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.
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