January Issue 2000
New Exhibitions Opening at Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC
Opening Jan. 28 and continuing through Apr. 9, at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center, in Salisbury, NC, Beyond Words features the powerful and unsettling work of three very diverse artists: master photographer, Jerry Uelsmann, and installation artists Lori Bilger and Brian DeLevie. These artists challenge and engage us by using the visual vocabulary of familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. The installations by Bilger and DeLevie share a search for personal and family catharsis in the carefully constructed frame of reference they both create in gallery space. Uelsmann's stunning photographs, courtesy of the Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC, use the familiar in a surreal and objective way, subverting our assumptions about reality.
In the exhibit,Subverting the Eye, Jerry Uelsmann's mystical and enigmatic photographic montages are like dreams that slip past our perceptual defenses, triggering a response but never quite revealing their meaning. Uelsmann, a major creative force in fine art photography, began manipulating the photographic image in the darkroom more than thirty years ago, presaging the digital imaging age. His style continues to influence a whole new generation of photographers.
Born in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann has had over 100 solo shows, and his work is included in major museum collections throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque National in Paris, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan. Nine books devoted to his art have been published; most recently, Museum Studies, in 1999. He was the recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Uelsmann lives in Gainesville, FL and retired from the position of Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida in 1997. He is represented regionally by Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC.
Falling somewhere between celebration and memorial, Brian DeLevie's installation entitled, Known But Not Spoken, brings together images of memory, custom, and history within illuminated boxes and objects nested in them at each place setting on a Sabbath dinner table. The structure of the exhibit invites each individual participant/viewer to discover merging images as they circle the table, viewing the ring within rings of images before them. The overall purpose of the exhibit forms within this circle, a major symbol of the Jewish tradition from the life cycle to the celebratory dance called the hora. The empty chairs surrounding the table in the midst of visual memory represent both absence and presence.
A fragmented family album, digitally assembled, will hang on the gallery walls. DeLevie says, "As the last generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors are passing, so too is most of their history. It is not just a history of the Jews as a people that is passing, but their individual family histories as well. This installation represents multiple perspectives. A space is presented in which people can join in the memory of those Holocaust victims and survivors, while realizing it is truly impossible to fully understand the experience. Personally, it is my effort to understand what my parents and their families went through during the Holocaust and its subsequent effects on me." DeLevie received his MFA degree from the University of Houston in 1995 in Electronic Media/Photography and currently teaches interactive multimedia design and technique at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
"First of All...", Charlotte, NC, artist Lori Bilger's enigmatic installation, codified in white, allows us to enter and somehow be witness to her life experiences while projecting our own. Bilger writes that her process "begins with thoughts and emotions: the stuff that keeps me up at night or makes me run a red light, personal issues that I cannot let go of, issues that I need to work through. I collect familiar objects that evoke the feelings and memories. I pile them in a corner until the time to do the installation draws near. Then I paint everything white. About a week before the opening, I am allowed into the assigned space, and it becomes mine. As I weed through the objects, I am also weeding through my feelings. I move the objects around and let them play off each other-redefine each other. When I am through, a transformation occurs inside me, and I can then walk away." A 1988 graduate in Visual Arts from the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, this is Bilger's fifth installation.
The exhibition by Greensboro sculptor Frank Holder will continue in the Taylor/Johnson Courtyard. Holder's large organic abstract shapes in a variety of metals have a wonderful sense of fluidity and motion, and often times, whimsy.
During this exhibition period, artwork by Rowan County High School Students will be featured in the Young People's Gallery.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call the center at 704/636-1882 or check them
out on the web at (http://www.waterworks.org).
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