Kirsten Hassenfeld's elaborate paper sculptures draw on the artist's love of ornamentation and find power through her painstaking craftsmanship. The product of hundreds of hours of cutting, folding, rolling and coiling, her works have taken the form of jewels and luxury goods, ornaments and vases, and most recently trees and flowers. The Bell Gallery exhibition includes two bodies of work: Blueware, new works that combine decorative ceramics and nature, and Dans la Lune, a fanciful installation of ornate hanging sculpture that was commissioned in 2007 by the Rice Art Gallery, Houston, TX.
Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Blueware, 2009
Inappropriate Covers includes multi-media works by eleven established and emerging artists, chosen for the aesthetic tensions they generate through acts of appropriation, reconfiguration, and erasure. Works in the exhibition range from the refined to the outrageous. Jim Campbell's elegant sculptures muse on memory and loss: the artist's own heatbeat and breath set the frequency of layers of fog that appears on a glass, covering and uncovering photographs of his parents. At the other end of the specturm is Kelly Heaton's Live Pelt. Heaton refers to the cloak, which is made from sixty-four used Tickle Me Elmo dolls purchased on E-bay, as her "substitute lover." In addition to Campbell and Heaton, artists participating in the exhibition are Brian Dettmer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Marclay, L. Amelia Raley, Ted Riederer, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Syjuco, John Oswald, and Mark Wallinger.
Curated by Braxton Soderman and Justin Katko
image: Kelly Heaton, Live Pelt–Portrait of the Fashionista, 2003
Scavengers explores the unique approaches of seven artists to the essentially material and tactile nature of sculpture. In order to highlight the materiality of their medium, and to reframe conventional understandings of it, each of these sculptors has brought the raw substance of their work, quite literally, to the surface. By drawing on found objects and scavenged, everyday materials, they have attempted to focus the viewer's experience on the substantive composition of their work as much as, and sometimes more than, its form. In their incorporation of both non-traditional sculptural elements and commonplace industrial elements, these works go beyond mere techniques of abstraction and challenge the autonomy of form as the conveyor of meaning. Scavengers is the drawn from the permanent collection and includes work by Lee Bontecou, Joseph Cornell, Georg Herold, Dieter Roth, Creighton Michael, Italo Scanga, and Hannah Wilke.
Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: installation view with George Herold, Promise, in foreground, and works by Hannah Wilke, Italo Scanga, and Lee Bontecou
The David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art present the 29th annual Student Exhibition, juried by Berin Golonu, an independent curator from New York, and Providence artist Amy Lovera. Artists included in this year’s exhibition are Sarah Abarbanel, Olutade Abidoye, Megan Billman, Anne Blazejack, Galen Broderick, Brittaney Check & Andrew Seiden, Jessica Chermayeff, Jesse Cohn, Alexandra Corrigan, Sara D’Apolito-Dworkin, Danielle DesBordes, Bart Dessaint, Bret Ecker, Quinn Fenlon, Emily Garfield, Shane Farrell, Hilary Fischer-Groban, Drew Foster, Pik-Shuen Fung, Brooke Hair, David Hernandez, Gillian Lang, Jungmin Lee, Geddes Levenson, Emily Martin, Alexa Morita, Anne Oram, Erica Palmiter, Phillippa Pitts, Talia Rozensher, Claire Russo, Peter N. Scheidt, Hannah Singer, Tyrell Skeet, Zachary A. Smith, Lydia Stein, John Szymanski, Christina Wang, Aaron Weinstein, and Sabine Zimmer.
image: Aaron Weinstein, Abstraction of Beetle Horn 1, 2009
The Bell Gallery presents a solo-exhibition of Annabel Daou, a Lebanese-born and New York-based artist. Entitled KNOT, the three-part exhibition consists of twelve notebooks with a continuously drawn line that are laid out on a table much like a map; a site-specific wall drawing that transcribes the lines of the notebooks into the gallery space; and a twelve-fold accordian brochure that charts the notebook drawings into a single line. The title KNOT alludes to an inherent reversibility between the text and image, reading and seeing, reflection and experience, creation and interpretation.The project is a collaboration between the artist and the writer David Markus, in which twelve words chosen by Markus — aporia sacrifice muse island place game object trauma donimation distance that — serve as guidelines for Daou's visual exploration of linguistic meaning.
Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: detail of wall drawing
Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Dorothy Hamill
The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye is a mid-career survey of the work of sculptor Elizabeth King. King makes meticulously crafted objects that raise questions about life and artifice, and the nature of being. Her uncanny self-portraits, articulated arms, artificial eyes, and tissue samples are created in a range of natural materials: from porcelain, wood, bronze, and basalt to kidskin, and human hair and eye lashes. The exhibition includes 65 sculptures, film animations, installation pieces, drawings, and photographs produced since the late 1970s. Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye was organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia.
image: Pupil, 1987-90
Seventeen years after the end of the Soviet Union, Views and Re-Views invites a post-Cold War assessment of Soviet graphic arts. The exhibition suggests that artistic merit may be found in art in the service of political belief and subject to state regulation and that there is a range of stylistic diversity within work that is too often simply (and dismissively) characterized as Socialist Realism. Viewers may also note that with the passage of time it has become possible to see that not all criticisms of the West by Soviet artists are completely spurious or inauthentic. Views and Re-Views includes posters, cartoons, photomontages, and postcards spanning more than six decades, from the time of the Russian Civil War (1918–21) into the late Soviet period. The exhibition includes well-known Soviet graphic works, by such artists as Viktor Deni, Dmitri Moor, El Lissitsky, and Gustav Klutsis, as well as lesser-known, but equally compelling works by the Kukryniksy (a three-artist collaborative), Alexander Zhitomirsky, and others. Drawn from an extensive private collection of Soviet propaganda, the exhibition includes more than 160 images.
Co-curated by Abbott Gleason and Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Alexander Zhitomirsky, Hysterical War Drummer, 1948
The artists included in Self and Others explore their identity in relationship to others, i.e. family, friends, or society. Burke and Sage approach the self through family; Matthew focuses on ethnicity; Underhill and Burke examine gender; Tibbs compares her child and adult selves; and Lovera posits a fictionalized self as girl-adventurer, à la Pippi Longstocking.
Curated by Jo-Ann Conklin
image: Jesse Burke, from Masculinity, 2005-2007
We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask is a project by Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born artist who lives and works in New York. Focusing on the history of car bombings in the Lebanese wars, the project includes a 17-minutes long video and a series of 43 photographs. The allusive title, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask, refers to the impossibility of prognosis, less in terms of weather conditions, and more in terms of the future historical, geopolitical, and cultural conditions.
Raad has created a work specifically for the List Art Center lobby. The large four-part mural depicts the post 9/11 sociopolitical landscape. The background of each wall of the lobby is painted in a different shade of blue, referencing the sky over New York on September 11, 2001. The rough, sketchy drawings are digitally manipulated courtroom drawings that the artist compiled for a number of years after 9/11, left intentionally unfinished to remain ambiguous in origin and reference.
Curated by Vesela Sretenovic
image: Proposal for wall drawing
The 28th annual juried Student Exhibition is sponsored by the Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art. Murray McMillan and Anne Tait served as jurors. Both artists teach at Roger Williams University in Bristol. The exhibition is open to all Brown students. It provides students with the valuable experience of showing their work within a professional setting, while at the same time providing the Brown and Providence communities an opportunity to view works by talented young artists. Artists in this year’s exhibition are Dara Bayer, Megan Billman, Anne Blazejack, Cody L. Campanie, Cheih Chin Chiang, Jesse Cohn, Thomas Dahlberg, Sara D’Apolito Dworkin, Lauren Engel, Sarah Faux, Hilary Fischer-Groban, Elizabeth Fisher, Jay Gidwitz, Brooke Hair, Melissa Henry, Henry G. Lee, Katrina Lencek-Inagaki, David Lloyd, Kelly Ma, Alice Malone, Mary MacGill, Sarah Meiklejohn, Rachel Moranis, Sophia Narrett, Stephen Neidich, Rebecca Nelson, Alice Nystrom, Erica Palmiter, Kim Perley, Alex Rosenbaum, Victoria Roth, Malika Rubin-Davis, David Watson Sobel, Lydia Stein, John Szymanski, Jessica Taylor, Miho Tomimasu, Mark Tumiski, Paul Wallace, Christina Wang, Aaron Weinstein, and Hannah Wohl.
image: Megan Billman