Perspectives

A wide range of work by Brown's faculty

January 30, 2007 5:49:30 PM

DISRUPTING ORDERLINESS: Susan Doyle’s “Yoycanti” [2006].

It happens only every three or four years rather than annually, so “Faculty Exhibition 2007” (through March 4) at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery is bound to catch our attention.

Artists in academia, being insulated from commercial considerations, might offer a particularly insightful cross-section of where contemporary art is at the honest end of the spectrum. This exhibit has recent work by 19 artists from the Departments of Visual Art and Modern Culture and Media, full-time and adjunct faculty as well as visiting artists.

Variety of acceptable styles and sensibilities has been a hallmark of modern art — and the challenge of criticism and connoisseurship. The range here certainly is not one-perspective-fits-all. Utilizing video and sculpture, oil paint and pinprick drawing, the assembled artists depict everything from the violent imagination of childhood to the meditative calm of woodland walks.

As we should expect these days, some of these artists are responding to the war in Iraq and to violence in general. Most explicitly, Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project 1: Until the Last Gun Is Silent consists of a poster, a handout, and a 14-minute video reenactment of an anti-war speech by Coretta Scott King in Central Park. Another video, from Tony Coke’s Evil series, projects brief text reactions to 9/11 and the war. Sculptor Marlene Malik is showing pieces from a two-dimensional series, but the posters incorporate photographs of imagined or simulated objects (cluster bombs); the surrounding typography reminds us that children often pick up unexploded ones (“. . . ashes, ashes, we all fall down”).

Continuing the war theme, several color drawings by Jay Stuckey depict airplane dogfights, done in the cartoonish style of pre-adolescent boys doodling while the teacher isn’t looking. The compaction of his images intensifies the effect on us, as if we are looking into the mind of a kid who is going to sign up as soon as he is 18. Similarly, at first glance there is a lightheartedness to the Rube Goldberg-like weaponry among the surreal sculptures that Daniel Stupar has placed on a long bench for us. Like a Joseph Cornell box without boundaries and from a bittersweet imagination, the found-object assemblages include such fantasies as a caged rock with a plastic ear emerging from it and a creature with a tiny orange skull crawling along on bicycle handlebar arms.

Conflating such innocent humor and real-world reminders is scary stuff, indeed. In this day and age, innocence can’t help but be ironic, so that context is enough to give dark background to some of the otherwise sunny works here. Raised in Scandinavia, Joan Backes has usually referred to nature in her work. Here she has arrayed scores of laminated leaves in a white corner of the gallery, giving the comforting order of even separation to what in nature would be a chaotic, random pile.

OBSERVERS: An untitled work from Leslie Bostrom’s “Bird Disaster” series [2006].

Conventionally, birds provide an uplifting image (when you forget that Mr. Audubon shot down all the specimens that he illustrated). Leslie Bostrom places two birds as observers of idyllic suburban tract house scenes, but the title Studies for Bird Disaster #10 gives away the artist’s starting place. Even so, we don’t have to know that her avian motif, which is sometimes more optimistic, began in response to the death of her father.

As with Malik, creative departures are in evidence. Susan Doyle has usually done abstractions in the past, but here she incorporates representational images in Yoycanti, an oil painting that disrupts the orderliness of its green-on-green grid in two ways: by stretching the canvas over an uneven frame and by scattering circles that contain pictures of disruption: squabbling cherubs, Snow White reaching from a mirror to slap her evil stepmother, etc. In her six photographs of Havana, Kerry Stuart Coppin’s variation is to use an ultra-wide-angle lens for panoramic black-and-white prints, more closely simulating what she originally saw.

In her continuing exploration of marks and patterns, Jane Masters has embossed designs and text on paper that she then textures with meticulous pin punctures — humorously in one titled Carpal Tunnel. Wendy Edwards, known for her purely abstract paintings, here expands on her work as a colorist (and teacher of color theory). WAKE UP physicalizes the morning confrontation with a glass of orange juice by draping a pure orange color field with a netting of thin lines of extruded gray-blue paint. Cleverly, Edwards has it both ways: she can make the loosely circular decorations non-representationally ornate, since the title and background color have already suggested that they are slices of fruit.

It will be interesting to see what some of these artists come up with in 2010 or so.