PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In celebration of Brown University’s 250th anniversary, the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Department of Visual Art presents a series of one-person exhibitions by distinguished alumni.
The second set of exhibitions, featuring Sarah Morris ’89, Rob Reynolds ’90, and Taryn Simon ’97, will be shown from April 12 through May 25, 2014.
All events are free and open to the public.
The six alumni artists featured in the anniversary exhibition have established significant careers within the visual arts and were chosen to represent a diverse range of media. Incorporating drawings, paintings, sculpture, photographs, videos, and films, the artists create aesthetically diverse works. While there is no identifiable “Brownian aesthetic,” as Ralph Rugoff ’80 noted in his catalogue essay, “all seem to make art that grows out of expansive and invigoratingly skeptical ways of reading.” Each artist investigates and interprets social and cultural phenomena in a unique way.
Clements and Tribe translate and reconfigure pre-existing cinematic texts. Clements examines the spaces of cinematic melodrama, mapping the interior environments in which these films unfold. In her 20-foot drawing Mrs. Jessica Drummond (My Reputation, 1946) — which was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial — Clements references the Barbara Stanwyck film. Using only black ballpoint pen she stitches together a panoramic view of the protagonist’s bedroom. Clements’s architectural interiors challenge the conventions of drawing: folded, pressed, creased, and hanging loosely, they cover the walls like textured fabric. Additional works in the exhibition demonstrate the delicacy with which Clements employs color inks and washes.
Kerry Tribe will present There Will Be ________, a half-hour video that conflates the real and fictional histories of the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Used as a backdrop for numerous Hollywood films — from The Big Lebowski to There Will be Blood — Greystone Mansion was also the site of a real-life drama: a double murder. Tribe unites these histories by using dialogue drawn from the commercial films to script five competing and plausible accounts of the murders, which she films in the mansion. The evolving scenarios and repeated dialogue create a sense of confusion that speaks to the slippery slope of truth and fiction and how media can obscure our remembrances of past events.