Juror’s Statement

Within the chronological confines of what is considered modern art—or even contemporary art—there has been an extraordinary variety of styles and technical developments that have altered the practice and perception of visual art in fundamental ways. Nevertheless, there is also much evidence that, no matter how many new approaches or methods arise, the history of art is a continuum that binds current artistic endeavors to aspects of past creativity as well as the larger creative community. Art, after all, is a human expression, and as such, will reveal perennial truths and individual ideas, in varying proportions according to each artist’s vision.

So it is both exciting and reassuring to see a vast range of methods and sensibilities from an international group of artists come together not only as a bustling sampling of current manners of image-making, but as unplanned subsets of subject, concept and technique. Evidence of the merging of the continuity of tradition with individual sensibilities emerges in the large proportion of realistic imagery found in this selection. The venerable subjects of nature and portraiture are well represented, sometimes in quite straightforward ways, such as James Mullen’s calm view of a Maine coastline, Marilyn Stevenson’s photograph of a marsh area with light effects recalling the 19th-century style of Luminism, and Ronnie Cramer’s delicate capturing of a transient moment as a girl adjusts her ice skate.  Landscapes, whether rural or urban, may be heightened by technical effects or careful selection of subject to evoke subtle moods and mystery, as in Karen Terry’s dark, misty view of an isolated castle, Cary Africk’s sepia-toned photograph of an apartment building, or Marian Rubin’s city street scene romanticized by its view through a rain-spattered window.

Yet much of the work here is far from prosaic in image, reveling in the contemporary artist’s option to follow whatever path one’s imagination may devise. Thus, a portrait of a girl becomes a two-faced Janus figure in Perdita Sinclair’s painting, and Bud McNichol creates a downright goofy “self-portrait” as a grinning boy with superimposed cartoonish goggle-eyes. And portraiture takes a detour into the realm of magic realism as Galina Dargery presents a woman attempting to catch a wedding cake that is inexplicably plummeting from above.

A transition from realism to abstraction (in modern art, abstraction is now its own form of tradition) may be shown through a methodology that has become rather popular among a segment of contemporary artists—extremely, even compulsively, complex imagery. Ceaphus Stubbs’ composite photographic images are filled with objects and fragments in frenzied, bursting compositions. Ryota Matsumoto’s imagery swarms with hundreds of hybrid shapes that hover between amorphousness and objecthood, and seem to literally hover in complicated suspended networks. Markus Riebe creates geometric abstract patterns in lenticular materials that create 3-D illusions and superimposes these over aerial views of urban landscapes.

On the other hand, compelling abstraction may be produced through very simple or subtle means: Yari Ostovany offers a calm, barely inflected painted field of blue, and John Marron creates a single, rapidly applied irregular loop of red that recalls the controlled vigor of Zen ink paintings.

Finally, sculptural expressions can offer their own mix of realism and abstraction, especially when produced in unusual materials. A writhing construction of pins made by Sono Arima visually vacillates between a sinuous abstraction and a snake-like creature rearing up to strike. Katie Truk’s delicate spatial networks are produced from an unlikely source: pantyhose. And a mushroom formed from gloves and pens rises from a spreading foundation of gloves in Lisa Bagwell’s enigmatic construction.

Thus, with its many coincidentally occurring groupings of imagery and sensibility, drawn from an international art community, the overall sense of this exhibition symbolizes the ongoing development and practice of visual art as a phenomenon of the personal within the universal.

Jeffrey Wechsler, 2015

Juror: Jeffrey Wechsler, Senior Curator at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University from 1978 to 2012. At the Zimmerli, Mr. Wechsler organized many significant exhibitions focused on lesser-known aspects of 20th century art such as Surrealism and American Art, 1931-1947, Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions, and Asian Traditions / Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945-1970. Author of over 50 essays for museums and galleries, lecturer, advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Wechsler is now the curator for the Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Gallery in New York City.

PDF of Juror’s Statement

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