Welcome

This exhibition was conceived in 2009 as a response to a request to mount a faculty exhibition to showcase the work being produced by the faculty of the Painting Department at the Savannah Campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. The resulting exhibition includes full time faculty, part time faculty, and visiting artists who were involved with the department during the 2008/2009 academic year.

Rather than schedule a show at a local gallery it was suggested that we attempt to find an international venue. The resulting schedule is more then we could have hoped for. This exhibition would not have happened were it not for the work of Blazo Kovacevic. His drive and determination has given us this remarkable opportunity.

Painting exhibition participants:
Adam Cvijanovic, Blazo Kovacevic, Craig Drennen, Denise Carson,
Gregory Eltringham
, Laura Mosquera, Matt Blackwell, Morgan Santander, Natalija Mijatovic, Roger Walton,
Stephen Knudsen
, Suzanne Jackson, Todd Schroeder.

Drawing exhibition participants:

20.5.10

Why Go Anywhere Else? (by Lisa Young)

WHY GO ANYWHERE ELSE?

I recently went anywhere else.

I went anyplace. For reasons that are irrelevant here, I went there. I realized as soon as I got there, that I could have been anywhere. It didn’t even matter to me where I was going or why. I didn’t need to get away exactly; I just had to go. This place was in the middle of nowhere, as much (or more) than anyplace is the middle of nowhere. But it was a real place, a place whose movements moved and whose history happened even before I had arrived and will continue long after I leave. This sense of before and after in relation to time and place is one of the most existential components of going somewhere, anywhere. How can I be certain that it, this place, existed before I arrived? How does it get along without me? In other words, what happens in this place when I am not a witness? How do I impact anywhere and how does anywhere impact me? My family moved many times when I was a child, from place to place, small towns, cities, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and so the question, posed by this exhibition: why go anywhere else, is particularly poignant, raising fundamental questions about, not only movement through space, but also through time, as the work of art maps the movement.

This exhibition and its title question, why go anywhere else, suggest the triangular relationship between travel, the location and formation of identity, and the production of art. Writing offers one route between these three points. Visual art, perhaps painting most specifically, offers another. It offers a means of mapping this question: the why, the going, the sense of place, the notion of elsewhere in relation to home, and the fragmentary construction of the self in relation to place. In this sense the assembly of works here, all produced by current, former, or visiting artist faculty in the Painting Department of The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia, loosely considers the work of art as an amalgam of experiential parts, details, travel, and the collaborative efforts and images that result in such encounters between place and self.

Why go anywhere else?

It’s all here, wherever here is. Everything you could possibly want. After living in New York City for fourteen years, I recognize this question with force. I wondered daily, why I would ever leave, where I could possibly go after New York. Then after living in Savannah, Georgia for four years, I realize that I was wrong and that it is the very act of going and coming that informs (and confirms) one’s sense of place simultaneous with one’s sense of self. The home and the elsewhere are linked to the construction of identity, each in states of constant fluctuation in response to one another. One’s “own” place can become too comfortable. You learn to think, incorrectly, that nowhere else matters. Nowhere else could have anything to offer. Or the opposite may be true and one envisions everywhere else as superior to (greener than) the here and the now. But it is in the act of unraveling this question: why go anywhere else, that the answer resides. It is found in the act of walking, driving, uncovering, turning corners, meeting, seeking, entering, finding, and losing. The why of the question is revealed, actively producing meaning with each phenomenological step through the unfamiliar place. It is in these acts of travel and movement that each memory-image becomes engaged. Each image is lodged, sometimes step-by-step, and marks are made. The images of a place pile up around us as our photographs do, constructing a place in memory and alongside impacting who and how we become.

This exhibition has traveled from one anywhere to another elsewhere. In this sense it engages painting in one location together as a faculty body as being about the act of responding to place. Sometimes this effort is collaborative or at least conversational. The artists in this exhibition have all traveled extensively and have also worked together, even if indirectly, in one city. Indeed the work is not brought together thematically. Instead, it travels as a faculty body of images, as the work of very different artists. It represents a group of colleagues whose work is as diverse as its numbers, but a body that has loosely merged as community, in response to a place, in this case, the city of Savannah, Georgia, a somewhere with as much of a sense of place as anywhere else, - a city intoxicated with American historical memory and iconic cinematic mythology.

But indeed this exhibition is united by a single but loaded question: why go anywhere else? The question itself is both humorous and serious. It calls to mind the “homebody” who sees no need to leave his place of birth. It confirms the urgent and ever-more-current vogue for the local, the new culture of the “staycation,” and the replacement of global as a buzzword with local, a cultural preoccupation, not only for “foodies” and farmers, but now, sometimes out of economic necessity, for the general public. The works in this exhibition, paired with the desire on the part of the artists to temporarily travel somewhere else, if only for a summer, speak to the power of place, both local and relational, in each of the projects represented. Many of the works included do address, even if unintentionally, the visual construction of anywhere here and elsewhere there and the unexpected involvements with person, city and object that “take place” in the interstitial moments of travel. Many of the works in this exhibition demand a quiet attention to these questions, an attention that will produce radically shifting responses as the audience shifts from the southern United States to states of reception unforeseeable in Eastern Europe.

Todd Schroeder’s “Kung Fu” series approaches the fragmentary nature of truth, as his “missing” subject is revealed to be an exoticised, kung-fu fighter hero of 1970s American T.V. The former actor David Carradine’s life and death are pieced together via sound bytes of media misinformation about his 2009 death in a random Swiss Hotel in Bangkok. Midwestern childhood memory, Hollywood fantasy, and Bangkok reality collide in perceptual questions posed in Savannah. Text hides and seeks with gesture recalling the piecing together of meaning and the piecing together of identity as fragmentary balancing acts.

Adam Cvijanovic’s mural-sized paintings often use scale as an entry point for establishing location. The viewer enters an all-encompassing mise-en-scéne. The subject matter is charged with complexity as the close-up, the fragment, and the meteoric mass of detail emerge as twisted metals, consumer detritus, or a mass demonstration of single bodies on a beach. The fragmentary part is in constant dialog with the whole and the chaos of the crowd (mass audience, consumer base, collaborative group) is suggested. Painting becomes an act of call and response to place: suburban experience, Hollywood set, the city as ideal, the consumerist present, and the classroom as collaborative site for the collision of individual memory and method.

For Morgan Santander the experience of place is one of time travel through the history of art as a history of possible, fantastical heterogeneities. The collages respond to a history of painting as colonial practice by rendering them hybrid: time and place are interwoven with a sepia-toned photographic nostalgia, as if to suggest the what-could-have-been, if the colonial framework (and that is a big if) had not been the most rigid, defining experience of the past. This is travel through centuries and conversation between cultures that could only take place with the present as starting point. Santander’s prints assemble a postcolonial critique of the past together with a regenerative understanding of how objects and figures (and paintings) can yield new meaning in the present. Tribal masks impose themselves upon Dutch Baroque lace collars, while indefinitely Mayan statuettes preside over an eighteenth century British farmhouse picnic, offering gifts from another time, a distant place.

Suzanne Jackson’s paintings have a three-dimensionality to them, a tactility that embraces layering as a fact of meaning-making. The making itself seems to be a central act. As in the walking around a city, or the analog experience of place as a quotient of self-construction, these multi-part, multi-storied, collaged remnants of materiality and compositional structure engage painting as a physical act of looking back at memory. Her works insinuate the making as linked to the re-presentation of memory: the taking of time to cut, to tear, to unravel, to tape, to peel, to mask, and to render, acts which are at the very heart of an understanding of the relationship between painting and sculpture.

Natalija Mijatovic paints with a type of poetry often reserved for photography. Reminiscent of a Neue Sachlichkeit impulse of the 1920s with its focus on a machine aesthetic, the imagery employs shadow and light, black and white, tonal value, form and line to produce a palimpsest of remnants of the urban industrial landscape. Fragments of an electrical power plant, network enmeshments of wires and cables, the mechanics of a machine-age culture, are effaced and revealed; reminders of a still visible present in the midst of becoming the past. The composition insinuates a loose grid of parts or details whose human context has been hauntingly extracted.

Matthew Blackwell, like Adam Cvijanovic, traveled to Savannah from elsewhere, Brooklyn, and then back again, collaborating with students, painting alongside other artists, working and living in the SCAD painting department in the shadow of the vast hull of the looming Savannah Bridge. Snippets of place emerge in Blackwell’s work. Hybrid figures are culled into being, part Catskill Mountains, part Low Country, part Brooklyn, all simmering and boiling in an artist who has created a rural studio, cabin-like, remote, in the most urban of cityscapes. Place and the experience of self (even as the self resists and embraces the place) are as inseparable in Blackwell’s work as place and the vernacular. The local quality of language, food, humor, music, and folk are given body in his paintings, the iconicity of which sinks in as universal over time; work that will be remembered.

A recent interview with Montenegrin artist Blazo Kovacevic, who lives and works in Savannah, and an artist who played a central role in organizing this exhibition, points toward the humanity of this curatorial question, and the trauma and liminality of travel as integral to identity formation and artistic production:

BH [interviewer]: Would you prefer to live there [Montenegro]?

BK: Yes, but I also like to live here. Actually I live there and here – but most of the time it is in the airplane between the two that I feel most like myself. [1]

This occasional in-between state offers the space of contemplation but also ignites a state of heightened physical awareness and bodily vulnerability. In an example of Kovacevic’s work, a minivan is x-ray scanned, its “body” turned inside out. A proxy for the human body passing through state-controlled technologies in transit, the vehicle’s skin is transparent, its metallic bones made susceptible, frail even. Moving from place to place becomes an act of (self) exposure as the artist also offers a critique of the blind acceptance of the limitations upon civil rights we have experienced in response to terrorism.

Denise Carson’s paintings involve collage as a material process and as a narrative one. The female figure is often the starting point, layering past and present, wending back and forth between fantasy and reality. The figure slides on this scale with ease: a mythological goddess, a fairytale heroine, a grandmother, a girl in between childhood and teenaged knowing. Place and person unite in a fluid fantasy without rational restrictions.

Craig Drennen, former SCAD faculty, has devoted much energy to the importance of artists moving from one place to another, encouraging guest artists to visit Savannah and faculty to travel elsewhere as a component of art-making. His images, with a Twombly-esque exchange between pencil and paint, explore mark-making as a self-reflexive act. A letter is shadowed by its imprecise self, a memory trace and the repeating of the mark, that constantly re-investigates representation step by step, interrogating the choice that led one to that mark as opposed to the one that was not made.

Roger Mark Walton’s paintings, oil on canvas, do not deal with a place as much as they attend to the margins of that place. Titled with time of day or month of the year, each image presents a point along a highway, at once non-descript anywhere and yet a local light quality stamps these images with place, suggesting the flatness, foliage, and fiery sky of a southern landscape. Dilapidated billboards and artless pylon bridges render these scenes uncertain; a criticality of ecological destruction and sprawl rests quietly alongside an optimism that is reminiscent of the Dutch Baroque expansive dialog between sky and land.

The paintings of Gregory Eltringham seem to travel inward. They locate a space of intentionally awkward exchange. Scenes at once voyeuristic and vulnerable are governed by a playful carnivalesque. The images haunt as dress-up and drag (the difference between the two a fine line) result in an unveiling rather than a masking of private truth. His figures channel Manet’s maladroit female figure, perpetually crawling in a stupor through the central background of Dejeuner sur l’herbe. What is she doing? Is she even there? Similarly, the distinction between fiction and fantasy has been removed in Eltringham’s work. Painting as construct and identity as conjecture keep the viewer on his toes, not an altogether comfortable place to be.

Stephen Knudsen’s work deals with a tension between the figurative and the abstract. His recent work references the bodies in between death and life, although more aligned with death, aboard Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819). One example takes an interest in the witnesses’ accounts and the discarded figure of a woman, set further adrift by the already drifting victims. The work traces a fiction with some basis in historical record, an abstraction of that record. In Knudsen’s image her body floats like Ophelia, barely hovering between this place and the next. The play of reflectivity and shadow, diaphanous fabric and flesh, reverberate with the gravitas of the image.

The individual figures in a number of Laura Mosquera’s paintings seem almost to be contemplating questions about where to go next, not literally, but existentially. A situation has been presented, a quiet moment acquired, a confrontation unexpected. With titles such as “Almost There,” “Anything Goes,” and “Can I Stay,” the paintings present particularly poignant moments of solitude and clarity; the kinds of moments that change lives. The figures are probing, questioning, without confrontation toward anyone except the self. Going and staying, laying and gazing into the distance are linked with being and becoming as the nature of existence is probed, if only for that instance.

Historian and theorist, Victor Burgin, in writing about the relationship between images, cities, and identity, asserts that “[t]he (con)fusion of representations of body and city has a history… For example…Humanist authorities wrote that the first men derived their units of measurement from the palms of their hands, their arms, and their feet.” This exhibition binds artists together if only temporarily, linking them to one city, while seeking a collaborative movement (of works in proximity) from city to city, from country to country. As the exhibition investigates, in part, the operation of place and painting in relation to selfhood, the question: why go anywhere else is rendered moot. The “why” is dropped and the answer becomes instead an imperative: go, return, try, seek, move, enter, find, lose, walk, see, share, make, but sometimes, just go…. anywhere.

Lisa Jaye Young, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design



[1] From an interview conducted by Savannah art critic Bertha Husband in February, 2009. Please see http://www.natalijamijatovic.com/Probe/Interview.html (accessed 5/14/2010)

Why Go Anywhere Else? (by Jovana Stokic)

NON-ALIGNED

Why Go Anywhere Else? Exhibition: Lessons in Mutual Co-existence

Matthew Blackwell, Denise Carson, Adam Cvijanovic, Craig Drennen, Gregory Eltringham, Suzanne Jackson, Stephen Knudsen, Blazo Kovacevic, Natalija Mijatovic, Laura Mosquera, Morgan Santander, Todd Schroeder, and Roger Mark Walton

As Erin Dziedzic, curator of the group exhibition titled Why Go Anywhere Else? explains, the participating artists are brought together by their relation to the painting department at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia, USA. They were all active in the life of the department – as the full-time or part-time faculty, or as residents/visiting artists. Their heterogeneous artistic practice does not guarantee a sort of legible coherency desired for a group presentation. One should look elsewhere for the cohesive factor between these different individuals. Each of the artists represented in this exhibition have impacted and influenced students in the SCAD painting department. As an art historian and critic who visited the painting department in 2008, I am prone to think about framing these diverse practices in such a way so as not to disturb their original differences. At the same time, I believe that the curatorial point of grouping these individuals together is a sound one – insisting on the notion of creative collaboration as an impetus for not only creating, but for a continuous dialog. In this way, a local convergence transcends its coordinates and can become a trans-local platform. The reception of the show in its many guises will revolve around these questions of relevance within various contexts.

Again, my work here is to develop a way of conceptualizing this representational situation. After examining different styles, modes and techniques of these thirteen artists, I realized that these notions would not lead me to a fruitful way of talking about them all. Should I offer a compare and contrast approach here? I don’t think so. Rather, I offer an art historical intervention that consists in establishing the framework for thirteen disparate artists working simultaneously in the medium of painting. Painting, revered as the most admired traditional artistic practice should not be singled out; I see it more as an institution in which all of the participating artists feel comfortable. To their diverse responses, I apply the notion of non-alignment, but not in its geo-political sense. Rather, applying it in a more abstract sense of “not belonging to the same alignment, “ to emphasize the artists’ strong individuality and the possibility of mutual co-existence that enriches the viewing experience.

Using the term non-aligned here ironically evokes the concept of non-alignment, coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during the Cold-War world political climate of the 1950s when the Non-aligned movement was formed. Nehru described the five pillars to be used as a guide for Sino-Indian relations that were first put forth by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Called Panchsheel (five restraints), these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement.[i]

The five principles were:

Mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty

Mutual non-aggression

Mutual non-interference in domestic affairs

Equality and mutual benefit

Peaceful co-existence.

By creating works in the globalized late capitalist art world today artists of course transcend the daily politics and interact with each other following rules similar to these five principles. This is the platform for the interaction of these artists who come from different backgrounds into the SCAD painting department. This framework, I believe, can also be a starting point for investigating the various ways artists respond to the particular cultural context they encounter in their practice as well as their teaching careers. As we learn from the curatorial text, these artists do share their experience of Americana, but their filters are quite different. Yet, their mutual representations merge the figural and abstract, as well as painting in the extended field, devised not to represent them as inane chroniclers of reality. In my view, they could be perceived as delegates on a fantasy Non-Aligned Conference: they come to this exhibition with a similar agenda – to argue for their version of painting to prove it will survive and make sense in different contexts.

Moreover, I hope that these artists also share a belief in the possibility of an individual ethical transformation via aesthetic experience. Even while depicting conflict and ruptures of our shared reality, the very act of its depiction gives us meaning for which we strive.

This is a common cause I detect in these different practices. So, let them peacefully co-exist promoting equality and mutual benefit–also for us, the viewers.

***

A full disclosure: As I personally stem from the same region of the world as the two of the painters in this group, I am usurping the egalitarian principle to address the sub-group of the “non-aligned”– my compatriots, Natalija Mijatovic and Blazo Kovacevic. When I learned of their art practice, I was even more intrigued to discuss their mutual co-existence. They operate within yet another social structure–a marriage between two painters. It makes their dynamic even more interesting. Having in mind traditional gender roles in the history of art, this duo proves that change has come to us. Both painters developed, and more importantly, sustained their own distinct painterly idioms. Their works represented in this exhibition speak eloquently about possibility of mutual beneficial artists’ co-existence. Kovacevic overtly displays his fascination with multifold aspects of the notion of conflict. The artist has created conflicting visual elements, which look for spaces of freedom within a representational sphere. His figurative images bear the burdens of collective fears and also let them offer a consolation, in visual terms. This is where the painter sees freedom reside. Mijatovic explores the possibilities of representation by a specific strategy she devised to deal with a depicted object. In her austere palette and her tactile treatment of inelegant, mundane objects, I see restitution of poetic of the ordinary. It does not bring Mijatovic to the terrain of domesticity. Rather, it moves her further to the industrial imagery only to emphasize that beauty occurs unexpectedly. Her paintings are focused efforts that return beauty to the realm of unadorned everydayness, reminding us of its ethical resonance. These quiet representational strategies offer glimpses of a transformational potential that transcend the realm of the visual.

Jovana Stokic, Curator of Abramovic Studio at Location One



[i] Chung, Tan, ed. Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998).

Why Go Anywhere Else? (by Erin Dziedzic)

Why Go Anywhere Else?

Matthew Blackwell, Denise Carson, Adam Cvijanovic, Craig Drennen, Gregory Eltringham, Suzanne Jackson, Stephen Knudsen, Blazo Kovacevic, Natalija Mijatovic, Laura Mosquera, Morgan Santander, Todd Schroeder, Roger Mark Walton

The group exhibition, Why Go Anywhere Else? includes full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and visiting artists who taught in the painting department at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, GA during the 2008-09 academic year. Why Go Anywhere Else? highlights the individual artists’ most recent works and simultaneously recognizes a collective group of artists who have impacted students and, in many instances, influenced and continue to motivate one another professionally. This exhibition expands upon the continued need for creative collaboration among artists as a means to perpetuate global dialog, inspire students, and thrive professionally. To the title of this exhibition, which asks Why Go Anywhere Else? the artists respond in their collective efforts to exhibit together internationally with the obvious question of “Why not?”

The show began as a discussion among colleagues, interested in developing an exhibition that would mark a moment of positive growth among artists/professors of the SCAD painting department. Why Go Anywhere Else? will be exhibited throughout parts of Serbia and Montenegro joining thirteen artists in unexpectedly intriguing ways to reveal their unique visual responses to a myriad of social, political, and conceptual themes. Many of the artists including Denise Carson, Gregory Eltringham, Suzanne Jackson, Stephen Knudsen, Natalija Mijatovic, Laura Mosquera, Morgan Santander, Todd Schroeder, and Roger Mark Walton have worked together for several years. Some have moved on from the painting department like Craig Drennen and Blazo Kovacevic to pursue other positions, while Adam Cvijanovic and Matthew Blackwell were invited to the SCAD painting department as distinguished visiting artists each for an academic quarter. Together, these artists exemplify a commitment to teaching and maintaining their own art practices while simultaneously supporting the collective goal to exhibit together.

After being invited to curate Why Go Anywhere Else? I began thinking about the recent Low Country Babylon project at SCAD in 2009. Low Country Babylon was a collaborative installation project created by Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic for an intensive painting course called “Painting a Memory Palace.” Cvijanovic had been thinking about the idea of individuals creating their own visual language, combined with other artists’ works to shape a collective story—one inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel (1563). This individuated yet unified vision of building upon a collective served as the impetus and thematic underpinning of Why Go Anywhere Else?

Cvijanovic is best known for his post apocalyptic murals depicting demolished, imagined landscapes that are slowly pieced back together with human remnants from destroyed architecture and man-made objects. In All the Wine I Ever Drank I Drank at Sea (2010), Cvijanovic intuitively erects a multi-panel structure from fragmented building materials, painted onto porous Tyvek where he has created a magnificent ocean panoramic that swells and protrudes in the center of the composition as it undulates across the surface. Hundreds of empty emerald green wine bottles are scattered amidst a foregrounded pile of wood debris. Some bottles stand at attention while others fall around an empty mattress covered in white linens. This intimate scene takes place amidst quiet destruction and is illuminated by a warm light filtering in through industrial skylights. These familiar objects creep into Cvijanovic’s desolate grey wastelands to fulfill their collective role of revealing an utopian sensibility. His use of warm, natural light adds to this concept a renewed sign of life and rebuilding in these imagined spaces and theatrically staged settings.

While Cvijanovic’s imagery reveals a (re)appropriated reconstruction of desolated space, Serbian-born, Savannah, Georgia-based artist Natalija Mijatovic’s surfaces reduce industrial landscapes to a residual patina that recalls space and time.[i] Mijatovic’s linear grids reference the underlying structural sense of Agnes Martin’s grid paintings. While Martin’s abstract expressionist lines create a rhythm that recalls sublimity, Mijatovic’s grid references industrial spaces with a rich history of human presence, alluded to through architectural forms.[ii] Mijatovic hides these remnants with several transparent layers of earth tone hues. This creates the idea of traces of human presence felt in the residue of the space’s emptiness.[iii] These traces are revealed in the subtle implications of representational imagery like wire, electrical equipment, and wooden beams, and yet they are abstracted so that their presence borders on the surreal. In Mijatovic’s most recent paintings, she abstracts the grid system and man-made objects even further to reveal a controlled industrial landscape. Solitaire (2010) recalls the banded, monochromatic landscapes of Anselm Kiefer where fragments of destroyed material and crumbling earth appear and disappear just as quickly into and out of the surface. Unlike Kiefer, Mijatovic’s surface shows an interest in layered process of light washes rather than building up the physical texture of the surface. This allows the viewer to recognize the underlying grid system that ties her entire oeuvre together: the structure remains intact beneath the curtain that the viewer navigates, recalling their own experiences and nostalgic inference associated with these now unoccupied industrial spaces and landscapes.

Savannah, Georgia-based artist Gregory Eltringham’s figurative paintings convey a sense of drama. Eltringham’s figures are illuminated in his painted portraits, imbedded in ambiguous landscapes, which he notes “work independently of one another but fuse into a narrative.” His paintings are comparable to Cvijanovic’s monumentalized structures erected from a crumbling terrain.[iv] These portraits personify Eltringham’s interest in the psychology of the human façade that lends a barrier to the way people portray themselves in public versus private situations. In his most recent series, Eltringham uses contemporary subjects that he relates to historic models in order to point out social, political, economic and cultural constructs as humanely flawed systems. Filly, Nag, and Stud all from 2009 are portraits of a scantily clad man and woman uncomfortably hunched in military stress positions adorned with peculiarly animated horse masks. They stand alone spot lit from above in richly dark and ominous landscapes that in some instances read as pop-like cut out set design and others as spattered Rorschach inkblots. This seemingly playful appearance of a character in a horse mask is quickly turned to a subversive tone of menacing restraint. The expressions on the horse masks resemble fear and embarrassment while the strained muscles and crouched folds of skin suggest extreme tension and shame. The largest painting of the group, Mission Accomplished (2009) exemplifies a moment of confused tension. Four toy-like horses roll on tracks into the center of a circular mound of earth, like Trojan horses entering the walled city of Troy. Rather than conquering the location they now occupy, these horses stare vapidly at one another, paralyzed by the idea that they have not been able to accomplish anything despite penetrating this inner sanctum. Perhaps this is a metaphor for emasculation; upon entering the space where they presume they have conquered they realize that they are a group of non-breeding geldings rather than the stud needed to accomplish the mission of fertilizing the egg. These whimsically dark paintings exemplify Eltringham’s contemplation of the humor of façades to undermine truth in contemporary society.

Like Eltringham, Brooklyn artist Matthew Blackwell leans on painted representational imagery to reflect contemporary society and propel his narrative paintings into ordered chaos. Blackwell’s ongoing series of monumental muscle cars are plopped down into lushly active Arcadian landscapes. Blackwell is not afraid to get physical with the thickness and malleability of the oil medium, masterfully rendering these paintings with such verve and precision. At the same time, he delicately caresses the curves of rusted steel car frames with light application of paint and suggests a plane where the car resides with such confident immediacy that the vehicle becomes permanent. Lake Effect (2001-09) is a sprawling unstretched painting on canvas of a yellow 1970s Chevrolet El Camino. This portrait of the El Camino rests angled at a three-quarter turn to the viewer on a snowy plane. Blackwell is unmistakably accurate with the individual details of his vehicles. The rusted exterior and dilapidated quality of this once glorious symbol of American industrial progress and consumerism now stands alone, defeated, and hammered by icy winds and snow. His landscapes subtly reflect Cvijanovic’s post apocalyptic gritty surfaces although Blackwell’s paintings are imbued with a soul that seems to leave the viewer in the present, as if moseying on down the road while humming a Tom Waits tune rather than looking toward rejuvenation or future growth. Blackwell focuses on America in the present, through a non-idealized lens, which conveys, with urgency, a message opposing mainstream suburban culture and conformity, not as a condition of isolation but as an informed choice.

While Blackwell’s landscapes express an unapologetic vision of rural America, Savannah, Georgia-based artist Roger Mark Walton depicts landscapes referencing industrial American expansionism imbued with a high key palette that borders on the sublime. Walton depicts natural landscapes intersected by highway systems. Locations just outside the immediate city limits of Savannah, Georgia are referenced by titles like Route 204 Summer Evening and Route 204 January. Although the titles indicate a particular stretch of highway, these marshlands could be any ravine along the Southeastern coastal region. The juxtaposition of nature and industry is reminiscent of worthwhile explorations in American realist painting, like Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) later Surrealist-style Rooms by the Sea (1951) where an open door peers out to the ocean; the viewer neither knows their distance to the water nor can they gain a bearing on their surrounding structure. Walton’s smooth lines and saturated palette lure the viewer into a sublimely utopian realm that is stylistically and conceptually different from Cvijanovic’s and Blackwell’s more gestural application of paint and concept-based focus on society stripped down to its bare bones.

Montenegro-born, Savannah, Georgia-based artist Blazo Kovacevic uses media x-ray technology in the triptych series Corpus Delicti (2010) to explore his fascination with the negative and positive aspects of conflict and protection. Each digital on Polycarbonate print shows three vibrantly colored images of various bags, cases, and purses whose contents are rendered visible by x-ray. Inside each container are a series of weapons or possible weapons that are clearly observable in their negative state. When lined up consecutively as though they were on an airport security conveyor belt the weaponry reminds us not only of the safety reasons for security checks but also of the insurmountable conflict that arises from security profiling and random screenings. These images explore themes of privacy, security, crime, and conflict while the transformation of the non-visible to the visible serves as a metaphor for society’s false sense of protection.

The figure plays a prominent role both physically and conceptually in the work of several artists in the Why Go Anywhere Else? exhibition: as a metaphor for human emotion, a reflection of time and place, implied historical narrative, or as a springboard for irony in pop culture. Savannah-based artist Laura Mosquera’s vibrant non-linear narrative portraits delve voyeuristically into moments of human intimacy. In the painting Before Everything Goes (2009) two female figures are rendered in an obscure yellow space intersected by three blue lines streaking behind a woman. The figure’s serious expressions and body language is further punctuated by a swarm of circles that activate the visual connection of the subjects to one another and their background. Mosquera creates a visual tension between the allusive interaction of the figures and the relationship of their actions to these vivid hues interrupted by a mixture of linear and organically shaped motifs. The viewers, in terms of their own perceptions to body language and color, translate Mosquera’s non-linear narrative structure “opening the viewing to a wider emotional experience”.[v]

Painter Denise Carson, who lives and works in Savannah, Georgia, also depicts her figures in abstracted space, one that draws reference to water via her choices in color. For her most recent series of Sirens influenced by Greek mythology Carson responds visually to the strikingly clear blue waters of Adriatic Sea that border the coastal region of Montenegro. These Sirens are ethereal beauties; they are traditionally half- bird with human heads that are known throughout Greek and Modern history for luring men to their deaths with song, acting as a symbol for temptation embodied by insurmountable beauty. In Homer’s The Odyssey, the Sirens are referred to as “creatures that spell bind any man alive, whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close, off guard, and catches the Sirens’ voices in the air — no sailing home for him.”[vi] Carson’s Sirens seem to align more closely with Franz Kafka’s description of the Siren’s more fatal weapon of silence rather than song, which he wrote about in The Silence of the Sirens. In Siren I (2010) Carson’s airy figure sinks silently beneath a richly complex blend of ultramarine hues and streaks of brilliant gold. The Siren’s inverted body and dark hair tumble beyond the picture plane and emphasize her prolonged submersion in silence. Carson uses a mythological story as a structure for responding to the intense beauty of the Adriatic Sea but also its potential to harm.

Savannah-based painter, Stephen Knudsen, builds upon Théodore Géricault’s epic painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Referencing author Jonathan Miles’ text based account of the two survivors from the Medusa’s shipwreck in The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century, Knudsen paints his interpretation of the drowning of the only female passenger on board the ill fated raft. Knudsen’s larger-than-life size painting titled Sacrifice on the Medusa (2010) shows a woman being submerged in water. She floats motionless with the only sign of movement being the rippling water running smoothly over the folds of her delicate garments and saturated skin. Knudsen mentions this figure as emblematic of the failing state of Modernism yet within this collapse there still lies a glimmer of hope. Essentially, as the body’s depth in water suggests, we are only skimming the surface of our potential and there is much more for us to look to beyond ourselves, there is still hope for the sign of life. Knudsen employs the figure to convey a greater sensibility to the individual’s capacity to sustain life, survive and be hopeful amidst failing social systems.

The only artist of this group to utilize a non-narrative conceptual framework is Atlanta-based multi-media artist Craig Drennen. Drennen continues a series of paintings, drawings, sculpture and installation for the entire dramatis personae of the Shakespearean play Timon of Athens (c. 1605–1608)[vii], succeeding his most recent series, Mistresses, Apemantus, and Flattering Lords (2008-09). Timon of Athens was never performed during Shakespeare’s life and is often considered a “failed” work of the English playwright. Drennen situates himself within an existing cultural structure and visually explores an unoccupied bandwidth in which a “failed” project resides.[viii] The low influx of activity surrounding a “failed” project allows Drennen to insert his own contemporary intertextual modifications driven by intuitive exploration coupled with the inclusion of modern and post-modern visual language. Drennen’s work modifies the reading and visual language of Timon of Athens in a nonperformative method of representation. He achieves this by removing the narrative aspects of the play and (re)contextualizes Shakespeare’s established characters, whereby (re)presenting them in a contemporary context. Drennen’s three paintings in this exhibition, Timon Of Athens 4, Timon of Athens 5, and Timon of Athens 6, all from 2010 are meant to act as posters for the play.[ix] They include an array of hints, like visual imagery of the letter T for Timon and green stripes that recall the Flattering Lords, referencing certain motifs and colors that he uses for each character. This offers a familiar yet abstracted point of reference, much in the same way Drennen articulates the trompe l’oeil strips of painter’s tape, which are inserted to emphasize the surface quality. Therefore, Drennen is able to make an epic characterization of a “failed” piece and at the same time keep the viewer perpetually engaged with a dynamic repertoire of visual signifiers to allude to a figure(s) without having them rendered in representational form.

Artist Todd Schroeder who lives and works in Savannah, Georgia opens a dialog on challenging, questioning, and reconfiguring media, oral, and intuitive information by employing the concept of koan, a Zen practice of creating pictorial passages which present new visual structures. In his recent Kung Fu series Schroeder (re)constructs snippets of information from television, radio, Internet, conversations, and his own response to create an enigmatic visualization of the peculiar events surrounding the death of late actor David Carradine. Exploring Carradines’s defining role as Kwai Chang Caine in the early 1970s television series Kung Fu as a way to establish a perception of identity Schroeder combines his interpretation of visual and audible fragments regarding his death to demonstrate a complex exchange of time, culture, media, viewer and author. Schroeder blurs the actual, perceived, and associative elements that envelope an entirely unknown situation. This series reveals slight bits of information through partially visible words, hints at familiar objects and forms amidst thickly applied graphite and acrylic lines, and adds weight and a sense of uncertainty in the use of thickly applied abstracted sections of heavy black paint. As a result, the form of drawings like A Blanket of Asphalt, Suicide at 72?, and Insert Koan Here (small) all from 2009 embody the paradoxical nature of the power and ignorance of human consciousness.

Mexican-born artist Morgan Santander who lives and works in Savannah, Georgia combines imagery much differently than Schroeder. Santander’s interest lies in restructuring historical moments, figures, and hierarchies by manipulating their original contexts. He plucks and combines images of Dutch landscapes and African masks in Beyond Reconstitution IV (2009) to suggest an alternative difference and identity. The blades of a windmill in a 17th century Dutch landscape painting are juxtaposed with the head of an African mask that has four protruding horns. The narrative implied in this image references the windmills and windmill type monsters from The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha by Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes.[x] Each digital giclée print is carefully constructed from existing historical and cultural images to suggest a new world order in which we find ourselves suspended within a cascading flux of cultural and historical exchange.[xi] These two-dimensional digital collages are colored in a golden hue that makes them seem as though they are stained from the passage of time and look themselves like historical documents.

While Santander’s mode of collage is kept to a flat two-dimensional surface, Savannah-based artist Suzanne Jackson creates painstakingly applied layers of paint, papers, and fabric revealing a substantial catalog of experience often almost in three-dimensional form. Jackson’s abstract expressionist aesthetic creates a visual dialog that links each work and at the same time the complex interlacing of materiality, reference to architecture, personal correspondence, and memories that make each work unique in its own expression. Swim-Wildlife Refuge (2008) incorporates a faint representational figure that stands wistfully surrounded by sweeping strokes of white paint. Framing the top of this three-dimensional painted image that can be suspended from above and viewed from all sides, is an abstracted landscape scene built up by paints, Shibori, canvas, and gauze netting to create a rock-like surface. The sweeping brush strokes and rich earth tone hues seem to gently move over imagined curves, crevices, and mounds of the earth concealing intimate moments woven into the landscape.

Amidst differences in concept, medium, technique, and style, each artist in Why Go Anywhere Else? values painting as a mode of expression, a tool for analyzing the culture that surrounds us all, art as a forum to communicate ideas in a uniquely individual manner. At a time when painting in the 21st century is going through a period of uncertain growth and development stylistically, Roberta Smith reminds us that “pictorial communication — signs, symbols, images and colors on a flat surface — is one of the oldest and richest of human inventions, like writing or music.”[xii] Artists working in a myriad of conceptual and representational modes — unite for the very simple yet exceptional purpose of recognizing comparable interests and overlap in concepts and simultaneously enriching one another through unique modes of visual expression. Paying homage to the spirit of collaboration and the genre of painting, Why Go Anywhere Else? examines the individual vision and the vision of synthesis woven together with a varying group of professional artists to draw on the importance of collaboration in contemporary art practice. This exhibition gives notice to the importance of collaboration in any form and the continued importance of their “mutual co-existence to enrichment of the viewing experience.”[xiii]

Erin Dziedzic, Curator for the Savannah College of Art and Design



[i] Interview with Natalija Mijatovic, Apr. 21, 2010.

[ii] Rachel Cohen, “Beyond the Grid,” Art Review (London, England) v. 2 no. 9 (December 2004/January 2005) p. 77.

[iii] Interview with Natalija Mijatovic, Apr. 21, 2010.

[iv] Gregory Eltringham artist statement, 2010.

[v] Laura Mosquera artist statement, 2010.

[vi] Homer. The Odyssey trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 272.

[vii] Craig Drennen’s primary text source for the original Shakespeare play is the Yale University Press Shakespeare library version, which is a facsimile of folio version from 1623.

[viii] Craig Drennen artist statement, 2010.

[ix] Email interview with Craig Drennen, April 26, 2010.

[x] Email interview with Morgan Santander, Apr. 28, 2010.

[xi] Morgan Santander artist statement, 2009.

[xii] Roberta Smith, “It’s Not Dry Yet” New York Times (March 26, 2010).

[xiii] Jovana Stokic, “Non-aligned,” catalogue essay for the exhibition Why Go Anywhere Else? 2010.