Exhibition Catalogues
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Item Critical Voices: Selections from the Hall Collection(Oakland University, 2022-09-09) Barnes, Leo; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from foreword by Leo Barnes: My relationship with the Hall Art Foundation developed over the five years I worked there from 2012 to 2017. The artworks, collected by Andrew and Christine Hall, present a unique index of the best contemporary art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The collection, heavily infused in particular with the work of German and American artists, is a fascinating entrée into the contemporary visual arts in both cultures.Item SRA: Stimulus Response Affect(Oakland University, 2015-10-16) Whitehead, Vagner; Ludwig, ColleenExcerpt from introduction by Vagner M. Whitehead: Stimulus Response Affect is an exhibition that explores the varied ways in which artists create, react, engage and understand the world around them. This process of receiving, decoding and potentially rejecting information, feelings or other data by the artists becomes further mirrored, translated or distorted by the gestures and feedback from the participating audience. The selected artworks specifically engage the human body through sensorial, perceptual, chronological and spatial changes, while considering an array of contemporary issues.Item The Body Metonymic: International Contemporary Sculpture(Oakland University, 2014-01-11) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Contemporary sculpture has the immediate, visceral quality to assert itself in ways that mediated art forms, like video or painting, cannot because the sculptural object’s signification is metonymic - in other words, it holds the equivalency of the image or entity depicted, embodied in the presence of the materials of its fabrication.Item Shadows of the Invisible(Oakland University, 2014-10-11) Baillargeon, Claude; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Claude Baillargeon: Shadows of the Invisible explores the ability of contemporary photography to reveal what is invisible to the naked eye. Often echoing the conflation of science and art that shaped early photography, the current preoccupation with the unseen manifests itself in remarkable fashions ranging from the poetics of evocation to the dread of the unknown.Item Your Very Own Paradise(Oakland University, 2019-09-07) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Paradise exists in the mind’s eye. To begin to imagine, we have to free ourselves for a moment from the frame of our everyday lives and rise above to something better than reality. We have to give ourselves encouragement to daydream. Our goals have to be open to the possibility of discovery. We must believe anything is possible and shed any feelings of absurdity and guilt associated with the monotony of a typical day.Item Image and the Photographic Allusion(Oakland University, 2022-01-14) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: All photography is staged. Every image is objectified, yet certain images possess something indisputably allusive, undirected, inexplicit and enigmatic. The desirable ineffaceability of an indirect allusion, with all its implied ambiguity, is invariably an unnamable quintessence. Our most poignant connection to such photographic paradoxes, which have the power to change our social consciousness, occupies part of our thinking mind far away from the bluntness of a direct index of a particular thing or narrative. To enter the unrestricted territory of meditative intimations, the artist must convey the information without directly unveiling it. This lies at the heart of this exhibition: the revelation sans the reveal.Item Appliance | Nolan Simon(Oakland University, 2004-10-16)Excerpt from essay/interview: Simon's work encompasses the practical life of operating, of driving, of using electrical devices, of being surrounded by sprayed, machined finishes and of the faceless facades of machines that evoke nothing but efficiency and ease. The eclectic epistemology of these works fuses the Minimalist aesthetics of artists like Donald Judd, the factory ethos of contemporary design and the anodyne whiteness of Formica.Item Communicable Consumption | Phaedra Robinson(Oakland University, 2005-03-15) Goody, DickExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Above all, Robinson is interested in the seminal properties of substances, and in the monolithic thing, the single salient idea that will reveal everything - as she puts it, "the macrocosm in the microcosm." She talks about blood and milk as being seminal fluids - simple yet complex. Simplicity and complexity fascinate her. All the paradoxes and issues embodied in interpretations of what these two liquids can incite -the red and white - keep Robinson's imagination energized.Item The Flowers Of Insomnia & other photographs: a retrospective by Rob Kangas(Oakland University, 2004-01-09) Goody, DickExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: The Flowers of Insomnia Series, Kangas's panoramic photographs, which he began in the late 1980s, are passages. As we read them, our eyes travel across the time and space of the photograph, recording the surface, with its geometry and abstractions, in a way that is different from the perception of a single iconic image. It is this effect, this passage, which is not unlike the "passage effect" in Duchamp's paintings Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2 or The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride (both 1912), that makes these works so unusual and unique.Item Mini Mall: Faux Home Range(Oakland University, 2002-09-07) Goody, Dick; Snadden, Peter; Wardle, PiersItem Wendy Roberts | Paintings(Oakland University, 2004-10-16) Goody, Dick; Roberts, WendyExcerpt from essay/interview with the artist: Leaving no stone unturned, I asked Roberts to summarize her work. She said: "Rain on the gunwales of a slow-gliding wooden canoe."Item Secret Life of Suburbia | Paintings by Deborah Sukenic(Oakland University, 2004-09-11) Goody, DickExcerpt from essay: Deborah Sukenic's paintings expose the fragile psychology of suburbia. Good art is seldom spawned from contentment and the restlessness in Sukenic's work oozes up through cracks, spreading across the foreground and forecourts of her bleak suburban piazzas. Neither landscapes nor genre scenes, these paintings explore the fragile relationship between the remembered and the observed delving into the artist's memory through painting. The psychological realm explored in her work is the not so pristine, entropy ridden architectural domicile unit. Sukenic's fatigued houses and interiors invite inquisition. Perhaps she wants us to dig, and dig deeper - archeologically that is - to deconstruct with Freudian trowel and brush to find out what went awry because in her version of suburbia all is not always well.Item Susan Goethel Campbell | Field Guide(Oakland University, 2015-01-10) Goody, Dick; Corso, John J.; Campbell, Susan Geothal; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from artist's statement: My work is a hybrid between landscape and environment. In one sense, it has evolved right out of the Romantic tradition following Goethe’s claim that the landscape painter should pay greater attention to the specifics of the natural world. Although I am not a painter, the formalist, aesthetic part of me has focused on knowing the dynamic effects of landscape so that I can better understand and represent global environments. This includes the documentation of human agency both overhead and underfoot.Item Sally Schluter Tardella | Memory Palace(Oakland University, 2014-09-06) Goody, Dick; Corso, John J.Excerpt from Note form the curator: With these new bodies of work, Schluter Tardella offers two versions of memory. The paintings are declarative. They present a one-time version of events – an ossuary of recollections rendered down into a primary painterly structure. Her books, on the other hand, are more open-ended; their catacomb-like progress being labyrinthine, serpentine and sequentialItem Susan E. Evans | Kaiho(Oakland University, 2014-09-06) Goody, Dick; Corso, John J.Introduction: Kaiho is a Finnish word that does not directly translate into English. Kaiho is a state of hopeless, melancholic and/or nostalgic longing for something that is missing or gone. Kaiho is a deep emptiness where profound feelings, both happiness and sadness, exist simultaneously.Item Lalla Essaydi: Writing Femininity, Writing Pleasure(Oakland University, 2013-10-13) Corso, John J.; Doyle, AllanExcerpt from essay by John J. Corso: This exhibition brings together 20 large-scale photographic works, made from 2003 to 2012 and spanning five major bodies of work. In the earliest body of work, Converging Territories, Essaydi establishes the primary conditions of her aesthetic investigations: she photographs women elaborately adorned in henna script within exquisitely ornamented interiors. These works highlight the importance of writing in the creation of the self and of femininity.Item Idealizing the Imaginary: Illusion and Invention in Contemporary Painting(Oakland University, 2012-01-14) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Central to the practice of the painters in this exhibition is the expansion of the imaginary as the primary source of their compositions, and, as such, their practice is rooted in invention and the mind’s eye.Item The Roving Eye: Aura and the Contemporary Portrait(Oakland University, 2013-01-12) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Dick Goody: This exhibition explores the work of international contemporary artists (temporarily or permanently) fixated with portraiture. It considers: the sitter (object), the artist (depicter) and the viewer (subject). By degrees, these three things are inextricably linked; but it is the artist and the object that she or he renders that takes precedence in the sense that the viewer’s role is not active in the making of the work.Item Who Were They Then(Oakland University, 2018-10-20) Goody, Dick; Lashbrook, Debra; Barrie, Morgan; Harris, Carole; Rosas, Mel; Snider, Clinton; Tillman, BryantExcerpt from introduction: When we think about the past, we see it as a resource to whom we become. Along with our individuality, we inherit a prescribed set of attributes from our parents and those before. Whether cultural, economic, or sociopolitical, our heritage and locality loom large in our personal identities. As we grow and develop, these traits begin to meld with our own experiences and these outcomes result in the choices that we make. With artists, the evidence of these decisions and subsequent maturity can often be seen in their oeuvre. This exhibition asks both who are they now and who were they then?Item James Johnson: I Come from a Serious Place(Oakland University, 2012-10-20) VanderKaay, Cody; Lashbrook, DebraExcerpt from essay by Cody VanderKaay: James Johnson’s artwork encourages the viewer to construct and examine personalized narratives of identity, impulse, ownership and self-determination. With motives likened to that of a magician, he is continually revealing and concealing his method of operation. In spite of these clever manipulations, the behind-the-scenes accoutrements invert newly formed notions and undo guises.