Past Exhibitions: Summer 2006

The Real (Art) World:
5 Curators, 5 Artists,
1 Museum

Adapting its title from the popular MTV program, this show offers five unique views of what’s “real” in the art world today. The organizers are five first-time curators who, in conjunction with American University Museum Director and Curator Jack Rasmussen's Curatorial Practice Course, each chose and worked with an artist to make a solo presentation.

Roxana Martin, an AU alum (SPA/MPA ‘82) and docent at the American University Museum currently living in Bethesda, Md., will be presenting a sculpture installation by Genna Watson, Bones of the Tiger/Knitting Warm Garments. Watson’s installation consists of four ladders juxtaposed with four sculptural elements and an androgynous figure made of wire mesh covered with an array of media. Watson covers the floor with tar paper where lines of talc and chalk form a matrix creating a unified space. A well known sculptor in the Washington, D.C. area, Watson’s work deals with issues of mortality.

Bernard Birnbaum, an American University undergraduate student from Rochester, N.Y., will be presenting works of blown glass by Dave D’Orio. D’Orio has created a connected series of blown glass vessels specifically for The Real (Art) World. The series embodies his ideas of modern currents within the art world. D’Orio has been working with glass for a number of years and is currently based in the Washington, D.C. area.

Daniela Rutigliano, an American University graduate student from Boonton, N.J., will be presenting an Ariel Goldberg photography project called Watching Television. This series of large format, color photographs documents several television viewers, revealing how people react, watch and feel when they are in front of television screens. Goldberg is a New York City based poet and photographer who believes that her role as an artist is to “conduct social experiments.”

Nicole Ferdinando, a Catholic University undergraduate student from Staten Island, N.Y., will be presenting recent works by Marie Ringwald. Ringwald uses the simple architectural language of buildings such as warehouses, factories and farm houses, as a source of inspiration for her work. Her works of sculptural reliefs and free standing pieces are made out of wood, rubber, glass and sheet metals – the same materials as her sources of inspiration. Rural by nature, these works offer a temporal escape from the hum of city living, particularly for Ringwald, a Washington-based artist.

Meg Ferris, an American University graduate student from Wilmington, Del., will be presenting five works of ink and acrylic on silk by Jiha Moon. Moon’s pieces focus on works of nature and landscape that juxtapose traditional Korean and contemporary American symbols, images and colors, creating works that are familiar, yet completely unexpected. Trained in her native Seoul, Korea as well as in the United States, Moon is currently a resident of Atlanta, Ga.

See AU Weekly for more about the exhibition and the Curatorial Practice course.

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Made in Oakland by Jim Melchert

In a rare solo showing of Jim Melchert's art on the East Coast, this central figure in the San Francisco Bay Area's ceramic arts movement presents a new group of ceramic tile installations, dated 2003-2005, featuring fresh variations on the subtly atmospheric, often feathery, sometimes accidental compositions he has recently produced. These conceptually driven pieces various suggest photography, philosophy and Asian art. Melchert (b.1930), influenced by ceramic pioneer Peter Voulkos in the 1960s, eventually set his own goal of "getting beyond making objects" to create forms and images removed from any obvious association with a pottery studio.

 

 

 

Makoto Fujimura:
Water Flames and Zero Summer

Sumptuous large-scale abstractions by this Boston-born, New York–based painter, 45, fuse the open, broadly gestural approach of American color-field painting with calligraphic references to nature, revealing the artist's interpretation of the Nihonga tradition of his ancestors, which he studied in Japan. Long exhibited and collected in Japan, Fujimura's work began being shown in the United States in the 1990s, including several solo gallery shows in New York shortly after he returned here for good.

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