Archive for February, 2010
Kaidi Dunstan’s first show took place some 20 years ago, in a small Deloney Street gallery. In a matter of hours, the exhibit was close to sold out. Her first collection of oil paintings, a grouping of still lifes and portrayals of the female human figure were so masterfully painted as to remind us of the great Post Impressionists Gauguin and Cezanne. Dunstan’s compositions were inspired by some of the former’s paintings of Tahitian women, and a small study of a bowl of cherries could have been snatched from the latter’s studio. Dunstan displayed, with her premiere show, a genius for mixing and applying paint. Evident, too, was an affinity for capturing exotic color and patterns.
Transported, Dunstan’s first Jackson show in some years, opened February 22 at the Tayloe Piggott Gallery. An opening reception takes place Friday, February 26, and the exhibit remains up through April 17.
Dunstan currently lives in London. Her life, recently touched by personal tragedy,—she lost her husband to cancer—remains enigmatic to the public at large. Though Dunstan’s work is contemporary and her colors echo those of the Expressionists, her work can be likened to Kiki Smith’s “Victorian” artistic interpretation of mourning. Dunstan continues to work on the human figure, but her work has become almost completely abstract. Faces and human forms are transparent and Dunstan’s paintings are marked by overlapping lines and mosaics of color. Structurally, she’s turned her paintings inside out. They look as if they were complicated to create, and they are. Dunstan uses transfer paper as a material on which to sketch, then transfers that drawing to another surface like canvas or paper. She can use her original image over and over, and so creates multiple layers of the same image in a single work.
Often, Dunstan’s forms seem to be dissolving before our eyes.
“The human figure holds an enduring fascination for me providing both oddness and mystery,” says Dunstan. She has incorporated media images of daily disasters into recent work, and is otherwise taking materials from the world at large into the maze of her compositions. Through the imposed mystery and hints of grief emerge works that, with their bow to biology and minutiae, speak of teeming life.
The large nude double-portrait I purchased at Dunstan’s first show remains the centerpiece of my own little art collection. And to this day, it’s often mistaken for a Gauguin by those seeing the painting for the first time.
Altamira Fine Art continues its ascent by adding yet another new artist to its roster: Marshall Noice. Some years ago I wrote about Noice for Planet Jackson Hole. The column went something like this:
Noice, who lives and paints in Kallispell, Montana, is a nationally noted artist whose works are part of many prestigious collections. However, the prize he holds most dear comes from the Blackfeet Nation, which, in 1987, honored Noice with a name-giving ceremony. Medicine man George Kicking Woman, who saw Noice’s name in a vision, gave the artist a Blackfeet name: “E-Kah-She-Mah-Kin.”
I don’t know the translation, but I do know that Noice began his artistic career as a photographer. The work taught him about light. In fact, Noice was Ansel Adams’ assistant during the summer of 1977, and the experience gave birth to Noice’s love of landscape.
“I have sometimes wondered if I live here because of the work I do, or if I do the work because I live here,” muses Noice. “An interesting question without an answer. I learned how to see light from Ansel Adams. He was a great teacher. I really learned how to recognize landscapes. I feel that my experience in photography has helped me to develop a heightened sensitivity towards landscapes.”
Noice’s work also has to be influenced by Fauvism. For the Fauves, color is 
TOUT. It is applied furiously, without restraint, and it is wholly interpretive.
Art history lesson alert!
“Fauvism” refers to a period in art history having its genesis in 1905, when French painter Henri Matisse and his buddies Andre Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Raoul Dufy, and Georges Braque first displayed new paintings drenched with color; huge, vast masses of unbroken, emotional, explosive color. These painters and others were given the nickname “Les Fauves,” –the Wild Beasts. Upon seeing the collection of wildly colorful paintings surrounding a comparatively run-of-the-mill sculpture, unveiled for the first time at the 1905 Paris Salon d’Automme, French art critic Louis Vauxcelles remarked that “it was like a Donatello ‘parmi les fauves’”-among the wild beasts.
Wildlife art. Wild Beasts. Sense a century-old connection here?
Contemporary Western Art is in no way disconnected from art history’s great movements; it descends from many masters and traditions. Artists in the West articulate landscape and are paying homage to light, color, and “the shapes of things,” as artists always have.
In addition to Trio house artist Lee Carlman Riddell hosting a painting workshop in Tuscany, her gallery partner Kathryn Mapes Turner has said “yes” to an invitation to exhibit her work alongside those of Michigan painter John Felsing.
The two artists plan a joint exhibition at Altamira Fine 
Art, where Felsing is represented. The show runs March 11-13, kicking off with an artist’s reception on Thursday, March 11, 5-7 pm, at Altamira, in Jackson.
The show does not signal any change in Turner’s affiliation with Trio Fine Art. More on this special exhibition soon.
Item #1 (With a bullet.)
Via Facebook, the Art Association of Jackson Hole has announced a lecture on censorship taking place Thursday, February 18, at the Center for the Arts.
The forum is set to be a panel discussion and runs sixty minutes. Beginning at 5:30 pm and scheduled to end at 6:30 pm, this talk will allow participants to head out early in the evening—however, I can’t imagine an hour being enough time to really tackle this subject, particularly given the Jackson Hole late-arrival trademark. At this writing the Blog is unclear as to whether this discussion will deal with perceived censorship issues within Jackson, or with censorship in the world at large. Maybe both.
Whatever the focus, it’s a convenient and welcome chance for creative persona to bring censorship’s causes and repercussions to light.
The irony of censorship is that when a show or artist is censored their particular spotlight only burns brighter. And usually, as we’ve seen in Jackson, the entity doing the censoring gets much more negative attention than the art in question.
Figure of Speech: Censorship in the Arts will be held in Artspace’s Main Gallery. Panel members include reps from writing, dancing, theatrical and visual arts.
Item #2:
A reminder that Lee Carlman Riddell and Ed Riddell are guiding a photography and painting workshop to Tuscany, Italy this spring. The trip begins April 29, 2010 and concludes a week or so later, on May 5.
Ed Riddell has details about the trip on his website, www.edwardriddell.com. You can also visit Lee’s website, www.leeriddell.com. Lee is represented locally by Trio Fine Art. A previous post on this blog has more details regarding fees and application processes; do a search using key words “Riddell,” “workshop” or “Tuscany” and the post should appear.
Diehl Gallery features works by artist Angie Renfro now through March 6. As they’ve been doing, Diehl is offering collectors a chance to deduct 10% of the cost of any art work towards a particular non-profit. This show benefits WomensTrust, an organization providing outreach to Ghana, via microfinancing, education and healthcare.
So who is Angie Renfro? Why are her works simultaneously so melancholy and strikingly beautiful? Looking at press images, I’m struck by Renfro’s split subjects. The birds, bees and spring’s new budding branches are here; so are abandoned industrial landscapes depicting rusted piles of pipeline, muddy fields, flat gray skies and blackened telephone poles.
Blackened telephone poles, crying rivers of red. Dripping red.
A Texas native now living in California, Renfro says she’s haunted by the vast landscapes of
her home state. There’s overlooked beauty in desolate lots, deserted factories. She’s yet to be carried off by California’s blue tides, its sunshine, undulating mountains and deserts.
Renfro takes long drives across Texas, a state the size of a small planet. She believes placing the natural world on the same podium with broken down palaces of industry and farming will help viewers appreciate a shared “quiet, unassuming beauty.”
Along the lonesome Texas highway, there’s little obvious distraction, says Renfro. But, if you stop and sense the quiet, you’ll find quiet makes its own noise. Like Pompeii’s ruins, these Texas subjects are frozen in time.
Renfro’s landscapes are works one could live with for a long time.
Diehl Gallery phone: 307.733.0905.
Item #2:
Word has it that Center Street Gallery is closing. Timeline is unclear.
As long as I’ve lived in Jackson, Center Street Gallery has been there on Town Square’s east side, lighting up the boardwalk with its eclectic collection of contemporary art.
The gallery carries some very noted artists. That list includes: Thomas Batista, Lynn Berryhill, Kathy Bonnema-Leslie, Bruce Dean, Bill Drum, Robert Deurloo, Jeffrey Jon Gluck, Siri Hollander, E.H. Klink, Marshall Noice, Raymond Nordwall, Andrew Parent, Francine & Neil Prince, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Jean Richardson, Dennis Sohocki, Sari Staggs, Kay Stratman, Louis Von Koelnau, Joy Watson, Don Webster and Elizabeth Wright.
Center Street and the former Martin-Harris Gallery broke the contemporary art ice in Jackson Hole. Center Street’s art references in regional beauty interpreted by new, as well as practiced, modern day artists. Works are intimate, grand in scale, colorful, tonal, two and three-dimensional. A couple of decades ago, it was a brave act to open a contemporary gallery space in a traditionally representational Western culture. As Western art scholar Peter Hassrick has noted, we’ve yet to fully address the impact of humans on the remarkable landscapes and wilderness we inhabit. Without the continued health of contemporary arts in Jackson, we’ve less of a chance of approaching that still sensitive subject; it’s unmentionable, marketing-wise, to create content pointedly addressing human effect on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
The hope is that a good percentage of these artists will find alternate local gallery venues. Center Street Gallery, thank you for playing an important role in our arts history.
As this is the Jackson Hole Art Blog, and not the Irish Artists Look at America Blog, I should probably begin this post with my “Art for Dummies” discovery that Thomas Moran, famed portraitist of Yellowstone, was not the only artist in his family. In fact, most of his immediate family were noted artists, a bit of art history I recently discovered.
Instead I’m opening by turning you on to Irish painter Tom Molloy’s exhibit at the 
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Located in Ridgefield, Connecticut, the Aldrich is a gem, an “approachable” museum with great appeal. A friend cautioned that the Aldrich was, at the time of our visit, “between exhibits.” It was. Most galleries were closed, but the exhibition we viewed was so powerful it was worth the time invested and more.
The show’s title, Tom Molloy, is as spare as this exhibit first appears. It is unusual because Molloy is an Irishman living in Ireland whose work is largely about American events and issues. Akin to Pop Art, Molloy’s art utilizes real money, maps, other found objects and wordplay. His “surgically precise” drawings and scale are magnetic. Zoomed in, Molloy’s scathing opinions on global events, new world order and America’s role in global affairs reveal themselves. Messages are punch-you-in-the-heart clear.
A self portrait depicts Molloy holding a newspaper featuring a photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee holding a photo depicting one of the detention facility’s nefarious prisoner abuses. Map, one of Molloy’s best known works, is a cut dollar bill map of the world; not much larger than a dollar bill, we initially mistook the work for a wall doodle. Positioned at eye level, it is in fact a “….double-edged metaphor of American might and hegemony.”
Dead Texans, a series of fifty stamp sized portraits of death row prison inmates executed in that state during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor, captures each prisoner’s likeness, even providing glimpses of personality and fractured spirits. From a slight distance the portraits resemble inky thumbprints. These men are simultaneously stripped of personal identity and confirmed as unique, individual beings. Each regards the viewer straight on. Faintly visible penciled drawing grids further connote incarceration and the reality of fifty doomed destinies.
Standing in the gallery’s center, we realize that an exhibition as politically charged as this has yet to turn up in Jackson. With time, I believe we can open ourselves to exhibiting work with equal depth and commentary.
Tom Molloy remains on exhibit at the Aldrich until June 13 2010. Phone: 203.438.4519.
Item #2:
Went to dinner at my cousin’s house. She’s a master artist in her own right, she needs to exhibit and show, show, show.
As we talked, she pointed out a substantially sized etching hanging over the sofa. The work depicts a Pennsylvania open field, ringed by forest, and inhabited- Peaceable Kingdom style–by cows and other animals. She pointed to the artist’s name: Peter Moran (1841-1914).
My cousin found the etching at a flea market. She cleaned it up, and instantly spotted Moran’s signature.
Peter Moran, brother of Thomas Moran, favored Pennsylvania’s farmlands as subjects, but in 1890 
he participated in the U.S. Indian census, and ventured into Yellowstone. “Grand Tetons View” was, according to Grand Teton National Park, most likely painted while he was on that expedition. A watercolor, this view captures the Tetons as they appeared from Idaho. It is part of the permanent collection of the Roswell Museum and Art Center.
Peter Moran, the youngest brother in the Moran family, is said to have become his brother’s best art student.
Peter was three when his family arrived in America. At age fifteen, he became a lithographer’s apprentice. His interest in portraying animals was life long. Moran’s efforts in this area are obvious; the Teton painting seems an exercise compared to his animal scenes, which are rich in detailed devotion.
