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New Turf

July 6, 2005

JULY 6 – OCTOBER 30, 2005

East Gallery

New Turf upends conventional notions about the means by which we represent the landscape. This exhibition brings together 15 artists from Vermont and across the nation who draw inspiration from the rural, urban, and suburban environments around them. The American landscape has long exerted a strong pull on artists. These contemporary artists have distinguished themselves with thought-provoking, abstract works that make use of humor, politics, memory, and perception to evoke the rapidly changing American scene. Featuring works ranging from aerial photographs of environmentally impacted sites and pencil drawings charting the layout of suburban big-box stores to paintings offering rigorous, formal explorations of nature’s light, color, space, and mood, New Turf maps the diverse terrain where landscape and abstraction meet.

Exhibited artists: Anne Appleby, Louise Belcourt, Janice Caswell, Marsha Cottrell, Jane Fine, Tom Fruin, Richard Garrison, John Hudak, McKendree Key, Marie Krane/Cream Co., Sandy Litchfield, David Maisel, Sam Prekop, Lordy Rodriguez, and Gail Salzman.

 

  • From New Turf by Evelyn Hankins. Exhibition catalogue. Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, 2005.

 

Marie Krane, a member of the collaborative Cream Co., focuses intently on nature to find her subjects. In Krane’s paintings, thousands of finely modulated marks form a chromatic timeline charting the artist’s daily observations-and later, memories- of the flowers on a shrub as they passed through growth, bloom, decay, and disintegration. In modernist painting, the grid offers an antinarrative and antihistorical system, but in Krane’s hands it gives visual form to a perceptual and narrative field.*  Her grid encompasses a developmental sequence of physical changes, atmospheric variations in light and color, the transformation of those mutations through observation, and the process of remembering the initial sensations over a period of several years. At once enticingly sensual and methodically reductive, the mesmerizing, fourteen-panel Three Years (like the beginning of the first year through the end of the third year) is grounded in specific, empirically based experiences, yet it also offers an imaginative and fluid representation of the intangible notion of time.

*Rosalind E. Kraus, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London; The MIT Press, 1985), 9-22.