So Near, So Far
Recent work by Daniel White
September 8 - November 16
Reception: Thursday, September 18, 5-7 p.m.
ARTIST BIO
Daniel White's earliest influences were illustration artists' works and later his
ceramics background played an important role. This created the DNA for the work that
was to come much later. The approach is a complex simplicity and rendering down to
its most essential elements. Doing this on the formal structure of oil on canvas is
a way to bring playfulness to an often otherwise serious medium.
Daniel White lives and works in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area. He is a seasoned arts
professional by day as the Director of the Paul R. Jones Museum and The University
of Alabama Gallery. He holds an MFA from The School for American Crafts at RIT (2002)
and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Montevallo (2000). His artwork, embracing
playful informality and often self-reflective, can be found in private collections
across the United States.
ARTIST STATEMENT
So Near, So Far brings together bodies of work by Daniel White over the last several years. Layered between coats of oil paint, White infuses remnants of memory, truths, and half-truths to ask vulnerable questions: Does memory create its own landscape, or does it just make those events more bearable? In the end, does it all work out? What is real between us? What isn't real? There is just something tragic about growing up, and no one is spared the harsh truths. Before you know it, you cannot remember what it was like wandering down trails that led to nothing or holding your breath underwater. Memory is a push/pull and so is painting alongside art history. Often, it is stories begun in hard circumstance, turning into an adventure, and sometimes end well. The weight of art history is far heavier load on the brush than the paint. The weight of memory can be even heavier, and painting is always present with the past. What one has to do with both art history and memory is to turn a mirror onto both and ask questions. Make both accountable for what happened. These are the questions exploring: Where, through paint, does the trail end, do they survive the boat wreck, are we going to make it through?
Transience: Trace and Erasure in Lost Landscapes
Recent Work by Angel Fernandez & Winter Rusiloski
September 18 - November 1
Reception: September 18, 5-7 p.m.
The stories we tell about 'place' determine our relationship with the local landscape, and how we see ourselves. The places that we move through can be sites of energy, investment, neglect, or erasure. In an exhibition of all new work created during a residency at Troy University, artists Angel Fernandez and Winter Rusiloski create work in direct conversation with the land underfoot.
Fernandez and Rusiloski have developed practices that spring from the mythological landscape of the West, grappling with border issues of immigration, movement, power and persistence. Using playful colorful, and irreverent signposts, their two practices orient each other: Fernandez to the sweat and debris of movement, and Rusiloski to the horizon ahead. Although their work has always been hyperlocal, the themes and questions they pull forward are essential: What memory does the landscape hold? How do we move through it? What gets erased? And what mark can we make on sites that are forgotten/abandoned/unseen?
This project began outside of the gallery with a site-specific, temporary, public art installation in 3 vacant plots on E. Walnut St. Pulling the outside in, Fernandez creates performative sculpture and video work exploring struggle and journey within the landscape in a process that is fundamentally about drawing as an action and labor. Rusiloski, with a practice grounded in landscape painting, collages fragment of photographs from their travels and paints in collaboration with the elements, as her surfaces become marbled with dirt and rain. Their process of making when enacted on a place, gives local context to our own position and relationship to land use, ownership and authorship in the built environment.
This exhibition traces the evolution and labor of their practices, from outside upon the land, into the gallery as evidence of the journey. This body of work meditates on the environments we most take for granted and pushes to understand agency and impact on a human scale. How we move through the world leaves a mark, and how we understand and value the marks we leave behind shapes our sense of the future.
This exhibition was curated by elizabet elliott, Executive Director/Curator of Alabama Contemporary. As a Museum Without Walls committed to the work of living artists, Alabama Contemporary sites exhibitions with partner institutions throughout the state.
The exhibition is on display at the Huo Bao Zhu Gallery, International Arts Center until November 1.
Learn more about this project on Troy.Today.
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This project is supported by generous grant funding by The Andy Warhol Foundation,
Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal
agency.