Proposal for potential exhibits To propose an exhibition for the Visual Arts Center galleries, download this form. pdf (348k)

The Washington Pavilion's Visual Arts Center features changing exhibitions of local and regional artists, as well as national touring art exhibitions, year round.  Keep checking back for updates and details!

 CURRENT EXHIBITIONS AT THE VISUAL ARTS CENTER

Mary Lucier: The Plains of Sweet Regret
March 12 – June 6, 2010
Everist Gallery

Mary Lucier’s 18-minute five-channel surround-sound video installation, entitled The Plains of Sweet Regret, was commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art as a part of an initiative to collect artists’ responses to the population shifts that are forcing the people of the Northern Plains to re-imagine their lives. The mixed media video installation utilizes four large video projections, two plasma screens, four loudspeakers and vintage school chairs in a darkened space to create a contemplative experience of the Great Plains. The artist traveled to selected sites in North Dakota over a period of several years, observing and recording the local landscapes, architecture, and inhabitants in such a way as to articulate the persona and drama of place in an area that is witnessing the greatest outward migration since the Great Depression. The characters in this are both real people and the elements themselves—the severe winter landscapes and the vast spaces, the languid melancholy of the domestic and industrial remains, all contrasted with the vitality of the farm and the rodeo. Within the 360 degree installation—surrounded by synchronized sound and moving images—the viewer becomes actively engaged with the contradictions of fecundity and decline, abundance and hardship, and the beauty and cruelty embodied in a rural lifestyle in the midst of change.                                                 

 

North Dakota Museum of Art website.

 

Denny Pearson—Portraits from Guatemala: Elders and Students

April 9 – June 27, 2010

Reception: April 9^th, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Sponsored by: XRX, Inc. and Xcel Energy

 

In 2003, local photographer Denny Pearson had the opportunity to travel to Guatemala as the photographer for an organization based out of Vermillion, SD, called "Sharing the Dream in Guatemala.” STDG is a non-profit organization that promotes fair trade with cooperatives and small businesses in Guatemala in order to provide fair wages and employment opportunities to low-income artisans and encourage sustainable markets for their products. STDG's craft products are handmade by Mayan artisans using many traditional techniques. The sales of these crafts provide work for the artisans, and the profits are used to support community development projects in Guatemala.

 

Through this organization Pearson was allowed access to people, homes and schools that the typical traveler doesn't usually have. His mission was to photograph some of the students for whom STDG provides scholarships and to make a visual record of other projects that STDG has been involved with. One such project—the Juanita Elder Project—provides food, medical attention, support and companionship to nearly 60 elders, mostly women who have been widowed by the Civil War that ended in 1996. In 2008, STDG asked Laura Wilson, a bi-lingual writer, to interview the elders of the Juanita Elder Project in order to capture their many stories and then, along with Pearson's photographs, create a book. The photographs in this exhibition focus on the images and stories of the students and elders that Pearson and Wilson captured. The images and stories provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of these people. 

 

Copies of the book will be available for sale through the Visual Arts Center reception desk, and Denny Pearson will be bringing some of the handicrafts from STDG to the reception for sale that evening as well.

 

Sharing the Dream in Guatemala website.

 

Envisage (Invention) = Analysis + Allegory + Affixation

J. Charles Cox Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

May 14 – July 25, 2010

Galleries D and F
Reception: May 21^st, 5:30 –7:30 p.m.

 

J. Charles Cox received a B.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of South Dakota. This exhibition will be his Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition, which is required for graduation from the University of South Dakota. 

Drawing on the rich history inherent in existing cross-cultural folklores, Cox's artwork focuses on the creation and individualization of a contemporary, mythological dramatis personae. Beginning with portraiture as a base, Cox utilizes a mixed media approach, including drawings, paintings, and prints, in order to engineer a “pantheon” of sorts. Using portraiture to juxtapose a personal identity with the ideal characters of mythos provides the artist with insight into how the individual functions within his surroundings, and Cox hopes his audience is inspired to analyze their own surroundings through a dialogue with his work.

 

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Upcoming Exhibtions in the Visual Arts Center
Keep checking back for updates.

 

 

Sara Woster: Home Is Where You Start From

May 21 – August 15, 2010

Galleries B and C

Reception: May 21^st, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

Artist and writer Sara Woster is a native of South Dakota who left the state twenty years ago. She spent ten years studying and living in Minneapolis, France and Greece, and has lived for the past ten years in New York City. She has received the Jerome Foundation Fellowship and has been published in many anthologies, literary magazines and online journals. Her paintings have the looseness of a fleeting memory—they are epic, expressionistic and laced with a delightfully edgy sense of humor. 

For the past twenty years, Woster has been writing and painting her stories of love, travel and troubles. She has filled sketchbooks and canvases with words and images about her life. In the past two years, the object of her affection has been South Dakota. She is returning to where she started from; her recent painting has focused on images of South Dakota, and she is creating stories that are centered here. Woster returned to South Dakota several times over the past year to photograph, draw and write. This exhibition will be a combination of these new works and some that were created before her travels that use images and writing appropriated from a collection of internet images, personal photos and non-fiction descriptions of South Dakota. Some recently created animated videos may also accompany these words and paintings. The works in this exhibition are all inspired by South Dakota. The artist envisions the show to be a textured, layered and complicated story that takes all of the elements of family history, painting, stories, landscapes and memories and attempts to answer the following questions: What do refugee eyes bring home? What does time do to the way things are seen? What kind of portraits and landscapes are made by someone who is seeing places and meeting people with a nostalgic set of eyes?
Artist website 

Shifts of Perception: Paintings by Michelle Anderson, Megan Dirks and Mary Laube 
June 11 – September 5, 2010

Everist Gallery

Reception: August 6^th, 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

 

Centering around the concept of shifts of perception, the paintings in this exhibition are the work of three emerging artists from Iowa City. While the artists are linked through their concepts of consciousness of space and intuitiveness of perception and their use of colorful abstraction, each artist deals with the interaction and experience of psychological and real space in different ways and with unique visual results. All of the artists view themselves as constructing realities that reflect the study of consciousness and our ways of being within social situations, space and architecture. Concepts addressed in these works include memory and imagination (Mary Laube), the spontaneity of mark-making versus a sense of place (Megan Dirks), and questions of disassociation and convergence (Michelle Anderson).

 

Artist website

 

Roger Broer

July 2 – September 26, 2010

Gallery A

Reception: September 23^rd, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

 

Roger Broer is an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation working out of Hill City, South Dakota. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Extended Fine Arts degree from Eastern Montana College and a master of arts degree from Central Washington University. He has been exhibited in over 35 one-man shows and 100 group exhibitions and has received over 50 awards in national shows. His work is included in national and international collections, including that of the Visual Arts Center of the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science.

 

Broer is a master of monotype printmaking (painting and drawing on a flat and non-absorbent surface and then pressing that painting onto paper). Broer prefers to use oil-based paints and Plexiglas and hand-burnishes his prints rather than using a printing press. Hand-burnishing allows Broer a large degree of control over how much of the paint is transferred and frees him up to create prints just about anywhere. He often adds touches of other media on top of the monotype once it’s printed.

 

Broer’s art elegantly reflects his traditional Native American heritage within the sophisticated context of contemporary American art. His work is a manifestation of his consideration of the elements surrounding him in nature and the relationships and interconnectedness of all things, as well as our own limited ability to understand these relationships and their full significance and meaning. Broer often incorporates images of buffalo, crows, wolves and Native American figures into his work, and the monotype process suits the spiritual and symbolic nature of his subjects well. The process forces the artist to work quickly, and the resultant energy and decisiveness of hand imbues his subjects with immediacy, gravity and a dreamlike otherworldliness.

 

Artist website: www.lakotart.com

Permanent Collection Exhibition (title and content TBA)

July 30 – September 17, 2010

Gallery F

 

 

DISCONNECT: Conceptual Works by John Phillip Davis and Chris Vance

Genus: Rush to Omega (John Phillip Davis)

The Awful Truth (Chris Vance)

September 10 – December 5, 2010

Everist Gallery

 

This two-person exhibition features Des Moines friends and artists John Phillip Davis and Chris Vance. They will present abstract paintings (and sculptures) that are approached through different methodologies. The artists are working together to create and select works that will be complementary to each other’s for this two-person exhibition

 

Artist Statement: John Phillip Davis(website: www.johnphillipdavis.com)

A continuum. The point at which deliberate order and reactive composition come together. The place where aestheticism meets spontaneous textural muscularity.

 

Charged by relational and discordant influences and polarities, the thrust is to pool these diverse energies and disciplines to build up and dismantle them at will, thereby creating new relationships among them. Art has a design.

 

The result is an expression that elevates both tendencies by giving presence to the planned and the primal, the logical and visceral mind. The work is therefore not reduced to materials, color, scale or format but rather the philosophical relationship between chaos and control. Push and pull. Heavy and faint. Delicate and harsh. This is the constant ingredient. Chaos has a design.

 

As it relates to the viewer, my art is meant to provide all of the initial breadth of visual information, depth of compositional drama and the verisimilitude of style and environmental completeness from which the viewer can then extrapolate a personal meaning. The art is non-objective but has an agenda. The emotive is implied but perceived and exercised individually. A continuum, the point at which the work transforms after creation.

 

Artist Statement: Chris Vance (website: www.chrisvanceart.com)

Art is my diary. Throughout time, art has marked place and time. My work is the expression of daily events that form ideas and transform the canvases. I don’t attempt to settle the piece before paint hits the canvas. I like the canvas to tell me what it needs in the form of line and color. I look at composition and balance, and my feelings drive the piece on a subconscious level.

 

Ideas are an internal ingestion and the art is the medium of the expression. Understanding my work is to understand me as a person. Evolution in the paintings shows how small ideas turned into big ideas and those ideas back from big to small. The smallest things in life strike ideas that fuel my work in progression.

Both Sides of the River: Mel Spinar Retrospective Exhibition

August 20 – November 14, 2010

Galleries B and C

 

This exhibition, produced by the University of South Dakota and supported by South Dakota State University, celebrates the life and work of Mel Spinar. Spinar was born and raised in South Dakota, attended undergraduate school at Dakota Wesleyan University and did his graduate studies at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He taught art at Sioux Falls College (now the University of Sioux Falls), at the Civic Fine Arts Center (now the Visual Arts Center of the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science) and at South Dakota State University. He has been exhibited widely and is included in many public and private collections across the state. He is highly esteemed as both artist and art educator. Mel Spinar's retrospective exhibition chronicles a personal artistic journey of discovery and development. The artworks presented can be roughly broken down into six time-lines that mirror a never-ending search for purpose and meaning in the artist's life.

 

Eric Madsen: Carlyle’s Tools

October 1, 2010 – January 2, 2011

Gallery A

In a design career that has spanned nearly 40 years, Eric Madsen has specialized in all aspects of corporate identity and brand development, marketing and capability materials, magazines and book design for clients in the United States, Europe and Japan. His graphic design work has been recognized nationally and internationally. He is a past member of the national Board of Directors of the AIGA, the professional association for design.

 

The drawings in graphite and watercolor in this series are depictions of the treasured and well-worn tools of Madsen’s late father-in-law, Carlyle Steinke. Steinke's interest in tools and woodworking came naturally because his family heritage included blacksmiths, furniture-makers, carpenters and plumbers (Steinke himself was a mechanical engineering graduate of the University of Wisconsin). Many of the tools he used were handed down to him by his father and grandfather, and he took pride in teaching his children and grandchildren to use them properly. Madsen selected tools that Steinke used often and that Madsen thought had both character and history. The exhibition includes five of the original tools on display adjacent to their likenesses by Madsen.

 

Artist website: www.ericmadsen.com


Project 35

October 2010 – January 2012

Gallery D

 

For this exhibition, presented by Independent Curators International and in celebration of iCI's 35th anniversary in 2010, 35 leading curators from all over the world were each invited to select one artist's video, which they think is important and should be seen by audiences across the globe now. Project 35will be compiled onto a series of DVDs with eight to nine works in each of the four chapters; a new chapter will be distributed every three months, to provide the Visual Arts Center with new and engaging contemporary video work throughout one full year.

 

The series will offer a time capsule of historic and contemporary works that curators perceive as relevant to today. Project 35will show a diversity of approaches to making video as well as call attention to the contemporary issues that artists are addressing in their practice.

Project 35 recalls the founding initiatives of iCI.  It was 35 years ago that iCI organized its very first exhibition, a seminal survey of video art titled Video Art USA, for the São Paulo Biennial.  It presented works by artists Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Keith Sonnier, Steina Vasulka, and Bill Viola, among others. These artists were pioneers working in a medium that was just beginning to gain traction in the field of contemporary art, and ICI proved to be an early and committed proponent of it.  The international scope of ICI was clearly indicated in this first exhibition, which went on touring four more countries across Latin America.  With Project 35, ICI further draws from its extensive international network of curators formed over the past 35 years to organize a new exhibition of international video art and support new collaborations between curators, artists and exhibition spaces on national and international platforms.

Each DVD will be accompanied by a pdf with details about each video and a short introduction to each work by the selecting curator.

 

Curators include:

Mai Abu ElDahab (Egypt/Belgium), Ruth Auerbach (Venezuela), Nicolas Bourriaud (France), Zoe Butt (Australia/Vietnam), Yane Calovski (Macedonia), Lee Weng Choy (Singapore), Joselina Cruz (Philippines), Charles Esche (UK/Netherlands), Lauri Firstenberg (U.S.), Alexie Glass-Kantor (Australia), Anthony Huberman (U.S.), Mami Kataoka (Japan/UK), Constance Lewallen (U.S.), Lu Jie (China), Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania/France), Chus Martinez (Spain), Deeksha Nath (India), Simon Njami (Cameroon/France), Hans Ulrich Obrist (Switzerland/UK), José Roca (Colombia), Bisi Silva (Nigeria), Franklin Sirmans (U.S.), Kathryn Smith (South Africa), Susan Sollins (U.S.), and more…

 

Project 35 webpage:

www.iciexhibitions.org/index.php/site/exhibitions/project_35/