area artists whose work embraces the simple act of seeing as an inspiration to deep reflection and understanding,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who organized the exhibition. “In both Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey’s remarkable bodies of work, we are moved by the simultaneous expression of the particular and universal.”

In conjunction with No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey, BAMPFA presents a reading by Bay Area poets Lyn Hejinian and Frances Richard, who respond to Mirra and Thackrey’s work with original compositions that grapple in language with wordlessness. The reading takes place on Friday, August 23 at 12 p.m. and is free with museum admission.

No Horizon: Helen Mirra and Sean Thackrey is organized by BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder with Curatorial Assistant Lucia Momoh. The exhibition is made possible with lead support from Carla and David Crane.

BAMPFA
2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA
bampfa.org

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha @ BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California
January 31 – April 22, 2018

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

A Ble Wail, 1975

Performance, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley 

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Trip Callaghan

The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents an innovatively organized exhibition of work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), the first solo presentation in more than a decade of work by the accomplished artist, filmmaker, and writer. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee features nearly fifty of Cha’s works in a range of media, organized for the first time into distinct thematic groupings inspired by the ten chapters of her iconic 1982 book Dictee.

Drawing from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s rarely exhibited archives—which were donated to BAMPFA in 1992—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee captures the interdisciplinary scope of Cha’s artistic output, which encompassed photography, poetry, film, video, live performance, mail art, sculpture, works on paper, and more. The selected works highlight the artist’s interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of language, which is also a central focus of Dictee—a formally ambitious work that includes passages in English, French, and Korean. The exhibition is organized into ten sections that correspond to the chapters of Dictee, with excerpts from the book displayed alongside individual works to illuminate connections and themes that extend throughout the artist’s practice.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Re Dis Appearing, 1977

Video; black and white, sound, 3 min.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 

Repetitive Pattern, 1975

Ink on cloth, sewn with thread; 46 x 46 in.

BAMPFA; gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation 

Photo: Benjamin Blackwell 

Born in South Korea, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha immigrated with her family to the United States as a child and settled in the Bay Area, where she studied French at San Francisco’s Convent of the Sacred Heart before enrolling at UC Berkeley. Much of the work in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee was created during Cha’s time as a student in Berkeley, where she earned four degrees and worked as an employee of BAMPFA. The exhibition includes rarely seen correspondence and other ephemera from Cha’s life, which ended in 1982 with her untimely death at the age of 31.

“By exploring Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s art through the lens of Dictee, and vice versa, the exhibition offers viewers an opportunity to appreciate the global resonance of the artist's oeuvre and the ways in which it was profoundly interconnected across works and media, returning again and again to certain key themes,” said Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo, who curated the exhibition.

”We are excited to introduce Cha’s work to a new generation while at the same time offering a fresh take on this tremendously important and original artist,” said BAMPFA Director and Chief Curator Lawrence Rinder, who has previously curated multiple exhibitions of Cha’s work. “This exploration of Cha’s oeuvre through the lens of Dictee could really only happen at BAMPFA, where we are privileged to hold such an extraordinarily deep archive of the artist’s work and ephemera.”

In conjunction with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, BAMPFA is mounting a panel discussion and other public programs to reexamine the artist’s legacy; a full schedule of these events will be announced at bampfa.org. Copies of Dictee are on hand in the exhibition gallery and are available to purchase at the BAMPFA store.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee is organized by Assistant Curator Stephanie Cannizzo and made possible with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archive Fund and Young Chul and Elizabeth Cha Park.

BAMPFA
www.bampfa.org

Cecilia Edefalk @ the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Cecilia Edefalk / MATRIX 261
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive  

June 29 - October 16, 2016

CECILIA EDEFALK

Silver Roots, 2010

Polished bronze; 21 ½ x 7 ¼ in.

© Cecilia Edefalk, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents Cecilia Edefalk/MATRIX 261. The Stockholm-based artist Cecilia Edefalk’s work explores historical memory, fluctuations of time, and the symbolic significance of light. Her paintings, photographs, watercolors, and sculptures reveal an intuitive and reflective approach to making art. Edefalk’s works typically originate from a single motif—whether it be the crane fly that she discovers on her kitchen window, or a transfixing Roman sculpture she encounters in a museum—that she then represents repeatedly in various forms. The work selected for MATRIX 261 focuses on Edefalk’s decades-long engagement with the natural environment.

In recent years Edefalk has been documenting a dandelion-filled meadow near her home in various moments of light and states of bloom. One large photograph in the exhibition shows part of the field illuminated by resplendent, filtered light that turns the bulbs of the flowers into glowing orbs. Another large-scale photograph shows a hand delicately holding a perfect, spherical seed head before the wind carries the seeds away. Also on display are three small paintings which Edefalk produced in thin washes of black-and-white tempera, each revealing the meadow in different sunlit states, much as an Impressionist painter might have done in the nineteenth century. 

In the late 1970s Edefalk set out on a three-year journey across Europe with a botanist friend to document and draw coastal wildflowers they encountered in areas of historical significance in England, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The flowers and plants she captured in watercolor act as her lens onto these ancient landscapes. Edefalk originally made 160 of these works to comprise a botanical book on Mediterranean flora, which was never published; a selection of twenty of these appear in the exhibition. Birch trees, common in Sweden, are another subject that has inspired over the last several years. Edefalk’s interest in the tree originated from a traumatic moment when the artist witnessed the felling of a beloved Weeping Birch on her neighborhood block. She recovered bark, branches, and leaves from the site and transformed them into dozens of cast bronze sculptures to memorialize the tree.

Other paintings, sculptures, and photographs displayed in the exhibition point to her interest in historical sculpture, in particular a Roman marble mask of Marcus Aurelius that she encountered in the Malmö Konstmuseum, which became the foundation for a large, growing body of work. This spawned the series of paintings To view the painting from within (2002), which depicts Aurelius set against a pale blue background. The perspective from which Edefalk painted the sculpture corresponds with the phase of the moon of the day on which it was painted. A related series of photographs, To view the painting from outside, similarly shows the artist’s eye traveling around the bust with the paintings behind, again capturing many different sitelines. Edefalk’s exploration of the Aurelius portrait continues in another series of bronze sculptures that combine the visage with leaves and pieces of tree bark. In each work, she captures the evanescence of subjects that often exude a mystical and fragile quality marked by time and space.

MATRIX 261 is the artist’s first solo exhibition in a US museum in a decade, and her first ever on the West Coast.

Artist biography

Born in 1954 in Norrköping, Sweden, CECILIA EDEFALK studied at the Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm, from 1981 to 1986; and Konstfack, University College of Arts, Craft, and Design, Stockholm, from 1973 to 1977. One of Sweden’s most celebrated artists, Edefalk has had numerous one-person museum exhibitions, including at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; Moderna Muséet, Stockholm; Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö; Lunds Konsthall, Lund; Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Art Unlimited, Basel; The Art Institute of Chicago; Nordic Watercolor Museum, Skärhamn, Sweden; Parasol unit, London; and Museum für Kunst, Bremerhaven, Germany. A major retrospective will open in the fall of 2016 at Prins Eugens Waldmarsudde in Stockholm. Her work has appeared in many group shows at various international venues including at the the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany; Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the 22nd São Paolo Biennial. She has received many awards and grants including the Barbro & Holger Bäckströms stipendium, Sweden; Edstrandska stiftelsen, Malmö, Sweden; and the Hans-Viksten-stipendium, Sweden. Edefalk lives and works in Stockholm. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels; and Stene Projects, Stockholm.

BAMPFA
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu

Emmet Govin, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
February 6 – March 14, 2003

Every picture is environmental. That is one of the overwhelmingly wonderful things about photography; no matter how much one intends to rid the picture of environment, which is to say living substance, something of it is nonetheless there. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Philip Brookman, 2001

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs is the first major exhibition in more than ten years of work by the internationally recognized photographer. Presented at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection, the exhibition features ninety-two images created by Emmet Gowin since 1986. The artist's growing body of work bears witness to how humankind has visibly scarred and continues to alter the Earth's surface - the main theme in Emmet Gowin's series of aerial photographs.

The exhibition concentrates Emmet Gowin's rich, hand-toned black and white landscape images into a series that depict alarming views of the Earth's disturbed surface. The images appear as starkly beautiful compositions of light and form which invite long and lingering contemplation, while his subject matter raises alarm for environmental concerns.

Emmet Gowin had for many years been making portraits of his family and landscape photographs throughout the United States and Europe, as well as teaching photography at Princeton University, when, in 1980, the eruption of Mount Saint Helens moved him to charter a plane and, with a hand-held camera, made pictures of the natural devastation below. He returned there in 1986 to experience a pivotal transformation in both human and artistic terms.

In 1986 returning, I thought, for the last time to Mount Saint Helens, I took a side trip to Yakima, Washington, and a flight that changed my whole perception of the age in which I live. In less than two hours flying over the Hanford Reservation, a pattern of relationships and a dark history of places and events emerged. Still visible after forty years were the pathways, burial mounds, and waste disposal trenches, as well as skeletal remains of a city once used by over thirty thousand people who built the first reactor and enriched the first uranium. What I saw, imagined, and now know, was that a landscape had been created that could never be saved. I began in the next year to search for the other signs of our "nuclear age": missile silos, production sites, water treatment and disposal sites - in short, the realities that I had unconsciously forgotten. - Emmet Gowin, Interview with Toby Jurovics, 1996

Emmet Gowin's first photograph of this abandoned nuclear reactor site, home of the Manhattan Project, is a key image in the exhibition. Old Hanford City Site and the Columbia River; Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington are among the works in the exhibition from the 1980s that include images of mining explorations in Montana, weapons and bomb disposal sites in Utah, an alkali wash and dry watering hole in New Mexico, and an abandoned trailer park on an Apache reservation in Arizona.

In 1992, Emmet Gowin traveled in the Czech Republic for two years for aerial explorations of strip coal and chemo-petrol mines, power stations, and evidence of exploitation and devastation from the Soviet-era. Throughout the 1990's, Emmet Gowin directed his attention to photograph the American West; most frequently the Nevada Test Site and agricultural tracts using pivot irrigation in Kansas. Battlefields in Kuwait, an Israeli suburban settlement in Jerusalem, and golf courses under construction in Japan are among Emmet Gowin's global subjects.

Emmet Gowin was born in Danville, Virginia in 1941. He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond; and received an M.A. from The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Since 1973 he has been teaching photography in Princeton University's Program in Visual Art, of which he is currently the director. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974); National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1977 and 1979); The Seattle Arts Commission (1980); the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts from the State of Pennsylvania (1983) and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (1993-1994). In 1997 Emmet Gowin received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. The first solo exhibition of his work was presented by The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1983. Emmet Gowin/Photographs: The Vegetable Earth is but a Shadow retrospective exhibition was organized by The Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990 and traveled extensively. Photographs: Landscape in the Nuclear Age was presented in Japan in 1992, the same year his first European retrospective exhibition was presented in Paris.

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth - Aerial Photographs was organized by The Yale University Art Gallery, and Jock Reynolds, The Henry J. Heinz II Director, and Curator of the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome fully-illustrated book with essays by Jock Reynolds, author of many articles on American photography and contemporary art; nature writer and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams; and a revealing conversation between Emmet Gowin and Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at The Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu

Visual Worlds, Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis - Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula

Visual Worlds
Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, Allan Sekula
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
September 28 – October 31, 2001

The Visual Worlds exhibition features the work of Andrea Fraser, the GALA committee, Mary Kelly, Shirin Neshat, ®™Ark, and Allan Sekula, investigating shifting concepts of visuality in the age of globalization and digitization. The exhibition encompasses works in photography, slide projection, video/performance, web-sites, and other conceptually based image/text explorations. Utilizing strategies of viral infiltration, parody, sabotage, and documentation, the works included in Visual Worlds, question the increasingly convoluted relationships between media and society, as they seek to undermine the omnipresence and seamlessness of mainstream media news, television and Hollywood.

Included in the exhibition are selections from Mary Kelly's mea culpa series in which thousands of pounds of laundry have been washed and dried to create wave-like intaglio prints composed of fragile dryer lint. The ocean-like swaths of lint are imprinted with text and are presented in photographic linear configurations. The texts, though fictitiously composed by Kelly, are derived from fragments of politically motivated atrocities including recent investigations by the International War Crimes Tribunal. Conveyed through the voice of an anonymous female protagonist, the texts reference atrocities associated with Vietnam in the 1970’s and the apartheid-crimes of South Africa under investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Act.

The exhibition also includes Shirin Neshat’s powerful and poetic photographs, in which contemporary female Muslim identity is examined in relationship to the culture of the media photograph and the history of the photographic portrait. Also on view will be "Waiting for Tear Gas," a slide-installation project by Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer, Allan Sekula, incorporating documentation of the recent World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. Sekula’s poster-like piece "Dear Bill Gates" incorporating an image of the artist swimming in front of Microsoft executive Bill Gates’ sprawling estate, along with a letter from the artist addressed to Bill Gates, will also be on view.

Visual Worlds is also feature a series of works created by the GALA Committee, a collaborative artist/activist/product design team who have created ironic insertions into the Prime Time television program Melrose Place over a period of years. The GALA committee, consisting of over 100 artist/participants succeeded at producing over 100 art objects that actually appeared in many filmed episodes of the Melrose Place program. The objects developed collaboratively using fax communication between participants, poignantly satirize the cultures of Hollywood, of professional sports, and of the advertising industry through a critique of gender, race, sexuality, and status stereotyping. GALA Committee projects include, for example, a series of heirloom-like photographic portraits titled "Prostitute Ancestors" and an ironic sports trophy, "Father-Son Trophy," that seeks to unravel the cycles of aggression transmitted through mainstream sports culture. Several simulacra of David Hockney-like paintings will also be on view, including one depicting the site of the Rodney King beating and one depicting the home of Nicole Brown Simpson in Los Angeles.

Also included is Andrea Fraser’s performance and video piece, "Inaugural Speech," originally produced for the inSITE 97 San Diego/Tijuana art event. Unraveling the relationship between international arts events such as the inSITE 97 festival and other parallel counterparts such as the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Biennial, Documenta, and the Seoul Biennial, Fraser reveals the not-so-hidden relationships between business interest, art patronage, real-estate development, and these types of arts events as she examines the "pyramid of power for which artists and arts audiences form the base of support." The exhibition will also feature the video "Bringing IT to YOU! by the digital arts collective ®™Ark. Accompanied by their web-site and a large digital poster display, ®™Ark, challenges Late Capitalist, Multi-Nationalist corporate culture, through a strategy of corporate sabotage and digital infiltration.

The Visual Worlds exhibition has been developed for the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis in conjunction with a major interdisciplinary conference organized by the Center for History, Society, and Culture (CHSC), UC Davis scheduled from October 26 – 28, 2001.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu

Kunié Sugiura, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Dark Matters/Light Affairs

Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
April 8 – May 18, 2001

Kunié Sugiura: Dark Matters/Light Affairs features a selection of some thirty major works produced in the past twelve years by New York artist Kunié Sugiura (b. Nagoya, Japan, 1942). Kunié Sugiura, a subject of many one-artist shows and a featured participant in New Photography 13 (1997) is an artist of International renown.

Kunié Sugiura’s chosen medium is the photogram, a camera-less photograph made by placing objects (often, in Kunié Sugiura’s work, living beings) in front of photographic paper and exposing them to light. Sugiura’s images – the preserved shadows of flowers, land and sea creatures, and even boxers frozen in battle – resonate with a sense of immediacy and discovery like that which animates the work of the earliest photographers. At the same time, she is the contemporary avatar of a long Japanese visual tradition grounded in the haunting, economical beauty of the silhouette.

Skeins of swirling photographic chemicals, intentionally fixed at the printing stage, suspend Kunié Sugiura’s subjects in the otherworldly present_tense of the darkroom. Her lush positive and negative renderings prompt reconsideration of the photogram as a vehicle of illusionism, as an exquisite dialect of design, and as the self-portraiture of the natural world, acting out timeless private dramas.

KUNIE SUGIURA

Dark Matters/Light Affairs

Exhibition Catalog

Dark Matters/Light Affairs is a traveling exhibition organized by Pamela Auchincloss Arts Management Services, the exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog, distributed by the University of Washington Press and featuring essays by Bill Arning of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Joel Smith of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu

Robert Arneson, Nelson Gallery, UC Davis - Alice Street Revisited

Robert Arneson: Alice Street Revisited
Nelson Gallery, University of California, Davis
November 12 – December 15, 2000

Robert Arneson’s body of "Alice Street" works on view at The Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis, includes the monumental sculpture The Palace at 9 a.m., two large paintings Alice Blue and Alice House Billboard: Corner of L Street and Alice, as well as numerous drawings, studies and sketches. Each work uses as its point of departure the image of the artist’s former track house, located at the corner of Alice and L streets in Davis, California where Robert Arneson resided in the years between 1962 – 1976. Ranging in tone from reverent to ironic, the "Alice Street" works are as art-historically and socially probing, as they are engaged with the particulars of place and time from which they emerge. They challenge art-historical conventions and presciently foreshadow later art movements, in which the house as a symbol of the "American Dream" is thoroughly deconstructed as an American icon.

Robert Arneson’s interest in playing with perspective and the house icon achieves perhaps its most complex exploration in the monumental sculpture, The Palace at 9 a.m., which he made in 1974 as a remake of his original "Alice House" sculpture Big Alice, 1967. However, The Palace at 9 a.m, became a much more elaborated version of its original, and its title is thought to be a play on Giacometti’s surrealist dreamscape The Palace at 4 a.m.

The intentionally child-like, direct, and vernacular handling of the clay in The Palace at 9 a.m., with its scatological and primal allusions, heightens both the playful and serious impact of the piece. Exaggeration of perspective, both through Robert Arneson’s placement of the piece at a calculated height, and also more noticeably through the angles of the roof-line and street sign, achieve a cartoon-like presence for the work that Robert Arneson poignantly pits against its primal references to mark-making and shelter. Shrubs, bushes, trees, dog tracks, dog excrement, wood chips, piles of garbage, the family van, a basketball hoop, and other evidence of habitation, are all sculpted expressively as part of the great model. The house and its surroundings are marked with drippy, washy vivid pinks, greens, blues, and yellows, achieving both a true sense of likeness to the house, and a cartoon-like aura. The artist’s actual handprint appears across a front window as a "mark of the self", a haptic signature, not unlike the prehistoric hand prints found in caves as evidence of those who once inhabited a particular site. With this handprint, and other marks ranging from footprints to patterned imprints, Robert Arneson reconnects the enterprise of sculpture with the ritual of the quotidian, replacing the sculpted bust on the pedestal with an archeological investigation of domestic space and time.

Robert Arneson’s polemic humor continues in works such as Fort Alice, which go even further in their mockery of the enterprise of homeownership and domestic life. But Robert Arneson’s irony and humor is tempered with equal doses of self-investigation, and even with an overt display of affection for his own house, its life, and certainly the enterprise of art-making to which he turned over both his house and his life energy. Alice Blue, plays with associations of the color blue with royalty and divinity, linking them to ideas of the track home, the American dream, the nuclear family, and the content and meaning of art and art history while Alice House Billboard: Corner of Alice and L, created between 1967-68, carries forward Robert Arneson’s challenge to the painted canvas and its conventions, through its play with perspective and its unraveling of the idea of the house and the framed painting as icons of civility. Trapezoidal in shape, the billboard-like painting presents a view of 1303 Alice complete with a sunny blue sky, family van parked in the driveway, and a rainbow which traces the entire eave of the roof. The rainbow, with its references to both the 1960’s counterculture and to the myth of the "American Dream" as a "Somewhere over the Rainbow," functions as a comic double-entendre, rooting the painting in the culture of its time.

Richard L. Nelson Gallery & The Fine Arts Collection
1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616
Room 124, Art Building, University of California, Davis
www.nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu