Feature Articles

November Issue 2001

Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, Offers Faculty Exhibition

Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, presents Art and Design Faculty Exhibition Two to the public from Nov. 8 through Jan. 27, 2002, at Winthrop University Galleries. Free to the public, the Exhibition presents the work of four Winthrop Art and Design Faculty artists - Shaun Cassidy, David Freeman, Janice Mueller and Alfred Ward. Like last year's inaugural Art and Design Faculty Exhibition One, which presented works by Mary Mintich, Alan Huston, Paul Martyka and Phil Moody, the 2001 exhibition provides a more comprehensive investigation of each artist's work.

Sculpture professor Cassidy is exhibiting a large, site-specific, room-like structure typical of his recent work. Freeman, who has been on the Winthrop faculty since 1970, has a new series of paintings that illustrate his current experimentation. Mueller's recent paintings for this exhibition explore her ongoing interest in symbols of culture. Master silversmith Alfred Ward explores his childhood memories of World War II London in a new body of finely crafted jewelry-like forms.

The public is invited to an opening gallery talk with Alfred Ward on Nov. 9 at 7:30pm in the Elizabeth Dunlap Patrick Gallery. Or join in the Sun. afternoon artists' lectures, held at 3pm in Rutledge Auditorium, on Nov. 18 with Shaun Cassidy, on Dec. 2 with David Freeman, and on Jan. 20 with Janice Mueller.

The following edited text was excerpted from interviews conducted by Tom Stanley In September 2001.

Shaun Cassidy Interview, September 10, 2001, at 5pm

"It was the beginning of May at the Djerassi Artists Program in California, and there had been an enormous amount of rainfall that spring. All the landscape was collapsing so there were these big mud slides. I wanted to incorporate the idea of decay and build a sculpture in the landscape that would allow the landscape to dominate. So I built this skeletal structure of a room. It was made of thin, wooden square-stock - basically a white, ghost skeleton of a house sitting in the landscape. The piece I am building for this exhibition is a follow-up to that piece, but it will be an interior version. There will be a ghost of a floor with four big steel beams, that are again just ghost beams sitting on two main vertical risers. There will be many, many different elements that sit in ghost version above the floor with more massive, substantial objects that sit under the floor. I am really interested in this idea of conscious and subconscious thought and the process of how we construct a memory - what is actually real in that memory, and how our memory over time changes things and becomes a sort of hybrid, fused, muffed reality in our own imagination. Some of the imagery in the two pieces is very close, but what I am trying to do in the latest piece is somewhat different.

The piece in the gallery will be a much more surreal and complex work. When I first envisioned it, I had imagined it would be 20 feet by 20 feet because of the size of the gallery, but in this configuration its going to be 10 feet x 10 feet by about 14 feet high. I basically want it to be a very transparent, insubstantial structure, given the amount of space it's going to be taking up. My work often has that sense of theatricality to it. The audiences activity within the viewing of the work is a major component of the sculpture, as they identify metaphors or an affinity for a particular form or idea within the work In my working process, I always have a loose set of ideas and I try to keep as much open as possible until late in the project, so the work stays fresh. It's not just like executing a drawing, a plan or a concept. So I won't really see this piece finished until just before the opening. The parts will be pre-built but the orientation of the elements within the structure will be altered according to my mood that day. In the process of making, I leave room for things that I just have this compulsion to make. And I'm not quite sure where that compulsion is coming from, but I've learned over the years just to trust myself to go ahead and make those things. Later, some kind of understanding of why I wanted to make them will become evident."

Janice Mueller Interview, September 13, 2001, at 2pm

Janice Mueller

"Having spent time in another country has given me an ongoing interest in culture and the symbols of our cultures and what they mean to me personally. These can be looked at historically, but they can also be looked at in terms of a personal attempt to connect. And especially with the labyrinths in my work, they can be considered an attempt to find my own way. My paintings have always started with symbols and stories from other cultures, oftentimes very old cultures. For example, one of my paintings evolved from a story I recall about a gravesite in Newgrange, Ireland, that was at least 10,000 years old. It was built in such a way that it would let light in the grave for only 20 minutes a year. The engineering feat and the creativity that was infused with the spiritual meaning of the gravesite is mysterious to me.

Another painting is about a gravesite found in Denmark. It is the grave of a young woman and her child who both died during the birthing process. From the 7,000-year-old remains, the gender of the baby could not be identified. Still, the woman had been buried with sea shells and different materials that might have been important to people of that time, or young women of any period. Next to her was buried her child. The child was buried "on the wing of a swan", which is the title of the painting. It affected me very much that even 7,000 years ago, when one would think people would have been so involved with mere survival, these emotional and spiritual responses were possible. So, I am looking at collective symbols, which produce collective emotions and collective memories that I try to represent through my paintings. I may be the only person aware of the background story in the painting, but my goal is not to tell the story. It is not a narrative. My goal is to provide the emotion, even if the emotion that is evoked is undefined. I think the way in which we emotionally respond to visual symbols in our lives is very similar, and was probably very similar 35,000 years ago. That kind of connection throughout history is something that interests me intellectually and spiritually."

David Freeman Interview, September 13, 2001, at 3:30pm

David Freeman

"I've been listening to classical music since I discovered it as an undergraduate student in college. More than the influence of any particular painter, I think it has been music that has moved my work. Though these are not to be regarded as paintings about music, the influence of music figures into it heavily. Composition does play a role: getting the elements to work together, the colors in relationship to one another, the colors underneath, the structure, the movement of the painting. But music is also part of it. And, yes I evolve the paintings from subject matter. In graduate school, I would go out to junk yards and look at mechanical parts. Even here in Rock Hill, I have gone to scrap-metal yards to photograph images. In my studio, I still have my drawing board which is full of small photographic fragments that may or may not find their place in a painting at sometime. They are all possibilities. They are shape configurations that I see. One whole series, for example, came from the salad greens that I saw in a garden. Sometimes I have even photographed images in color to help jump-start my thoughts with regard to different color relationships.

Most of the paintings in this exhibition are from images I photographed from subjects that were located around my house. For example, there is a tree in my front yard with scaley bark, which I photographed with a close-up lens. Most of my subject matter has either been man-made objects or subjects from nature that become an abstract point of departure for the work. The music is an emotional point of departure. I must have a structural basis to begin the work. I can see more exciting shapes and shape relationships in nature than I could ever invent. Though I have been pretty consistent over the years, I am experimenting with color and shape. I am interested in new approaches. In this new painting, Shelf Life, there is recognizable content that evolved from a travel experience and photo fragments of a shop window that displayed dolls and owls. One of the problems I faced was just how realistic, how far I wanted to go with this."

Alfred Ward Interview September 14, 2001, at 2pm

Alf Ward

"Subconsciously, this is all to do with my childhood. It's not deliberate until I get to the image-making. Up until about 12 years ago, I had thought that my imagery had been developed at college. Even then my work combined fluidity and the suspension of the effects of fluidity in a moment. So there is fluidity as a contrast to solid or hard edge. For example, with a volcano one has a static object in the volcano and then this fluid lava. So what I eventually realized with my work is that it actually goes back to my childhood - a mixture of memories of World War II London and my father's business at that time, which was casting metal in his foundry. My view of metal was as a liquid. So I retained this initial experience with metal as a fluid material. On the other hand, during the war all of this other metal was falling from the sky. It was really sharp, hard, jagged, harmful and dangerous, falling to the ground. This was a totally different thing from the working experience with my father. So I had two separate experiences with metal, mixed in with the trauma of the war. I don't consciously design things based on those memories, it's just that I have noticed over the years that it comes out in my image-making. I am combining this same process - the hard, the soft, the fluid, the hard edge. In the past, I had worked on a series of metal-only images mounted on the surface of roof-like slate. Though I liked those, I found them a little restricting. So having done a lot of stone cutting and polishing in my early career, about a year ago I decided to think more about using stone as a canvas instead of using metal as the background for these images. I actually find the images through a long search of looking at the stones and by cutting and identifying just the piece I want. I am using these images as the basis of the work and then building the metal parts around them to actually support the found image, or enhance the image, or encase the image. That has led me to this new work. It has taken a long time to get to this stage because each takes a lot of cutting until I find just the piece I want for the image. For example, this one is called Dog Fight. You see, when these planes would fight in the sky, this is almost exactly how it looked. You have these trails of falling debris from the sky. And this other one is actually a fossil. When the bombs came down, they would go down so deep that fossil-like material was thrown up. Where I lived, there was probably 20 feet of dark earth covering chalk and the fossils were in the chalk the bombs would go down and churn up the earth and chalk, so we would find fossils like this. This work is entitled Carpet Bomber. It will eventually have a slab of gold across it like a continuous line of flying bombers - basically in a decorative or symbolic sense, not pictorial. This one is called Night Raid. I had to find the piece of stone that represented what the sky looked like at night. So inside of this piece will be a little air raid shelter, which is symbolic, again, produced in gold. And this final piece, which will have shafts of gold coming into it from the outside, is called Dark Day."

For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or contact Winthrop Galleries Director Tom Stanley at 803/323-2493.

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