Blog Post
Discrete Ambiance: “Swarm Study/II” at UMMA
by christopherporter
It’s not unfair to say Swarm Study/II is a visual art experience that will long stay with you. But such an accolade is also far too passive. If given the chance, Swarm Study/II will not only stay with you -- it will literally follow you.
This 2011 site-specific installation on display in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s Irving Stenn Jr. Family Project Gallery, mounted through the courtesy of the Maxine and Stewart Frankel Foundation for Art, is held in conjunction with the museum’s Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors -- Part II: Abstraction exhibition.
The installation -- crafted by the London/Berlin-based Random International group that specializes in such site-specific installations -- has been designed to bridge the gap between human interaction and scientific technology. It's comprised of dozens of small dual-stranded LED lights set vertically in eight rows stretching across 32 multi-layered waves that blink horizontally to and fro across the length of the gallery.
Borrowing from UMMA Assistant Curator Jennifer Friess’ Gallery statement describing the display, “As people walk, run and ride by the Museum,
Eno says in his original liner notes of the 1975 ambient album that he was given a classical harp music recording by a friend after he was hospitalized following a minor traffic accident. Confined to bed, “with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record on a stereo" in his hospital room, Eno wrote.
Adding to this awkward situation, Eno adds, “Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of listening to music -- as part of the ambiance of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambiance.”
Reflecting on the phenomena of such a repetitious patterning of music, Eno set to work on the technological challenge of crafting ambient music: “The key figuration here is the long delay echo system with which I have experimented since I became aware of the musical possibilities of tape recorders in 1964. Having set up this apparatus, my degree of participation in what it subsequently did was limited to (a) providing an input of two simple and mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration stored on a digital recall system and (b) occasionally altering the timbre of the synthesizer’s output by means of a graphic equalizer.”
Granted, these art forms are different in many differing ways -- sight and sound being the least of these issues. Yet this particular creation of 1970s music and this 21st-century installation are not so dissimilar in other post-modern ways.
“Discreet Music” is ostensibly passive with its variability embedded in its computer program while Swarm Study/II is interactive in that its program engages its viewer through its variability. But both creations are digitally manipulated arts whose application is meant to be secondary to their reception. Such an extraordinary mechanically produced aesthetic would have been hardly imagined in the prior period of modernism -- much less in earlier arts.
Swarm Study/II differs, of course, in the sense that its algorithmic program is triggered by its audience whereas Eno’s program that is set in such a manner as to be self-regulating. But quoting the turn-of-the-20th-century French avant-garde composer Erik Satie, Eno notes that his ambient music (like Satie’s earlier musical efforts) is meant to “mingle with the sound of knives and forks at dinner” to create a sound that settles in its environment. Just as Swarm Study/II has settled in its environment.
After repeated observation, I’ve noticed it’s the very rare passer who actually stops to study the restless transition of Swarm Study/II's light patterns. Rather, like the intent of “Discreet Music” to be sonic wallpaper accompanying other activities, Swarm Study/II is visual wallpaper tracing the patterns of pedestrians walking in front of the U-M Museum of Art.
All of which tells us a lot about the contemporary interface of art, technology, and human activity because the flickering horizontal and vertical flashings of Swarm Study/II is actually quite arresting as a light show in its own right. These lights comprise a faux aurora borealis whose temporal demeanor would most certainly be striking enough to raise conscious awareness if the viewer actually attended to it.
Yet perhaps its relative ubiquity is yet another subtle dimension of Random International’s intent. As an electronic-based probe of the activity taking place around it, Swarm Study/II is not unlike other security devices that surround us through our daily affairs. We’re all obviously now encircled by surveillance observational electronic equipment almost all the time. It may be that Swarm Study/II is merely more charmingly upfront about its artful purpose.
The irony, perhaps, is that in an earlier day -- and in certainly another cultural context -- the very discrete twinkling of Swarm Study/II's lights in a more traditional or conventional setting like a gallery space inside a museum or gallery, would garner considerable interest.
Yet attention might undermine the purpose of the installation’s purpose. As it stands, Swarm Study/II” is a silent sentinel restlessly monitoring its environment. And it reports its observation only to him or her who pauses long enough to read its LED monitor. So it’s certainly no waste of time or space for you to follow it as much as it follows you.
Related:
➥ Read our review of Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors -- Part II: Abstraction
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
“Swarm Study/II” will run through November 26, 2017, at University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 S. State St. The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am–5 pm, and Sunday, 12–5 pm. For information, visit umma.umich.edu.
Blog Post
U-M SMTD's tidy exhibition of Beatles material celebrates the 50th anniversary of "Sgt. Pepper's"
by christopherporter
The University of Michigan School of Music, Theater, and Dance's “Summit of Creativity: A Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of The Beatles’ of 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band'" drew experts from across the country in June to examine and analyze this timeless music with an academic panache typically reserved for the likes of Shakespeare, Gilgamesh, and radioisotopes.
By contrast, U-M musicologist Walter Everett’s 46-item exhibit 50th Anniversary of the Release of 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' is tidy in comparison to the sprawling analysis bestowed on The Beatles and this record in particular. Both the band and Sgt. Pepper's are now part of the firmament in our shared cultural and intellectual history, and they are now well worthy of deep study and scrutiny. But The Beatles certainly didn’t conceive the album with all that in mind.
The Beatles were up against the proverbial professional (and commercial) wall in the mid-1960s. They had embarked on a remarkable half-dozen-year transformation from their late 1950s hometown Liverpool adolescence (via their far more mature Hamburg Reeperbahn apprenticeship) and the darling mop-top era of “A Hard Day’s Night” to John Lennon’s belated cry for “Help!” The lads’ history was quite unlike the journey of other creative artists in modern history.
Their closest teen-pop idol analogs were vocalists Rudy Vallée in the 1920s, Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, and Elvis Presley in the 1950s. But as Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger smartly pointed out during The Beatles' introduction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the band was a four-headed monster, with each member contributing to the group's sound and aura.
Of course, it was a four-headed monster the world adored, but by 1965 it was -- to borrow from George Harrison -- all too much to continue as it was. The band no longer wanted to tour after almost a decade of relentless live performances, and The Beatles' direction forward would have seemed daunting by any stretch of the imagination.
As Everett writes in his “An Appreciation of 'Pepper,' Fifty Years On” (Beatlefan 38/4, May-June 2017): “Paul (McCartney’s) late-1966 concept of forming a fictitious ensemble like the municipal brass bands common in northern England would provide The Beatles with a group alter-ego that could free the musicians from any self-conscious blinders (not to mention career burnout), permitting a new flow of creative juices.”
And what a kettle of creative juices was unleashed. From experimentation in composition and recording to using electronics, BBC library sound effects, and a 40-piece orchestra, Sgt. Pepper's rewrote the book on popular music and popular culture. In one grandiloquent gesture, the teen beat was newly wedded to the circus, music hall, world music, electronic music, and avant-garde in what was ostensibly supposed to be rock-n-roll.
All of this is quite a heavy load -- intellectual and otherwise -- to bear. But what makes Everett’s 50th Anniversary of the Release of 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band' so refreshing is it shows the sheer effervescence of The Beatles’ Summer of Love. This display is an unalloyed visit to that period of transition from Beatlemania to what was to become Beatle academia.
For as Everett’s work reminds us: Sgt. Pepper's was nothing if not hard work -- as well as a fun ride. The album holds up superbly to listening and re-listening. And as this display happily shows us, you can never get enough Beatles paraphernalia.
The exhibit’s backbone is a variety of Sgt. Pepper's albums manufactured around the world. And while each of the covers looks virtually the same, there are subtle differences from market to market in the album’s famous artwork by Peter Blake, Robert Fraser, and Jann Haworth. One of the most interesting aspects of the display is studying the minute differences between these covers and the other paraphernalia.
There are multiple copies of McCartney’s “Penny Lane” b/w Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” 7-inch single that was excluded from the album because The Beatles' label insisted album sales would decrease if the songs were included on Sgt. Pepper's. Additionally, a British sleeve features famed American photographer Henry Grossman’s photo showing The Beatles with facial hair, and a promotional 45 RPM single has a “Factory Sample” sticker attached to its February 1967 pressing.
But perhaps the topper-most of the display’s featured attractions are two sets of the Fab Four’s autographs. One set of signatures is on a record-store bag from The Music Shop, located in Widnes, a suburb of Liverpool, acquired just after the band’s 1962 debut, “Love Me Do.” And the second set of autographs is on a 1964 Beatles in Paris magazine signed aboard Pan American flight #101 during the group’s first trip to America.
Mix in ample photographs drawn from the era and what’s readily apparent is the hard work these musicians put into their art, which is also reflected in subsequent boxed sets of their music. If absolutely nothing else, it’s obvious that being a Beatle was heavy lifting. The fact that all four members of the ensemble fared as well as they did under this pressure is a testimony to their strength of character and willingness to endure the strain of celebrity and focus on their art.
Related:
➥ Walter Everett talked about The Beatles and Abbey Road on April 19, 2017, at the Downtown library: video.
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance Library: “50th Anniversary of the Release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” will run through September 15, 2017. The U-M School of MTD Library is located at 1100 Baits Dr., 3250 Earl V. Moore Building, 3rd Floor. The exhibit is available Monday-Friday, 8:00 am–5 pm through September 1. From September 5-15; the exhibit is available Monday-Thursday, 8 am to 10 pm; Friday, 8 am-7 pm; Saturday, 1-5 pm; and Sunday, 1-10 pm. The Library is closed Saturday, September 2, through Monday, September 4, for the Labor Day Holiday. For information, call 734-764-2512.
Blog Post
O say did you see the Ford Library's “Banner Moments: The National Anthem in American Life”?
by amy
“O say can you see” takes on a whole new meaning at the Gerald R. Ford Library’s Banner Moments: The National Anthem in American Life.
Part of the presidential libraries system of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Ford Library collects, preserves, and makes accessible a rich body of archival materials focusing on the Ford presidential administration. The Library also hosts a series of temporary exhibits that focus on American history.
This exhibit -- curated and organized by University of Michigan musicologist Mark Clague and Bettina Cousineau, exhibit specialist at the Ford Library and Ford Museum -- traces the 200-year history of America’s national anthem through 10 interpretive panels and four display cases filled with historical documents.
And what a busy 200 years it has been.
In a recent interview, music professor Clague dispelled a number of common myths about the anthem as well as a clarification of the anthem’s place in American history.
Blog Post
Soul Nourishers: Kathleen Alfonso's "Quiet Spaces" at Kerrytown Concert House
by amy
Kathleen Alfonso’s Quiet Spaces paintings are biomorphic abstractions. Her art hums with a quiet spiritual conviction and it has turned Kerrytown Concert House into a meditative setting for leisurely contemplation.
As Alfonso tells us in her gallery statement: “Let us join together in celebration of the beautiful natural world we have around us; the ever-changing landscape that delights and nourishes our soul.” She says her work is meant to “fulfill a need in our human nature to connect with the natural world," and to give word to Alfonso’s imaginative color-field configurations she uses the examples of “the intrinsic design of a plant leaf so full of variety and life; light shining and creating shadows into a space; or the current of water flowing and creating ripples and reflection."
Ultimately, she wisely concludes, art is “complex; but simply viewed, causing us to respond.”
We do respond because Alfonso’s work invites a personal response as long as the viewer is willing to surrender to her compositions, which seek to reveal internal discoveries in the eyes of beholders as much as they are formal works of creativity.
Alfonso’s statement, therefore, reflects a keen awareness of what it is she is striving to do with her varied mediums of pencil and graphite, pastel, mixed-media/collage, mixed-media paintings, and acrylic pigments. Her “quiet spaces” -- like the spiritual balance they artfully depict -- are not weighted too heavily by one form over or against another. Instead, this exhibit is designed to sweep viewers along with Alfonso’s reverie.
Whether using a post-painterly wash to brush across her working surface or to construct a more directed tactile graphing of organic imagery to suggest nature, Alfonso’s deft facture enlivens her compositions through these delimited strategies. Her works are disciplined and nuanced examples that less is often more when it comes to art.
For instance, Alfonso’s 20x26 inch pigmented Misty Evening is an abstracted landscape that’s crafted through four distinct visual planes: running from a pensive, near-diaphanous cloudy background through roughly textured earthen midground to an equally rich blue waterscape foreground. Alfonso’s pigments efficiently bleed from ground to ground to craft a serene yet nearly undetectable distant shore. All is inferred, nothing is stated.
On the other hand, the oversized 26x25 inch Cultivating Truth finds Alfonso more assertively handling her compositional elements through acrylic gesture. In this work, she uses a patterned blue and purple background that’s abetted by a foreground curvilinear organic pattern whose vertical swirling anchors the whole. Phonology meets mute articulation in this handsome painting.
The masterwork in this display is the 27x37 inch Windows to Soul. This dramatically oversized artwork melds the varied elements of Alfonso’s abstract artistry into a single striking composition. Her penchant for pattern is proportionately met by her restless exploration of chromaticity as the work’s recurrent design serves as the foundational basis of the painting. She opens the painting’s objective projection to introspective inspection, crafting a horizontal Rorschachesque internal tension through her repetitive blue pigments coupled with the understated yet dramatically nuanced saturation of her paper.
As Alfonso tells us in the conclusion of her gallery statement, “Connecting the natural world with the inner spiritual world is the essence of my work. It is the serenity of the place or a complexity of the moment which has been caught in my piece.”
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
Kerrytown Concert House: “Kathleen Alfonso: Quiet Spaces” runs through June 28, at Kerrytown Concert House, 525 S. State Street. The exhibit is available Monday-Friday, 10:30 am–4 pm as well as during public concerts and by appointment. A free reception will be held Friday, June 15, from 5-7 pm. For information, call 734-769-2999 or visit kerrytownconcerthouse.com.
Blog Post
Motion Lights: UMMA's "Moving Image: Performance"
by amy
The art of motion is currently on display in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s spirited Moving Images: Performance.
The second of UMMA's three presentations drawn from Istanbul, Turkey's Borusan Contemporary museum, Moving Images: Performance illustrates the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) relationship of performance and moving-image media that’s been fostered by the advent of the portable video camera.
The exhibit complements the concurrent UMMA installation Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9, which is a subject we’ll get to in a forthcoming review. But for the time being, the four short videos in this exhibit stand as prime examples of experimental filmmaking.
Typically classified cinematically as short subjects, these sorts of films have a long history going back to the origin of motion pictures. Indeed, these kinds of works -- experimental independent films with nontraditional narratives -- make up a significant chunk of the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
The four films in the exhibit are Kalliope Lemos’ At the Centre of the World; Elena Kovylina’s Equality; Roman Signer’s 56 Kleine Helikopter; and the Universal Everything group’s Presence 4. Each film features a different aspect of performance-based moving-image media.
Kalliope Lemos’ 2015 16mm black and white film with sound At the Centre of the World (running eight minutes, 29 seconds) is perhaps the most challenging short subject to watch in this exhibit's cinematic tetralogy.
A mixed-media and mixed-medium artwork, At the Centre of the World features a woman who is trapped within a body-sized iron-sphere sculpture crafted by Lemos. The video is that simple -- and it’s that complicated as we watch the woman roll about her studio, increasingly frustrated in her attempt to maneuver around the room.
Presumably a visual metaphor for being trapped in one’s world, the video does a good job of unsettling the viewer with its relentlessly swaying hand-held camerawork, which is as disconcerting as the model’s increasingly frantic and unsuccessful attempts to balance herself in the studio that serves as the center of her world.
The moving image of Elena Kovylina’s Equality is easily the most heroic -- as well as politically pungent -- in this exhibit. A 2014 single-channel video with a running time of seven minutes, 59 seconds, Equality follows a procession of participants, each holding a stool before him or her, walking in a single row and standing in solidarity at Palace Square in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We like to think this activity would be something like an art prank in our country. But in Russia, where democratic institutions and traditions are under severe stress, participating in such an installation could have legal and political consequences. Yet Kovylina’s performance art is so deceptively passive and so formally nonviolent, it’s up to the viewer to determine its meaning.
Our only clues are that the footstools have been cut at such a height that the many participants standing on them are superficially equal. Despite their obvious differences in gender, age, ethnicity, and occupational standing, the people stand hand-in-hand looking forward, ostensibly symbolizing the social equality that democracy fosters. Kovylina’s video (like her performance art) questions what is real and what is only apparent in contemporary Russian society.
Sometimes art is seemingly really no more than it appears to be. Swiss artist Roman Signer’s 56 kleine Helikopter, a 2008 high-definition color video that runs three minutes, 14 seconds, is just as its title says: 56 small helicopters let loose to riot and buzz around in an enclosed studio space.
It's possible the video illustrates the futility of range and motion in our current state of social and political affairs. But it looks to me like it’s more of a really cool idea to crash and burn a bunch of drones. Admittedly, it’s fun to watch these little copters repetitively slam into each other in a sort of miniature death race, with only a small number of them surviving the aerial mayhem.
Finally, Sheffield, England-based design consortium Universal Everything’s 2013 stereo, two-channel digital video Presence 4 (two minutes running time) turns a dancer's movement into colorful digital abstraction. The undulating curvilinear image of Presence 4 flows seamlessly in and out of an abstract whip and tide, with the dancing figure coming in and out of focus.
There’s not much commercial potential in this sort of filmmaking, but Presence 4 displays the ongoing value of experimental cinema in our postmodern era. As this short blissfully shows us through dance, adventurous video will thrive despite market restrictions -- and the art of filmmaking is so much better for it.
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
“Moving Images: Performance” runs through July 24 at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 S. State St. The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am-5 pm, and Sunday, 12-5 pm. For information, call 734-764-0395 or visit umma.umich.edu.
Blog Post
Revival: “Whipstitch: The State of Contemporary Textiles" at Ann Arbor Art Center
by amy
The Ann Arbor Art Center’s “Whipstitch: The State of Contemporary Textiles” does the rather nifty trick of reimagining yesterday’s art today through a conceptualization of what may be the art of tomorrow.
Granted, this notion may sound convoluted, but it’s really quite simple: Fiber, like architecture, can reasonably vie as the oldest of all arts. The reason for this is quite apparent with little consideration.
Yet the art of fiber (like another such ancient art, ceramics) has been essentially aesthetically dormant for millenniums -- and this is also for the same reason already considered. For as a practical artisan regard, fiber’s use has been largely defined rigidly as either being functional or fashionable with little thought outside of this.
Blog Post
Michelle Hegyi's superb sense of spatial balance on display at the WSG
by oldnews
Illustrating the principle that an artful passion can arise from the coolest of mediums, Michelle Hegyi’s “Wild Forest” manages to encapsulate both passion and discipline in a further consolidation of aesthetic strategy.
This is the fifth time I’ve caught Hegyi’s art in her WSG context. There was a streak of exhibits—June 2006’s “The shape of the Sky”; August 2008’s “Gardens of Love and Fire”; August 2010’s “Do You Remember the Shape of Trees…”; and November 2012’s “How the Day Changes with the Light”—where it was possible to chart Hegyi’s growth transitioning from old school printmaking to digital printmaking.
It’s been a privilege to see her work advancing technologically even as she consolidated her print expertise. It’s equally good to note that she’s still as restless in her study as she is in her craft.
In this instance—and working happily in the juncture between abstraction and representation—Hegyi continues to craft a hybrid computer-based painting where her abstraction is comingled with her inspiration.
Blog Post
Stimulation and Possibility: Dick Siegel's "Digital Manipulations" at Kerrytown Concert House
by christopherporter
Local award-winning singer-songwriter Dick Siegel’s return to the visual arts has been a long time in coming. But having found his chosen medium, his return is both assured and insightful.
In a recent interview at the Kerrytown Concert House, Siegel said both the visual arts and music were passions that run through his family experience. But as his personal interest was in music -- and a reasonable one at that considering his award as Best New Folk Artist at the 1991 Kerrville Folk Festival and multiple Detroit Art Awards -- it was only until the turn of the millennium when working with a computer and scanner that his visual arts creativity began to take hold.
As Siegel says in his artist statement for this exhibit, “Through digital manipulation of color, shape, and image I enter a world of enormous visual stimulation and possibility. In this realm I discover things to construct that move me, amuse me, and amaze me. I then work to bring them into physical reality with their vividness and vitality intact."
Blog Post
“The Aesthetic Movement in America: Artists of the Photo-Secession” at UMMA
by christopherporter
The Photo-Secession movement is one of those rare historic instances where radicalism won -- and still wins today.
As seen in “The Aesthetic Movement in America: Artists of the Photo-Secession” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, this turn-of-the-20th-century American creation became “the first truly international photography movement,” as noted in the gallery statement by UMMA Curator Emerita Carole McNamara. She also wrote that the movement's practitioners -- among them ringleader Alfred Stieglitz as well as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White -- “sought to position photography as a legitimate aesthetic artform.”
Blog Post
Subtle Switches: "Nancy Feldkamp, Watercolors” at Kerrytown Concert House
by christopherporter
Sometimes what you see in an artist's work isn’t nearly as important as what you don’t see. Nancy Feldkamp’s Watercolors at the Kerrytown Concert House shows the Chelsea resident's transformation from a geometrically focused painter to one who uses subtle inferences to give shape to her renderings.
As ever, her pastoral themes remain, as Feldkamp modestly says in her KCH gallery statement: “My work honors the beauty of farm life and its interaction with nature in intuitive ways. The shapes and lines suggest distant farmsteads as they nestle together in their actual settings and this stirs my responses.”
Quite right, yet looking at Feldkamp’s work in this light only tells half the story in this show. While nature and rural settings still play a significant role in her paintings, how she depicts those scenes has changed considerably during the two decades I've observed her output. Back in the 1990s, Feldkamp’s art was rigorously geometrically driven. Her countryside settings were activated by a compositional style whose expression was subordinated to her rectilinear line.
And it’s this literal trace -- or, more accurately, its near disappearance -- that’s readily apparent in her current exhibition because Feldkamp’s prior work had a remarkable geometric purity that resembled a sort of hard-edged Precisionist integrity, thereby making each artwork a unique interpretation of spatial depth.
These more current farmland studies at the Kerrytown Concert House are far looser in their articulation. The geometry is still there, of course, but rather than dominate, it now serves as a transitional compositional spine that abstractly traces itself across these paintings and mixed media works.
For example, her watercolor Tree Farm is clearly a transitional work where Feldkamp uses her line to abet a flattened articulation that’s more decorative landscape than a literal rendering. Indeed, it’s the very nature of her rectilinear geometry that holds the painting together. There’s a farm and a field -- with trees and surrounding environs -- but it’s pure straight-lined suggestion.
Using a different strategy, Feldkamp’s Boundary House features a far more subtle geometry with five horizontal lines fronted by more than a dozen receding diagonal lines depicting a plowed field leading to a cluster of houses in the painting’s recessed interior. These houses, depicted as being no more than an abstracted outline, are nestled in a way that allows Feldkamp’s rich and loosely applied earth-tone-watercolor washes in the foreground to dominate the painting’s background.
Boundary House is an expert balance of abstract representation and precise symmetrical heart. The loosened foreground articulation finds Feldkamp working in the opposite manner of her prior art. Her older paintings placed a premium on sharply articulated boundaries, but these paintings flow chromatically, allowing us to see the essence between her lines. What we don’t see is as equally important as what we do see.
This tendency of addition by subtraction is even more pronounced in the three mixed media artworks in the Kerrytown exhibit. In these constructions, Feldkamp has essentially loosened her visual mooring until her geometric line is only inferred. As such, the collective strength of these works lies in the absence of a formalized exterior that previously held her work together.
Feldkamp’s mixed media Simplicity House is a prime example of this strategy. This mixed media work is composed of broadsheet patches that consist of newsprint and other overlaid paper. The composition’s loosened articulation of space allows these rough-edged papers to play against one another. Yet true to form, Feldkamp has added streaks of watercolor lines that faintly craft an outline and structure the house’s contour.
Feldkamp generally now uses her watercolor to craft internal recession, and in the instance of Simplicity House, she applies only the loosest of facture -- in fact, quite nearly nothing more than an abstract wash -- to suggest her form. Feldkamp has now nearly lost her anchor in representation, and while her reliance on geometry was never a crutch, this relaxation results in liberating gestures.
Seeing Feldkamp’s newer work for the first time in some half-dozen years is certainly a treat. Perhaps if we’re lucky -- given the length of time between her exhibits -- we’ll get a retrospective in the future to allow us to study the transitions I’ve described in these recent works. At the least, Feldkamp’s one of those lucky artists -- who perhaps like a good architect -- has been able to modify her approach without losing sight of her favored motifs.
John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.
Kerrytown Concert House's “Nancy Feldkamp, Watercolors” runs through February 27, 2017. The Kerrytown Concert House is located at 415 N. Fourth St. Exhibit hours 10 am to 4 pm, Monday-Friday. For information, call 734-769-2999.