October Issue 2000
UNC-Charlotte Features Works by Bailey Doogan
The University of
North Carolina at Charlotte's Department of Art is offering an
exhibition entitled, Positions, featuring paintings and
drawings by celebrated Arizona artist Bailey Doogan in the Rowe
Arts Gallery through Oct. 20, 2000.
Ms. Doogan's work uses language and image to reveal the truth about the aging body, directly countering the identity-erasing ideal nude pictured throughout Western art history. This is masterful, important, and confrontational work, which requires the viewer to rethink the position of the body in visual imagery.
Doogan is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Arizona and she currently serves on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association. In terms of traditional technique, Doogan's work is an excellent example of virtuoso performance in the mediums of drawing and painting. Such craftsmanship is reflected in the works of such great artists as Rembrandt and Caravaggio. Doogan's drawings take that technical skill and combine it with a rich set of contemporary concepts.
Doogan's work is also challenging. Her figures are presented in such a way as to create the feeling of having a sacred character. The nature of their scaredness is in the presentation of physical and emotional truths and human vulnerability. The figures are not idealized. They represent our various human forms in an accepting manner, even with a sense of play or silliness at times. Her expressions have a sense of innocence that often feels playful.
According to Susan
Brenner, Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting and 1999-2000
Chair of the Exhibitions Committe at UNC-Charlotte, Doogan depicts
human physicality in terms of "being naked" rather than
as "nudes". The difference is that rendering "nudes"
follows a set of conventions of beauty, or historical rules, making
the pictures "pretty and acceptable" by idealizing or
glossing over truth and by emphasizing more superfical purposes.
In selecting and scheduling this programming the Department of Art's 1999-2000 and 200-2001 Exhibition Committees carried out their mandate to provide programs that are challenging for our students and that are catalysts for aesthetic inquiry. When considering what is challenging we attempt to change our students' expectations from what art is supposed to be to what it can be. Our mission in education is to open minds to humanity with its various truths and vulnerabilities.
For the past 20 years, Doogan's work has been included in important exhibitions throughout the United States, including the recent Picturing the Modern Amazon at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her work has been featured in such publications as The Village Voice, Art in America, Harper's Magazine, Ms., and ArtNews.
Bailey Doogan will share her thoughts on shame and censorship throughout the art world in her lecture entitled, Censorship: For Shame on Oct. 16 at UNC-Charlotte's Storrs Lecture Hall at 7pm. The public is invited to attend this free event.
"My art is described as tough art, difficult art," Doogan says, "My own art has been censored more times than I even could have imagined - in my own state of Arizona... and even New York."
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call Mary B. Tuma at 704/510-6382.
Mailing Address: Carolina Arts, P.O. Drawer
427, Bonneau, SC 29431
Telephone, Answering Machine and FAX: 843/825-3408
E-Mail: carolinart@aol.com
Subscriptions are available for $18 a year.
Carolina Arts
is published monthly by Shoestring
Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc.
Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts
Online, Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved
by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use
without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina
Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.