August Issue 2002
SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC, Offers Exhibition of Works by James Harold Jennings and Gregory Barsamian
The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, is presenting the exhibitions, Health, Happiness, and Metempsychosis: The Art of James Harold Jennings and Gregory Barsamian's Animayhem. Both exhibition will be on view through Sept. 28, 2002.
Health, Happiness, and Metempsychosis: The Art of James Harold Jennings is being presented in SECCA's Main Gallery. It is the first retrospective exhibition of this legendary self-taught artist whose eclectic art-making activities in a variety of formats and media spanned his entire life. The large exhibition is being organized by SECCA senior curator David J. Brown with assistance from Tom Patterson, critic, curator, and North American editor of Raw Vision magazine; Ray Kass, artist and founder of The Mountain Lake Workshop; George Jacobs, one of the first dealers to exhibit Jennings's work; and Roger Manley, a curator, photographer, and writer who specializes in the art of self-taught artists from around the world. The reclusive Jennings lived and worked in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and his colorful constructions and hand-built environments were sought by private collectors and museums from many parts of the United States. According to Manley, "Jennings was one of the most important and prolific North Carolina outsider artists, and I think that he had one of the most unique styles in the field. His work is very mechanically clever and emotionally ebullient."
Jennings was born in Pinnacle, NC, (just minutes north of Winston-Salem) on the family farm in 1931, and his father, a country veterinarian, died three years later. Jennings dropped out of school at the age of 12 and was home-schooled by his mother, who worked not only as a schoolteacher but ran the family tobacco farm. According to his brother Clyde, James Harold was always in the process of creating, whether it was hand-built radios, furniture, altered bicycles (his preferred mode of transportation - it is reported that he amassed hundreds), or necklaces with individual links meticulously formed from found wire. In his twenties and early thirties, Jennings held several jobs - as a night watchman at a local lumber mill or as a projectionist at a nearby drive-in - before devoting his entire waking life to the act of producing his sophisticated, hand-sawn, painted constructions.
Health, Happiness, and Metempsychosis: The Art of James Harold Jennings will feature over 150 unique works ranging from a model of the artist's childhood home, fabricated between 1954-58 from found materials, to the early mechanical works of the 1970s, to the more widely-known, colorfully painted constructions, and the Tough Girl series in the late 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition is scheduled to tour nationally. Throughout his lifetime, Jennings created thousands of works without the use of any power tools and under self-imposed conditions that can only be called primitive.
In SECCA's Potter Gallery is the exhibition, Gregory Barsamian's Animayhem.
The performance artist Laurie Andersen once asked her audience if they knew why, on some nights, they didn't have a dream. The reason for this, she intimated, was simple: on those nights you were already busy in someone else's dream.
The things you first notice about Gregory Barsamian's work is a whirring in the darkness and the humming of electricity flowing through gears, shafts, sealed bearings, and steel rods, followed by the tic-tic-ticking of blinking lights, some thirteen times a second. The lights conjure up before you a hallucinogenic array of real-time, dream-like transformations: Renaissance angels morphing into helicopters, dancers gyrating on the pages of a book, heads that turn inside out. In ways meant to delight and disrupt our waking state of consciousness, Barsamian constructs large, motorized, spinning steel machines and hundreds of cast objects that produce three-dimensional animation. Updating centuries-old optical and perceptual technologies, his sculptures echo stories that we might have dreamt - complicated, powerful, ethereal.
According to the artist: "What I end up doing is mounting three dimensional, sequentially-formed artworks on a motorized rotating cylinder. The cylinder is divided into segments like a piece of pie, in the neighborhood of sixteen frames. A strobe light is synchronized to flash as each frame passes. Each frame becomes like a single image in a three dimensional film composed and slightly different from the preceding and following frames. That's how I create the movement."
Barsamian's work has been experienced by enthusiastic audiences in museums throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Take a tip from one art critic who, upon seeing the artist's work for the first time, remarked, "I feel as though I should stand up and applaud!" Find out why. This is one that you'll want to tell your friends about!
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 336/725-19041, e-mail at (admin@secca.org) or on the web at (www.secca.org).
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