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Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast Opens June 20 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Release Date: 6/6/2008
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NASHVILLE, TENN.—(June 6, 2008)—The Frist Center for the Visual Arts opens Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast Friday, June 20, 2008. This exhibition features 26 drawings by four members of the Southeastern College Art Conference, an organization of art faculty committed to promoting the importance of art in higher education and in the broader community. Shades of Gray, organized by the Frist Center, is on view in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery, and continues through Sept. 21, 2008.
Conceived as a counterpoint to the concurrent exhibition Color As Field: American Painting, 1950–1975, in which form and content are unified through the broad application of brightly colored areas of paint, Shades of Gray includes works in gray, white and black, with suggestions of spatial ambiguity, mystery and personal and social narratives. The two exhibitions are connected by their emphasis on process, discovery and the willingness to allow the beauty and expressive power of the artist’s raw material to speak for itself.
The artists in Shades of Gray include Kell Black (Austin Peay State University, Clarksville); Sue Mulcahy (Volunteer State Community College, Gallatin); Jane Allen Nodine (University of South Carolina Upstate, Spartanburg, S.C.); and Carol Prusa (Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Fla.).
“When teaching at the university level like these artists do, it is important to maintain consummate technique, balanced with a strong sense of being in conversation with art history,” says Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Center. “Shades of Gray offers visitors a meditative experience of great subtlety, intelligence and beauty.”
About the Artists
To Sue Mulcahy, the materialism of contemporary culture limits the individual’s capacity to fully enter the natural flow of life. Emphasizing the value of intangible experiences, her abstract charcoal drawings are, in her words, “spontaneous reflections exploring the spirit of nature; listening to nature in an attempt to tease out her textures, moods, rhythms and compositions.”
Mulcahy begins each work by loosely applying charcoal to the paper with no pre-established image in mind. Using her fingers and various drawing tools, she then manipulates the charcoal, adding dark gestures, patterns or shapes to some areas, and in others removing the charcoal (often with a vacuum cleaner) to suggest the play of light over mysterious patches of shadow. Throughout this process, Mulcahy remains alert to visual surprises that might unexpectedly take her drawings in new and interesting directions. In her finished works, forms that appear to be only partially coalesced emphasize the importance for Mulcahy of becoming rather than being, transition over resolution.
In creating his aviation-themed drawings, Kell Black (whose work was first seen at the Frist Center in the Art of Tennessee exhibition in 2003) employs unconventional techniques to reproduce the sensation of natural forces such as clouds, smoke, sunlight and shadow. The surfaces of the larger works are animated by loosely applied charcoal, ghostly erasures, areas darkened by acetone and even holes in the paper where Black placed the works on a pebble driveway and ran an electric sander over them. Once he has established the atmosphere of these drawings, Black often evokes a sense of impending threat or loss by rendering zeppelins or airplanes as if suspended in their stormy surroundings. In the smaller works, Black combines charcoal with olive oil to evoke the fading photographs of early aviation history, while also suggesting the way forms emerge out of, and melt back into, the fog of memory.
The primary medium in Carol Prusa’s drawings is silverpoint—the same drawing tool used by old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer—which produces a line of great subtlety and luminosity. Her works evoke other art historical aspects as well, from botanical, anatomical and cosmological diagrams to Baroque furniture design and Celtic knots. Prusa’s frequent use of a circular or hemispheric format emphasizes the integration of the microcosm and macrocosm. This relates them to the tradition of the mandala, which in Hinduism and Buddhism is a circular diagramming of the cosmos and all that it contains.
Prusa’s repetitive sequences of organic patterns allude to mathematics, a field of study she views as the best means of exploring and articulating the universe’s ultimate adherence to definable principles. Yet Prusa does not necessarily deduce an ordered human destiny that abides by the rules of logic. She recognizes that beyond the bounds of reason lies mystery. With their sense of fading and distressed surfaces, her drawings are elegies of vulnerability and loss.
As icons of domesticity and commerce, Jane Allen Nodine’s tightly cropped images of men’s shirts evoke both the people who wear them and those who manufacture, sell, clean and fold them. As expressions of her wish to project transcendent meaning onto everyday ritual, she writes that her works “evoke memories associated with specific activities or events related to such items of apparel. The ephemeral qualities of fabric, such as staining, tearing and wrinkling, must constantly be managed through washing, cleaning, ironing and folding. The cycle of attempted control over the fabric, garment shapes and wear-ability … serve[s] as a metaphor for daily struggles that seem repetitive and cyclical.”
The ghostly human presence implied by Nodine’s shirts has precedents in Dadaism and Pop art, in which everyday objects are used or reproduced to stand in for the person who would use the object. In the Vesture series, the subtle accumulation of densely layered marks suggests a reflective relationship between the artist and the person for whom the shirt functions as a surrogate. In contrast, in the Camice series, the marks are graffiti-like and free form, independent of the restrictive geometry of the shirts’ folds, collars and borders.
Related Programs
Saturday, June 21
Gallery Talk: Artists’ Perspectives: Shades of Gray
2 p.m.
Meet at the Information Desk
Free
Join artists Carol Prusa (Boca Raton, Fla.) and Jane Nodine (Spartanburg, S.C.) in the Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery for an informal discussion about their works in the exhibition Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Each artist employs a limited palette of black, white and gray in exploring ambiguous relationships between figure and ground, as well as reality and the imagination.
Friday, June 27
ARTini
7 p.m.
Meet at Frist Center Information Desk
Included with gallery admission
Tonya Clarkson-McCain, associate educator of public programs at the Frist Center, will lead an informal conversation about the exhibition Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast.
Friday, August 15
Artists ARTini
7 p.m.
Meet at Frist Center Information Desk
Included with gallery admission
Artist Sue Mulcahy leads an informal conversation about some of her work presented in the exhibition Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Visitors may also enjoy music in the Grand Lobby, martinis, wine and other beverages at the cash bar and visiting with friends.
Sunday, Aug. 17
Family Day
1–5:30 p.m.
Free
Family and friends will enjoy a fun-filled day of excitement of special art making activities, live music and dance performances. Check out the large, breathtaking canvases of the Color As Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 exhibition and the black, white and gray drawings featured in Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Head upstairs to experience the exquisite display of many of the lamps and stained glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the exhibition Tiffany By Design.
Friday, August 22
Artist ARTini
7 p.m.
Meet at Frist Center Information Desk
Included with gallery admission
Artist Kell Black leads an informal conversation about some of his work presented in the exhibition Shades of Gray: Four Artists of the Southeast. Visitors may also enjoy music in the Grand Lobby, martinis, wine and other beverages at the cash bar and visiting with friends.
Sponsors
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts gratefully acknowledges the following exhibition sponsors:
· Exhibition Sponsor: Welling LaGrone and Morgan Keegan
· Presenting Sponsor: Publix Super Markets Charities
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