ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. - On Sunday, May 12, Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies will open the third and final group of exhibitions curated this spring by students in its innovative graduate program as final projects for the M.A. degree in curatorial studies.
The four exhibitions, "Shifting Spaces: Reading the Shadows," organized by Pip Day; "Next to Outside," organized by Sydney Jenkins; "Art on the Installation Plan: Tony Capellan and Belkis Ramirez," organized by Elena Pellegrini; and "Dissonant Wounds: Zones of Display/Metaphors of Atrophy," organized by Gilbert Vicario-Heras, will be open from May 12 through May 26. A reception, which is open to the public, will be held on Sunday, May 12, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Throughout film's 100-year history, its relationship with painting has been addressed in diverse ways in art theory, criticism, and exhibition. "Shifting Spaces: Reading the Shadows" brings Stan Douglas's film installation Der Sandmann (1995) and Nicholas Africano's large, tapestrylike paintings (1991 to 1992) into dialogue in exhibition. Both Douglas and Africano engage the formal properties and histories particular to the media in which they work and manipulate literary sources and the relationship of these sources to visual constructs. This manipulation induces a visceral response to the work that interrupts familiar ways of experiencing film and painting. The spatial and temporal experience of the work is dislodged; we shift into and out of the shadows that hover at the edge of the worlds of fantasy, fiction, and reality.
Both artists deal with the difficult and elusive zone that falls between two or more cultural, social, or political realms. Douglas's work formally embodies the inbetweenness of his own situation as a Canadian of African descent living in the predominantly Chinese and Caucasian city of Vancouver. Africano's paintings express the uneasiness of a more specifically personal or philosophical in-betweenness.
Nicholas Africano is an American painter and sculptor living and working in Normal, Illinois. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Stan Douglas is a Canadian artist from Vancouver whose work was recently shown in the Whitney Biennial, the Carnegie International, and has appeared in other group and solo exhibitions around the world.
Pip Day, former curator and associate director of Edward Day Gallery in Kingston, Canada, has recently worked on exhibitions and publications for the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Museo Egizio (in conjunction with the British Museum) in Torino, Italy.
"Next to Outside" examines the aesthetic kinship between the Chicago Imagists and so-called outsider artists Martin Ramirez and Joseph Yoakum. The exhibition presents works from Bard's Rivendell Collection by Chicago Imagists Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, and Ed Paschke and loaned works by Martin Ramirez, Joseph Yoakum, and H.C. Westermann that explore the development of the Chicago style and the concepts of "influence," "regionalism," and "outsider." Relationships between "outsider" and modernist styles are being rigorously analyzed by new, interdisciplinary scholarship. When a curator chooses to present such mixes of artistic expression, the curator must be aware of how he or she is contributing to the history of exhibition practice.
Sydney 0. Jenkins has been a curator at the Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta
(1991-1992); the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts (1986-1990); and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, Virginia (1982-1986). He studied studio art and art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the College of William and Mary.
"Art on the Installation Plan: Tony Capellan and Belkis Ramirez" focuses on installation art practices in the Dominican Republic, through the work of Tony Capellan and Belkis Ramirez. At the Center for Curatorial Studies both artists will exhibit new installations that articulate timely political, social, and environmental concerns. Tony Capellan's Las primeras heridas (The First Wounds) is part of a series that explores childhood and vulnerability. Belkis Ramirez's En oferta (On Sale!) addresses the themes of objectification and commodification of women. Capellan and Ramirez are part of a small group of artists in the Dominican Republic who use nontraditional materials to create mixed-media installations in a country where painting has been the dominant mode of visual articulation. Although their work is representative of different formal approaches to the making of installations, they address similar local themes that resonate universally.
During the past seventeen years Capellan's work has been exhibited in many international solo and group exhibitions. He had a major solo exhibition of new installations, "Campo minado," at Casa de Francia, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1996. He is participating in the group exhibition "Modem and Contemporary Artists of the Dominican Republic," which will be held at the Americas Society and The Spanish Institute in New York City in June 1996. He will represent the Dominican Republic in the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1996.
Belkis Ramirez's work has been shown in various international solo and group exhibitions. She had a major solo exhibition, "Miedo ambiente," at the Museo de Arte Modemo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1995. Her recent group shows include Africus, I International Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1995. She will participate, along with Capellan, in "Modem and Contemporary Artists of the Dominican Repubic."
Elena M. Pettegrini was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and has been living in New York since 1966. She has a bachelor of arts degree in communication arts and media from the City University of New york at Queens College. She was director and curator of INTAR Latin American Gallery in New york City from 1994 to 1995 and gallery coordinator from 1992 to 1994.
"Dissonant Wounds: Zones of Display/Metaphors of Atrophy" presents four artists who deal with issues of the body and its presence in the space of contemporary museum display. Although the figurative body is never fully present in the works of Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anish Kapoor, and Doris Salcedo, it is powerfully suggested through manipulation of personal possessions, corporeal allusions in sculptural forms, and symbolic objects. In some cases the artists place their work within the walls of the museum, but in others they use locations not traditionally associated with exhibition space.
Robert Gober' s work explores issues of sexuality and domesticity through the display of bathroom drains that are moved from their usual location to the walls of the museum. Felix Gonzalez-Torres's corner candy spills, by occupying a seldom-used zone of the exhibition space, address issues of the diseased body through a physical process activated by the museum patron. Anish Kapoor's sculpture contemplates the tension between spirituality and sexuality through forms that invoke feelings of emptiness and isolation. Doris Salcedo creates contemporary reliquaries and memorials to victims of political and social violence in Colombia by invoking the absent corpse through Minimalist principles of systematic order, abstraction, and space. "Dissonant Wounds" engages the viewer in issues of social, cultural, and spiritual decay while questioning the often-conflicting role of the museum as a singular, authoritative voice and its renewed responsibility as an educator.
Since graduating from the University of California at San Diego in 1989, Gilbert Vicario has worked in a variety of arts institutions and agencies in California. In 1991 he was hired as mural restoration coordinator for Chicano Park by the public art division of the San Diego Commission for Arts; at the same time he was a curatorial assistant at El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego. In 1992 he was selected as an NEA intern for the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and subsequently became the museum's traveling exhibitions coordinator. In 1993 Vicario was awarded a Rockefeller travel grant for the College Art Association New Scholars, New Scholarship Session in Seattle, Washington, where he presented a paper entitled "Burning Desire: The Art of Carlos Almaraz."