Part Two: Department of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition is the second installment in a three-part exhibition occurring over three years that features a selection of work by eleven faculty artists in the Studio Art, Art History, Art Education, and Design divisions of the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. Showcasing artists who teach in the department, the artists in Part Two provide viewers with a greater understanding of their practice by presenting unified series or by putting forward a selection of past and present works.
Planes of color fill Dan Sutherland’s painting and drawings. Some rendered in three dimensions and others not, Sutherland’s works push and pull viewers through the abstract and imaginative spaces he renders. Bradley Petersen’s paintings address space differently: close views of varied objects painted much larger than life. His jewel-toned works show a fragment of a miniature scene but are rendered in a many-times-larger-than-life scale.
Anna Krachey’s cyanotypes play with space differently. Close-ups of a melon photographed in ways that turn the melon into an image of the moon’s phases, Krachey uses a human scale to indicate galactic scale. Printmaker Tom Druecker simplifies a car racetrack seen from above into a thick black line, and what in life is only apprehended in full from many miles above becomes here an arabesque seen from a few feet away.
Photographer and filmmaker Teresa Hubbard’s video work Méliès investigates the residue of cinema and social terrain around the site of a mountain in the Chihuahua Desert in West Texas named Movie Mountain. In a special screening, she and her collaborator Alexander Birchler embark on a journey traversing the landscape of early silent-era film production.
Mark Goodman condenses a large event—last year’s fires in Bastrop, Texas—into a small selection of objects. A photography practice appears here as charred remnants of a Leica camera and monograph. Printmaker Tim High also play with metonyms. Odd melanges of images loaded with multiple significances, High’s works present an arrangement of possible meanings without pointing to one in particular.
Offering photographs and preparatory sketches as documents of her large sculptures, Margo Sawyer’s contribution renders her interests in translating the experiences of architectural spaces into a representation of the thing rather than the thing itself. Art historian Moyosore Okediji’s painting-sculptures reflect and refract the gallery’s ambient light. Assembled from shiny detritus, these paintings interact with the spaces surrounding the viewer and the work rather than the space the viewer imagines through the painting.
Scott Proctor and Leslie Mutchler, conversely, activate the space of the VAC’s galleries. While Mutchler’s project engages an audience in an open-ended intermedia project, Proctor’s sculptures here engage the practical concerns and processes behind the VAC’s exhibitions: the crating and hanging of its works.
Part Two: Department of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition is funded in part by the Carole and Charles Sikes Fund of the Austin Community Foundation.
