Category: art

Wander and Errancies at Crisp-Ellert Art Museum

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Untitled (blck longevity on the Matanzas) i, 2020, Enamel paint and xerography on paper. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Adler Guerrier: Wander and Errancies

March 6 to April 18, 2020

We are pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of new works by Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier. The exhibition, entitled Wander and Errancies, will include photographs, prints, collage, and objects that are informed by a line of thought set adrift in Saint Augustine. The artist will give a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday, March 6 at 5pm, followed by an opening reception until 8pm.  

Guerrier speaks to Saint Augustine as being “the most Florida of all places,” not only in terms of its geography or territory, but also in its relationship to history. During his research, the artist explored how those historical narratives give structure to what we know about Saint Augustine, as well as how they continue to shape our perceptions of the city.  He is drawn to Fort Mose and Lincolnville, in particular, as places in which emancipatory gestures and the strives of the Civil Rights movement contended to claim the space for the thriving of black social life. This exhibition proposes to tap the still resonant energy in those places.

While in residence at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in Fall 2019, Guerrier walked through Saint Augustine’s historical neighborhoods, visited various local historic sites, and undertook research about the history of our city. As the artist wanders he documents details in the landscape, often through photography, which become the basis for other prints and drawings. For Guerrier, the act of drawing is also an act of wandering, allowing for the development of the poetics of a particular place or landscape. 

Guerrier also takes inspiration from Saint Augustine’s popular ghost tours and is fascinated by the way in which the city has created its own haunted atmosphere, perpetuating its phantom myths by telling variations on the same  stories over and over again.

Adler Guerrier, born in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, lives and works in Miami, Florida. Guerrier received a BFA from New World School of the Arts/University of Florida. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, including Coffee, Rhum, Sugar, & Gold: A Post Colonial Paradox at Museum of African Diaspora, Dust Specks on the Sea Contemporary Sculpture from the French Caribbean & Haiti at Hunter East Harlem Gallery, and Adler Guerrier: Conditions and Forms for blck Longevity at California African American Museum. Guerrier recently organized the group exhibitions Between the legible and the opaque: Approaches to an ideal in place, presented at Bakehouse Art Complex and Notices in a Mutable Terrain at Fundación Pablo Atchugarry.

Guerrier’s practice is best known for works in photography, drawing, and installation, that explore the poetics and politics of place.

We are grateful to The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida for their support of the CEAM Artist Residency through a grant from the JoAnn Crisp-Ellert Art Fund.

The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum is located in an accessible building. If you are a person with a disability and need reasonable accommodations, please contact Phil Pownall at 904-819-6460. Sign Language Interpreters are available upon request with a minimum of three days’ notice. 

For further information on our programming, please visit the website at www.flagler.edu/crispellert, or contact Julie Dickover at 904-826-8530 or crispellert@flagler.edu. The museum’s hours are Monday through Friday, 10 am to 4 pm, and Saturday, 12 to 4pm, while classes are in session.

Seeks out the edges of things, of understanding

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“Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding; therefore its favourite modes are irony, negation, deadpan, the pretence of ignorance or innocence. It prefers the unfinished: the syntactically unstable, the semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do not add up.” –T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1984.

Epigraph of Sue Graze’s essay for Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words, Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988.

Vernon Fisher

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Bikini, 1987. Acrylic on canvas. 11 ½’ x 18 ½’
Collection of the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois.

Art as Provocation, 2014.

“Your normal experience of a painting is you see it as a whole first and then you see it in parts. My background is in literature and as a result the interaction is part to whole, not whole to part. You have to experience it in a linear fashion. Only at the end, and through reflection, do you get to see it. With my work, you are aware of the parts before you can construct the work visually as a whole. You are aware that the parts come from different modalities of representation. The text is part of a puzzle that you have to decode before you can read it as complete. Then there are vignettes that take the form of representation, and then there are the other elements that appear such as abstraction, representation, or other. You never get the experience where everything is seen as one piece; you get more of a partnership of elements. Chaos is at times more interesting in my works than harmony. The viewer gets to choose where to enter.” — Fisher in conversation with Middendorf.

Study Bikini, 1987
Acrylic on paper
42 1/2 × 48 in
108 × 121.9 cm
Hiram Butler Gallery.

Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words was a special exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988. The following is an essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, written by Sue Graze, then-Curator of Contemporary Art.

“[…] For the Dallas Museum of Art, the artist has created his most ambitious site-specific installation to date, combining traditional painting on canvas, three-dimensional sculpture, text and painting directly on the wall (12 elements all inclusive) over an architectural span of almost 200 feet. Fisher has choreographed the space to make the viewer aware of the processional nature of this architectural area, yet at the same time he subverts it- forcing the viewer to waver among text and image – a kind of balancing act that continually insists upon active audience participation.

[…] and finally ending with a large acrylic on canvas painting of the Bikini Island nuclear bomb test. Although the image has an awesome, frightful quality, it is distanced from the viewer, made to resemble a tattered disintegrating photograph. Here again Fisher employs the idea of interruption or static by placing an octopus image from a miniature golf course within the midst of this Bikini field. All seems conceptually askew, but both bomb and octopus share a similar bulbous, sensuous form, and both images are simultaneously strongly horrifying and banal.

Fisher’s Dallas installation begins with a text and ends with a painting, thus combining intellect and allusion into a complexly layered work. Questioning the notion of order, Fisher’s art insists upon a number of different experiences – visual, tactile, intellectual, emotional, and physical. Thus his strategy is truly the opposite of 20th-century precepts of a streamlined, controlled objective order. It moves from the cosmic to the mundane, the past to the present, from echoes of Duchamp to Magrittean surrealism, and Jasper Johns’ pop. Fisher has said, “There are really two stories in my paintings,” and indeed there may be more.” –excerpt of essay by Sue Graze.

Text and an interview, in 2016, with artandseek.org.

Where You Go, 2010
Oil and acrylic on paper
33 x 40 inches
Posted in art

Elizabeth Withstandley’s Searching for the Miraculous

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A trilogy of video-installation works by Withstandley that uses Bas Jan Ader‘s final work, “In Search of the Miraculous”, as an entry point for a new experiential journey. The exhibition opens tonight at AC Institute.

Searching for the Miraculous is a trilogy of video/installation works that uses Bas Jan Aders final work, “In Search of the Miraculous”,  as an entry point for a new experiential journey. The works explore identity, time, transcended experiences, and the romantic vision of a quest for something better.  The project uses video, audio, music and sculptural elements to create a contemporary version of the trilogy. It starts with  a cinematic short, then a connected journey between two people and finally concludes with a journey of a pair of glass jars floating across the sea.

Elizabeth Withstandley is from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She is one of the co-founders of Locust Projects, a not-for-profit art exhibition space, in Miami, FL. 

Her work is routed in conceptual art taking the form of video installations and photographic series. Artifacts, individuality, and music are all central themes in her work. In addition to exhibiting her own work she has organized a number of exhibitions including Smoke & Mirrors at the Torrance Art Museum, 20/20 at Locust Projects and a the 2019 residency project, work from artists at The Curfew Tower.