January Issue 2002
Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Features Works by John Ruppert, Sheila Pepe & More
An installation of recent work by artist John
Ruppert will open on Jan. 20 at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at
UNC-Greensboro in Greensboro, NC. Ruppert is a Falk Visiting Artist
at the university and the exhibition will be on view through Mar.
10, 2002. The Museum will also present an installation by Sheila
Pepe which will be on view from Jan. 27 through Apr. 7, 2002 and
an exhibition entitled, "A Way with Words", which will
be on view from Jan. 27 through Mar. 10, 2002.
Ruppert works with a range of both traditional and non-traditional
materials - from cast bronze and iron to chain link fencing. His
work references the forms and forces of nature, the remains of
ancient civilizations, and his materials' inherent properties.
For this exhibition, Ruppert will install a series of his large
cast metal "moon gourds" in the Falk Gallery and outside
in the sculpture courtyard. The gallery's large windows will give
audiences a continuous line of vision linking interior and exterior.
Ruppert is this year's third Falk Visiting
Artist and plans to visit UNCG in early Feb. to work with students
in the studio art program. He will lead a walk-through of his
installation on Feb. 11 at 4pm and will present a slide lecture
on the development of his work on Feb. 12 at 5:30pm. Admission
to both talks is free and the public is invited.
In late Jan., artist Sheila Pepe will create a new room-sized
installation especially for the Weatherspoon Art Museum. For several
years, the New York-based sculptor has been transforming spaces
with readily available domestic and industrial materials, such
as rubber bands and shoelaces. Pepe knots, crochets, and ties
these elements into looping, draping, web-like forms, whose "drawn"
character is echoed by the shadows they cast and the artist's
charcoal wall drawings they inspire. Pepe's recent installations
redefine an empty gallery space as both a walk-in environment
and psychological playground, and recall the abstract sculpture
of earlier artists like Eva Hesse and Judy Pfaff. Pepe's works
are a hybrid of sculpture, drawing, and installation that are
simultaneously humorous, whimsical, and slightly eerie.
This Gallery 6 installation opens on Jan. 27 and will be on view through Apr. 7. The artist will give a gallery talk while the installation is in progress on Jan. 24 at 3pm.
The Weatherspoon Art Museum will also present the exhibition, "A Way with Words", which will be on view from Jan. 27 through Mar. 10, 2002.
One of the many artistic developments of the
20th century was the incorporation of text into works of visual
art. Functioning no longer simply to identify the subject of a
portrait or the locale of a landscape, words came to be used by
a wide range of artists as textural and compositional elements
and even as the subject of their work. As early as 1911 and 1912,
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were using stenciled words and
bits of newsprint for their inherent "flatness," as
a way to assert the primacy of the picture plane over the traditional
illusionism of painting.
The selection of works in this exhibition, all drawn from the
Weatherspoon's permanent collection, follow more closely in the
conceptual tradition of Marcel Duchamp, although the incorporated
texts may also function as compositional elements. From Carl Andre's
use of typewritten lines of text as minimal box on a field of
paper to Kay Rosen's visual/verbal pun, which features the word
"R(aft)" in a piece entitled "Back of the Boat",
the marriage of text and image takes many forms and has become
a given in contemporary art.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 336/334-5770 or on the web at (http://www.uncg.edu/wag/).
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