SOU Art Faculty Show

Exhibition Statement

The 2009 biennial featured SOU’s very talented faculty members putting their best foot forward. This show gave students an opportunity to examine and be challenged by the art of their mentors. The community was treated to an inspiring glimpse of the ideas and artworks being created right here at home. Imagine that!

Artist Statements

Marlene Alt

“Now Falling, Now Flying”, is part of a series of works that intended to cast an apocalyptic shadow over the theme of the “peaceable kingdom”, by suggesting mechanization or scientific experimentation through a mixture of industrial, medical and alchemical materials. In the series, human and animal forms, along with found objects, are suspended from bars and a web of cables that imply both manipulation and interdependence. “Now Falling, Now Flying” is a frozen tableau, a rehearsal for catastrophe or transcendence that hints at Leonardo’s aerial inventions, or the failed flight of Icarus.

Cody Bustamante

The various elements of these drawings are inspired by classical pre-Columbian and medieval monsters, aquatic life, and an enthusiasm for transcriptions of knowledge and experience, from science literature to the dire longings expressed when David Hidalgo sings La Sirena, Miles Davis plays a ballad, or Ishmael describes Ahab chasing the whale.

This work emerged from drawings completed over the past ten years. Looking back, they seem to constitute a sort of experimental design phase in which I unconsciously synthesized my influences into an aesthetic realm. These drawings were at times diagrammatic as I worked out the particular logic they demanded. They often appeared to illustrate mounted specimens. In these more recent drawings from 2008, I begin to push these nascent forms into speculative or primordial, and sometimes violent environments to see what they would tell. So far, they destroy or alter their worlds as they fight and love.

Underlying all of this is my fundamental attraction to and affection for poetic ambiguity and scientific misunderstandings created in the struggle to describe, understand and express our experiences as human beings.

These drawings were completed during a Visiting Artist residency at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and the Majestic Ranch Art Foundation in Boerne, Texas.

Joshua Jalbert – Notations from Nature

In the creation of this series of images, I have worked alongside natural phenomenon using the photographic medium as a device of transcription that allows nature to draw with its own hand. The sky, river, trees, and other elements of nature act as creative agents in collaboration with the photographic recording devices that I introduce. Through the techniques that I have employed, such as tying lights to the branches of a tree at night to trace the movements of wind, the camera serves as an intermediary, articulating a dimension of the world that lies beyond the surface of what is commonly visible.

The results of these processes are artifacts, traces, notations. In these works, I engage with the element of chance in order to emphasize that the unpredictable possibilities of nature are inherently creative. The pieces describe nature as interactive and relational, and reveal nature’s symbols as a language of which the boundaries and total possibilities for significance we can never locate precisely or exhaust.

Margaret Sjorgen

My paintings develop through a process of identifying conditions or situations that can keep one from knowing oneself. Thus, the process and the product are about concealment, ego, control, denial and discovery.

The ideas for the paintings are not planned ahead of time. My studio is full of objects that I find meaningful or interesting in some way. Some are found objects, some are gifts, and some are part of the overall accumulation of stuff. One object will catch my interest and make its way onto the surface of the painting. The process continues each layer a response to the preceding layer. Sometimes the next step involves getting rid of the last one, so earlier images become distant.

The objects used in these paintings appeal to me for their archetypal appearance, allowing their relationships to be seen from different points of view.

Robin Strangfeld

I arrived at night. I was shocked at the blackness of a Maine night. The next morning, I awoke to a blizzard and was amazed by the whiteness. I think of Maine as white. White houses in white snow and white roads, white sky, even the ocean seemed white. My life was white. I was removed from the color of community and now unknown, alone in the silence of a new environment. I found a pink house in the middle of the whiteness and immediately found an infinite amount of love for it. A pink house was an island of difference in a sea of same. As the winter of white went on – I began to find distinctions – variations within the whiteness. The pink house began to feel obvious. I discovered uniqueness, clarity and depth in the world of whiteness.

Tracy L. Templeton

Recollected is my most recent work produced from more than a decade long interest in traces of human presence. In this work I have resurrected photographic studies from the mid-nineties – places I have not been to since and that in all likelihood no longer exist except in memory and my documents. These spaces bear the essence or notion of home and trigger a signature of intimacy. Through partial inversions or mirrored fragments, I have paired with the main image I synthesize the immemorial and recollected. The purposeful tactility of these etchings are evidence of my effort to mimic the transcendent fashion in which all our memories of sheltering places are physically inscribed in us.

I am interested in photo-etching and digital transfers and in my methodology these processes enable an exploration of physicality through material resistance and tactile awareness. The photographs I begin with act only as immediate visual records to serve as references at a later time. In the production there is the opportunity to alter the image and then the plate in order to reduce and distort the imagery, simplifying it and simultaneously broadening its meaning by drawing attention to the essence of the image.

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