About the Project:

Reconstruction: An Honors Painting and Drawing Student Collaboration

January 23 - January 27
William and Nancy Oliver Gallery
Reception: Friday, January 27. 7-9 pm.

In Reconstruction, we probe entropy as a visual structure by challenging the "lowest common denominator" principle. The goal is to create a work that expands rather than contracts vision, ideas, and thought. The collaboration will take place during the entire week in Oliver Gallery, and will end with the reception on Friday night.

By displacing landscape elements in a gallery context, Robert Smithson both destabilized and reconstructed a fixed sense of place. His work combined the powerful presence of natural elements such as sand and trees with mirrors, shelving and the gallery showcase to highlight the human desire to tame and order. It overlaid aesthetic ideals such as the picturesque that affirmed the beauty of ruins within landscape, with the second Law of Thermodynamics, which demonstrates how entropy integrates isolated systems, in his earthworks and displacements. In so doing he reconstructed an aesthetic almost rude in its grounding of physical presence.

“Reconstruction” replaces the solitary artist with the team. The transformation of a pristine gallery into painterly, pictorial space begins with the individual approaches of each artist on the team. As the work evolves over the week’s duration, their unique approaches become absorbed within alternative working methods, generating a collective aesthetic that transcends individual isolation. The resulting work reconstructs painting to encompass multiple authors, expanding the hybrid aesthetics in work by David Salle, Sigmar Polke, Laura Owens and Lari Pittman and others within a visual foundation.

Artists:

Monica Bradley
Steven Cochrane
Elisabeth Condon
Danielle Conkling
Cristina Garcia
Chad Harmon
Kristina Hultkrantz
Cynthia Norwood
Stacey Simmons
Jordan Star-Bochicchio
Nina Stolz
Murielle White