South Bend Museum of Art

Warner Gallery

Meredith Setser

Perform|Install 3
March 27–June 27, 2010 / EXHIBITION EXTENDED, CLOSE DATE IS August 2, 2010

It is not new for a museum to put on events or design exquisite installations. It also is not new for museums to share the art viewing experience with a performance in the same locale. For the SBMA, it is a regular happening and has been for many years. What is new, however, is to celebrate the joining of events and art in the third installment of Perform/Install. This fusion comes to the SBMA in the form of two visual artists installing work and deliberately transforming the Warner Gallery into a performing arts venue. Over the course of the exhibition several events ranging from experimental in nature, to traditional forms of performance will be presented.

Meredith Setser (Indianapolis, Indiana)–– Grounded by process and materials, space is transformed using massive, swelling walls of handmade felts, imaged with etchings and screen prints. The light at the end of this billowing cave converges on a surprise built of living and dead plant matter, textured felts, and resin. The patterning employed on the massive swaths of felt employ generic biological renderings of dermis and vein patterns shared by a majority of organic life forms and is applied with traditional printmaking applications. Incorporated into the installation are animal by-products (wool, hooves, and pelts) as a means to juxtapose the “faux” felted pelts with actual animal products. This combination places the installation somewhere between reality and falseness, perhaps producing some sense of subterfuge when examined closely.

Lauren Rice (Detroit, Michigan)–– Fantastical landscapes created from debris, papier mache, wood, spray and found objects organic grow and expand in unexpected ways. “Flowers” are formed from bulky blobs resting uncomfortably upon their armatures of wooden dowels, wire and cement. The imagery in this installation work references gardens and flowers, however the traditional preconceptions of these feminine and romantic things are often vulgarized. Rice’s installation intends to simultaneously support and subvert expectations of formal qualities and structural integrity, utilitarian and decorative function. And, in doing so, investigate techniques and materials that have masculine and feminine connotations, as well as explore notions of craft, kitsch, preciousness and sentimentality.

Surface Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Painting
October 2, 2010–January 9, 2011

It would seem that painting has always been with us. Stretching back tens of thousands of years, we have given form to the world around us--and our experience in that world-through pigment applied to cave walls, wooden panels, cathedral ceilings, canvases, and more. Throughout its history, painting has been shaped by a range of technological innovations in conversation with ever-changing aesthetic and theoretical concerns. This conversation reflects an ever-evolving medium that is defined by the cultures that produce it, and which culminates in a contemporary discipline that is marked by a diverse range of subjects and approaches. As viewers we are given an embarrassment of riches. The artists in Surface Tension reveal the vast range of forms that are possible through the application of pigment to a surface and they reflect the ways that contemporary painting draws from, adds to, and redefines it's own history.

Featured artists: Julie Heffernan, Jane Callister, David Kroll, Laurie Hogin, Howard Fonda, and Leah Tinari.