Knock Knock
Undergraduate Juried Exhibition
April 2 to April 26, 2015
Reception in the Hartnett Gallery, April 2, 5 – 7 PM.
The Hartnett Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Knock, Knock: The Hartnett Gallery Undergraduate Juried Exhibition,” featuring work by current undergraduate students from all departments across the University of Rochester.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, April 2nd and a reception will take place in the gallery from 5:00 to 7:00pm that evening. This exhibit represents a survey of the diversity of artistic practices that students engage with at the University of Rochester.
Purchase prizes and awards for artwork will be announced during the opening reception.
Poetic Sentiment
Mayumi Amada
February 19 to March 15, 2015
Artist Talk at 4:30PM, February 19, in the Stackel Room (across from the gallery)
Followed by a Reception in the Hartnett Gallery from 5:30PM – 7:00PM.
This show focuses on life within an eternal flow of time. Mayumi Amada explores the idea of mortality in eternity and eternity in mortality with her poetic statement. The use of the doily symbolizes the repetition of generations and the passage of time. Flowers whisper about ephemeral beauty. Recycled materials modestly enhance the theme. The triangle of the theme, image, and materials integrate the show.
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About the artist
Mayumi Amada was born and raised in a small rural town in Japan. Since childhood, she loved making things with her own hands. She learned to uses her grandmother’s sawing machine when she was only six years old. Soon after, she started to crochet. As a child she liked drawing and painting, as well.
In 2006, Mayumi graduated from the University of Minnesota with an MFA degree in sculpture. Since then she has had a very active professional career including a solo exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. She is showing her work nationally and internationally.
Her recent explores themes such as repeated generations, ancestry, and the circle of life. Through her work, she hopes that viewers take a moment to think about their own lives, and find motivation through them to consider what they want or need to do to lead a fulfilling life.
Tino Sehgal
This situation
February 10th to February 13th, 12-4pm
February 14th and February 15th, 11-7pm
February 16th, 12-4pm
The Harnett Gallery is pleased to announce a special university edition of This situation, a live work by the ground-shifting contemporary artist, Tino Sehgal. Members of the greater University of Rochester community will enact the piece from February 10th through the 16th, from noon to 4pm each day. The exhibition will conclude on the evening of the 16th with a public symposium in the Gowen Room from 5:00-6:30 where the piece’s producers, Asad Raza and Julia Simpson, will discuss the work with Rachel Haidu and Heather Layton of the Department of Art and Art History. This situation and the accompanying symposium will foster a unique and rewarding experience for U of R faculty, graduate students and undergraduates, and for others in the wider Rochester community. All are invited, and are particularly encouraged to visit This situation on one of the afternoons it is on display.
This situation and the symposium have been organized by Joshua Dubler of the Department of Religion and Classics. The exhibition has been produced with the generous support of the Humanities Project. Vital supplementary funding has been furnished by the Hartnett Gallery, Film and Media Studies, German, Visual and Cultural Studies, and the course “Justice and Equality.”
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About Tino Sehgal
London-born, Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal received his training in economics and dance, and his work perennially indexes these two disciplinary nodes. Arguably more than from any other source, however, Sehgal’s “constructed situations” take their inspiration from 1960’s revolutionary organization, The Situationist International. As described and prescribed by the Situationists’ most prominent theorist, Guy Debord: “Our central purpose is the construction of situations, that is, the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature.”
Constructing concrete situations that enable the transformation of everyday life into something higher and more passionate is precisely what, in a series of western civilization’s most hallowed secular temples, Sehgal has of late been doing. In 2010, as part of the Guggenheim’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, Sehgal produced This progress, in which visitors would ascend the landmark ramp for a series of uncannily interrelated conversations, first with a child, then a teenager, then an adult, and finally with an elderly person. In 2012, at documenta, This variation immersed visitors into a pitch-black space amidst a dancing, humming, chattering chorus. That summer, at the Tate Modern, These associationsengulfed visitors in a veritable murmuration of bodies, out of which would sprout intimate conversations of indefinite length.
For aesthetic, political and ecological reasons, Sehgal’s artistic practice is wholly immaterial. His constructed situations consist entirely of people: museum visitors and his “interpreters” (as his performers are called). Never does Sehgal produce an object. This means not only that he makes no physical works of art. He also authorizes no catalogues, allows no photographs, and indeed, signs no contracts or licensing agreements. The only way for someone to see Sehgal’s work is to experience it first hand. And once it is over, it is gone.
Sehgal’s work makes narrow interventions into the discourse of contemporary art, but simultaneously it giddily refuses that frame. Sehgal’s work is engineered to meet the viewer wherever he or she happens to be. This radically democratic spirit of engagement is responsible for many of the critical and popular hosannas that follow Sehgal’s work, and ideally suits it for a university context. But this is not populism for populism’s sake. Rather, Sehgal’s revolutionary humanism dares to constructively imagine the sorts of extraordinary, transformative experiences people might be able to have with one another if only the conditions were right. This is the radical spirit that animates Sehgal’s work, and this is the mood that Sehgal’s work engenders.
About the producers
Asad Raza was born in Buffalo, New York and studied literature and film at Johns Hopkins and NYU. He has contributed to many international exhibitions including A stroll through a fun palace for the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture. In 2014, Raza also produced and directed Tino Sehgal’s Estas associoñes at CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, as well as the first contemporary art exhibition to be held in the Roman Agora in Athens, Greece. Raza also created the 2014 exhibition Solaris Chronicles for the LUMA foundation in Arles, France, with Frank Gehry, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno and other artists. He has produced many projects with the artist Tino Sehgal, including two of the largest and most influential live art exhibitions mounted to date, This progress at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010) and These associations at Tate Modern, London (2012). Other exhibitions include Este tu for the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011), This situation for the Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal (2013), and Annlee for Frieze New York (2013). Together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alex Poots, and Sehgal, Raza created Mayfield Depot for the Manchester International Festival (2013). He is currently working on a major exhibition with Philippe Parreno for the Park Avenue Armory, opening June 2015; a new project for the 2015 Ljubljana Biennial; and a project with Sehgal that will take place at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Raza’s writing has appeared in Minnesota Review, Modern Matter,n+1, NERO, Newspaper Jan Mot, the New York Times, Post Road, and Tennis magazine, and he served as co-author of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s book Ways of Curating (London: Penguin Press, 2014). Raza has given seminars, talks, and workshops at universities including the London School of Economics, McGill, NYU, Queen Mary University of London, and Princeton University.
Julia Simpson was born in Maine and studied literature, history and philosophy at Wesleyan University. At present, she is is based in New York, where she works as an interdisciplinary producer, creative director, and filmmaker. Alongside Raza, she has installed and managed Tino Sehgal exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and Princeton University. Currently, she is producing a series of documentary films about teenage dancers, directed by visual artist Petra Collins. In 2014, she was the art director for Arcade Fire’s world tour. For the Performa 13 Biennial, she produced performance pieces for Florian Hecker, Rosa Barba, Ed Atkins, and other artists. Since 2013, she has managed the staff at the Frieze New York art fair. In addition to producing and directing numerous music videos and commercials, she has contributed to narrative and documentary feature films including Beasts of the Southern Wild, The House I Live In, Reagan, and Freakonomics.
Love Stories
Nichola Kinch
January 15 – February 8, 2015
Artist Talk and Reception: 5:30 – 7:00 PM, January 15, Hartnett Gallery
“Love Stories” is a collection of animation machines, photographs and optical devices, each presenting a rarified image of nature. These objects offer an illusion, a grove of 10 foot trees that appear real but are flat, a periscope that offers an altered perspective, and a moon that tricks the eye through persistence of vision.
Through these objects, and the images they create, Kinch presents the mediated photographic experience as a metaphor for how we understand the world. This most recent work stems from her research into early photographic processes, optical toys, and the advent of moving image machines. Kinch takes advantage of the physicality of these devices to place emphasis on the power and limits of visual perception.
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Nichola Kinch is a Philadelphia based artist and an Assistant Professor at Temple University’s Tyler school of Art in the Foundations and Visual Studies Programs. Kinch’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, SPACES Gallery in Clevland, Vox Popluli and The Print Center in Philadelphia, The Median Art Center in Beijing, China and The Center for Modern Art in Shanghai, China. Nichola Kinch holds a BFA in Ceramics from the Myers School of Art and a MFA in sculpture from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.
_e_scapes
Nick Marshall
November 20 – December 14, 2014
Artist talk in the Stackel Room (202 Wilson Commons), 4:00PM, November 20, 2014
Followed by a Reception in the Hartnett Gallery, 5:00-7:00PM
“Turn your bathroom into the retreat of your dreams.” — Sherwin Williams
In the 19th and 20th centuries, tourism proliferated due to rapid developments in transportation and the accessibility of photography. The distant, whether in space or time, became closer at hand. Displayed in albums, printed on Kleenex® boxes, or painted on bedroom walls, the promise of escape soon found its way into our lives at home.
Nick Marshall’s recent photographs and paintings explore the desire to withdraw from the everyday into representations of the idyllic. With the sea as a backdrop, the work creates imaginative horizons by turning our often absurd attempts to substantiate the ephemeral air and waterinto anonymous or impossible locales. Through the use of consumer house paint and vacation photos, Marshall reveals our cultural attempts to materialize and reconstruct memory and fantasy.
Nick Marshall is a Western New York based artist who exhibits his work nationally and internationally. His recent exhibitions include a solo show at University of Notre Dame’s Riley Hall Photography Gallery as well as the group show, Ese Barco ya Zarpo, at Club Fotografico de Mexico in Juarez, Mexico. In 2012, Marshall was selected as a featured artist in Susan Dobson and Allison Nordstrom’s collaborative project, Pictured Past Future Perfect, and that same year he curated the group exhibition, My Apocalypse, in Rochester, NY. He has taught courses at Alfred University and Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently the manager of exhibitions and programming at George Eastman House. Marshall received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design and a MFA from RIT.
Blueprint Paintings
Eric LoPresti
October 17 – November 9, 2014
Artist talk and Reception 5:00-7:00PM October 17, Hartnett Gallery.
Eric LoPresti’s aerial landscapes are investigations into the “apocalyptic sublime.” In this exhibition, titled Blueprint Paintings, he eschews the prismatic tinting of his previous work, and reduces his palette to a single, blue-grey color. Whether rendering the epic landscape of Nevada Test Site, where the US tested over a thousand nuclear weapons during the Cold War, or the explosive 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, which showered fine grey ash on his childhood home in Washington State, LoPresti’s newest body of work registers an attenuated response to cataclysmic disruption.
Executed in a loose but precise painterly style, Blueprint Paintings presents viewers with a collection of landscapes, both beautiful and terrifying, which they may consider with perspective.
Eric LoPresti makes artwork that examines the imposition of technology upon the environment and the aftermath of the Cold War. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Galapagos (NYC), the National Atomic Test Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution (Nevada), Washington State University, and Like the Spice Gallery (NYC). A winner of the Faber Birren Foundation Award and the Miami Young Painters Award, his work has received mentions in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum.com, NY Arts, ArtLog.com, Nature, The Denver Post, The Seattle Times, Vegas Seven Magazine and The Village Voice.
LoPresti holds a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Rochester (1993) and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2002). He is currently working on an exhibition of data-driven paintings in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, to be shown in New York City in 2014.
Strange Surroundings
Resa Blatman
Thursday September 11th – Sunday October 5th, 2014
Artist talk 4:00PM Havens Lounge, Wilson Commons
Reception to follow 5:00PM-7:00PM in the Hartnett Gallery
Melding art and science is an insightful endeavor and in Resa Blatman’s painted installation “Gaia,” art and nature exist as one. “Gaia” is an ongoing project that will continue to grow after the Hartnett exhibit. Its direction, patterning, and content will layer and shift as the environment around us changes and as global warming continues to accelerate. Resa uses various surface materials that layer, entwine, and cover to create an overgrown (un)natural world that is lush, undulating, and beautiful, while flowers and leaves lay coated by the sheen of a grotesque, inky oil spill.
“I’m very interested in the Gaia theory, which proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. In other words, despite our negative influences on the planet, the earth will survive. We humans will be at great risk as the planet warms, but new species of plants, animals, and insects will flourish. I find this concept, and the ambiguity of its meaning for life on earth, very intriguing. However, as inhabitants of Earth, we are responsible for making informed and thoughtful choices for the future of our beautiful planet.”
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Resa Blatman received her MFA in painting from Boston University in 2006, and her BFA in graphic designfrom the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1995, and she taught advanced level graphic designat MassArt from 1997-2012. Resa has received several grants and awards, including a nomination for the2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize at the ICA, Boston; and an upcoming sailing residency to visit the Arctic Circle in June 2015. Her work is included in private and corporate collections, including Fidelity, Twitter, the Hilton Hotel, and the WH Ming Hotel in Shanghai, China. Her work is reviewed and featured in numerous magazines, journals, books, and online blogs. Resa’s work was recently on view at Tufts University Art Center/Museum in a group exhibition called Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic, January-May 2014. Her project “Gaia” will be exhibited throughout the U.S. this year and into 2015. Resa is represented in Boston by the Miller Yezerski Gallery. To see more of Resa’s work, please visit www.resablatman.com
