| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
June Issue 2004
Spartanburg County Museum of Art in Spartanburg, SC, Features New Exhibitions
From grand-scale history paintings that question
the merit of capital punishment to photo essays on popular biker
culture, the Spartanburg County Museum of Art in Spartanburg,
SC, hosts several national-caliber exhibits for early summer.
Included is Zhi Lin's, Five Capital Executions in China;
Jessica Dunne's, Night's Inscrutable Embrace; Chris Wilson's,
A New Southern Realism; and Moving Sculpture: Art of
the Motorcycle World.
Featured in the museum's Parsons Gallery through June 27, 2004,
Lin's powerful - if controversial - series explores the brutal
history of capital punishment. Except for the single piece set
in modern times, "Firing Squad," the series focuses
on how society has accepted and even embraced execution as necessity
and even entertainment. Ironically, the artist uses the state-endorsed
Socialist Realist style of Chinese painting to take his country
to task for the part it's played in this history of cruelty and
violence. Hundreds of figures crowd his 7' x 12' canvases and
tell stories of starvation and flaying, decapitation and firing
squads.
Scale is not the only device Lin uses to heighten the impact of his work: the viewer witnesses these atrocities from an odd, high perspective, giving him a god-like view that the artist hopes will translate into some philosophical soul searching.
Exhibits coordinator Scott Cunningham says it was the massacre at Tiananmen Square that pushed Lin from being simply "a painter of pretty pictures" to explore the artist's power as social and political commentator. "It's a show that works on many levels," he says. "Regardless of your views on capital punishment, it's a must-see."
Art goers will find Lin's technique itself remarkable: each painting is accompanied by a series of painstakingly detailed preliminary sketches in charcoal or watercolor. The final mammoth canvases are developed first as black-and-white drawings and painted over in acrylic. The edges are then finished like quilts, topped with swags, and decorated with delicate ribbons silk-screened with figures from Chinese history.
Cunningham says that from its inception to its completion, Five Capital Executions in China, took "over a decade of vision, patience and persistence." During this time the artist received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Fellowship in Painting and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Artists grant at Giverny, France. Spartanburg is the fourth stop on its tour of museums, following Indiana State University Art Gallery in Terre Haunte, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Wash., and the Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles.
On display through July 4, 2004, in the Burwell Gallery are monotypes and monoprints by San Francisco artist Jessica Dunne. Recalling the urban isolation of Edward Hopper, Night's Inscrutable Embrace exposes a nocturnal world that is at once haunting and seductive. Glowing streetlights, wet pavement and shadowy cars suggest human presence, but that is all. For Dunne, night is about solitude, even in the midst of the city.
As with Lin's show, Spartanburg is the fourth museum stop for Night's Inscrutable Embrace. It traveled first to Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, Fresno Art Museum and The Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.
Continuing through June 27, 2004, in the Milliken Gallery is work by Rocky Mount, NC, artist Chris Wilson. While most viewers would point to Wilson's rich oils as "realism," the artist began his career as an abstract painter. In A New Southern Realism, he pushes the design aspect of otherwise traditional subject matter: a snow-frosted cemetery, bales of hay in a field, a simple but wonderfully textured white cloth draped on a table.
Finally, Moving Sculpture: Art of the Motorcycle World, continues through June 5, 2004, in the museum's hallway galleries. There, viewers can see entries into the museum's first annual motorcycle art competition, including the winning work: a full-scale Indian motorcycle crafted entirely of wood by artist James Evans. The event was part of a museum fund-raiser earlier in the year. The hallway gallery also includes the photo essay, Biker Generation by Michael Lichter, hailed as one of the top photographers of motorcycle culture in the US.
For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 864/583-2776 or on the web at (www.sparklenet.com/museumofart/).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2004 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© 2004 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.