Katie Tuss Interviews Anne Ellegood

Today is the last day left if you don’t want to miss the Hirshhorn Museum’s current exhibition Refract, Reflect, Project: Light Works from the Collection, which is on display through this Sunday, April 8, 2007. Katie Tuss recently spoke with Hirshhorn Associate Curator Anne Ellegood, who organized the exhibition, about the seductive nature of light and some of the highlights in the current show.

Katie Tuss: The show covers light works from 1959 to the present and numerous art movements are represented. How is the use of light developing differently than painting and sculpture?


Anne Ellegood: Well I think that one thing that happens, and that has been happening for several decades, is that contemporary artists don’t feel like their work needs to be rooted in illusion or representation. Often times they want to remove that intermediate step, so that whatever they are making has a direct relationship to the material. Spencer Finch’s piece Cloud H20 talks about this. He doesn’t want to make a painting of the sky. To him it has already been done, and done very well. He wants to create something more direct. And light does that, even if it is artificial light. You may or may not think of a cloud and it doesn’t really matter, but you are probably going to have some sense of the kind of feeling you have when you look at a cloud.

KT: Yeah, that piece almost moves.

AE: Actually it does physically move with wind currents in the gallery. If there are enough people in the space, it will respond. The installation isn’t rigid.

KT: What are the opportunities for using light moving forward?

AE: With young artists, and what I have noticed with Olafur Eliasson and Ivan Navarro, they want a capacity for intimacy with an object and to establish a type of familiarity with the object, but easily weave in historical, social, and scientific aspects as well. They aren’t interested in completely formal investigation like Dan Flavin. They want to add back in a kind of content, but are still enamored with the directness of the light as a material.

KT: In Navarro’s piece Flashlight: I’m not from here, I’m not from there, is that a random man or the artist in the accompanying video, pushing the wheelbarrow made of fluorescent light tubes?

AE: It is a friend of the artist.

KT: There is a sense of intimacy the man has with the wheelbarrow as he physically pushes it around and this piece is immediately juxtaposed in the first room of the exhibition with Flavin’s “monument” for V. Tatlin.

AE: It is really great that we have the opportunity to put the Flavin with a work like Navarro’s. These are two artists with totally different backgrounds and different agendas, but Navarro’s generation is very aware of Flavin’s generation. Navarro’s piece is built from his knowledge of art history, with a desire to acknowledge his own background, life, preoccupations, and concerns. He has picked up on Flavin and given it his own twist. It is exciting that we have the ability to show the two works side by side. We are trying to do more of this so that histories don’t look like they are operating separately.

KT: It is helpful to know the precedence and then actually be able to see the precedence.

AE: If you pick up neon, you have to grapple with Flavin. It makes you think about how materials shift and your comfort with them as an audience. When Flavin was starting out with fluorescents, it was pretty radical. You didn’t use industrially produced elements in your artwork. We don’t think of this as radical anymore. For Navarro it isn’t radical. It becomes a conversation literally about power in a more ideological sense.

Southworth and Sislen open today

Home and Abroad: Two New Views, a photography exhibit featuring new works by the very talented Barbara Southworth - titled “Homelands," the show revisits many of her favorite streams and marine sites, from Virginia to Maine, but rather than her usual panoramic format, she approaches these scenes with a subtly altered perspective and Alan Sislen's “Tuscany in Shades of Gray." After numerous trips to this beautiful area, instead of his usual color interpretation, Sislen explores the infrared spectrum (one of myu favorite genres of B&W photography) to capture the graphic beauty of this land.

Opening today from 3-5 PM at Multiple Exposures Gallery, in gallery 312 of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. Through May 7, 2007.

First Fridays at Philly and DC

Projects Gallery in Philly presents Tom Judd’s solo exhibition "The New World." This exhibition features Judd’s new work, including a 6 x 15 foot painting entitled “The New World." The exhibition opens with a First Friday artist reception April 6th from 5-9 p.m. and a Second Thursday reception April 12th, 5-9 p.m., and continues through April 29th.

In DC, as usual, the Dupont Circle Galleries will also have their first Friday openings and extended hours.

Airborne again today and returning home. More later...

Tortillism

Painter Joe Bravo is raising eyebrows with his current exhibit at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Los Angeles because Bravo paints on tortillas.

His tortilla paintings sell for as much as $1,800.

No truth to the rumor that a new series of pico de gallo installations are forthcoming.

MacO'Sullivan?

What's it with Washington Post art critics wanting to wear kilts? First Blake Gopnik wants to be a MacGopnik and now I get the below image showing WaPo art critic Michael O'Sullivan.


Seen here, Michael O'Sullivan (on the left getting ready to photograph the gent wearing the utilikilt) contemplates the possibilty of adding a utilikilt to his DC wardrobe.

It's a rare thing

For DC area TV stations to pay any attention to the visual arts, and thus we applaud the fact that tomorrow morning (Thursday April 5) Fox 5 Morning News will be broadcasting the morning news from the Washington Glass School.

From 6 am to 9 am, reporter Tony Perkins will be doing live segments where Tony tries his hand at new skills. Tony is scheduled to make cast glass awards, lampwork, draw with glass powder, and try other glass related workings with the gang at the Washington Glass School.