“A Patient Search: Paintings by Tom Dimond” is the newest exhibit in the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts Lobby exhibition space, on view from Jan. 15 through Aug. 2, 2019.
Tom Dimond’s work is highly detailed with hidden meanings, textural interest and layers of abstraction. Through the manipulation of materials, his work conveys familiarity and nostalgia, as well as a state of ambiguity that allows room for viewer interpretation. This collection features large-scale, abstract acrylic paintings, as well as smaller mixed media collages. His thoughtful titles illuminate the inspiration behind each work and pique viewer’s interests.
Dimond’s career has spanned five decades and he has exhibited work all over the country, in both the private and public sector. More than a decade after being named professor emeritus, we are delighted to showcase his work back at Clemson University.
The exhibition will feature paintings from the late 1980s to the present day, and demonstrate the artist’s development in style from flat, hard-edged shapes to more atmospheric spaces and textured surfaces.
Dimond explained the development of his style in this way:
1970s and 1980s
These decades were typified by compositions based on the manipulation of circular forms on a grid, initially black and white and eventually employing primary and secondary colors. As the paintings moved from paper to canvas, the forms took on the contours of the exterior edges, resulting in shaped and hard-edged paintings. These colorful abstract works were composed of a grid of nine interlocking circles unified by connecting lines, and were accompanied by a series of silkscreen prints.
The grid later expanded to include 77 circles employing radial symmetry as a compositional device. More complex variations followed in watercolor and silkscreen, which were related to the Pattern and Decoration movement.
1980s and 1990s
After artist retreats at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and the Vermont Studio Center, Dimond’s exploration of circles on a grid progressed. He revisited the theme of nine circles on a grid, alternating between watercolor and acrylic paintings. Making references to the natural environment and social interactions, the paintings moved from flat, hard-edged shapes to more atmospheric spaces and textured surfaces. Loose, incidental lines beneath the surface interacted with the geometric shapes, produced more complex shapes.
Early 2000s
Dimond returned to the large canvas format with a series of paintings that incorporated the older nine-circle theme and a new form. On a trip to Venice, Italy, he became fascinated by a marble tile pattern designed by the 15th century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello on the floor of San Marco Basilica in Venice – the stellated dodecahedron. Combining this form with the nine-circle mandala type composition provided further study into the theme of ambiguity of spatial tensions. His titles reference the music he listened to while painting, from a group in Sweden called Hedningarna.
2010s
Artwork by Tom Dimond
Dimond’s most recent series moved away from imagery and techniques of the tile works. It combines gestural watercolor painting with monoprints made on Japanese paper collaged to the surface. The first of these works mimicked earthen walls and were named after the sites of prehistoric cave paintings. Later iterations returned to complex layered surfaces with scans, distressed surfaces and collaged comic book imagery. He said these works are at once autobiographical in chronicling his visual influences, but also an amalgam of 50 years of techniques and studio practices.
Dimond served as the Lee Gallery director from 1973 to 1988 and as a professor for the Department of Art from 1979 to 2006. In 2006, he was named professor emeritus. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Mass. and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.
The exhibition will be on view to the public in the lobby of the Brooks Center for Performing Arts at Clemson University from 1–5 p.m. Monday to Friday, Jan. 15–Aug. 2, 2019. An artist talk and reception will be held from 5:30-7 p.m. on Friday, March 1.
For more information on Brooks Center exhibitions, contact Susan Sorohan at sorohan@clemson.edu.
CLEMSON — Clemson University’s National Print and Drawing exhibition, “Adaptable: Facing the Future,” opens Thursday in the Lee Gallery and will be available to the public through March 15. The juror and awards presentation and reception will be 6–8 p.m. Feb. 17.
Since the beginning of our time on Earth we have responded to the impact of change in every aspect of our human experience. In the ever-expanding social, technological, biological and digital era, change is taking place at unprecedented speeds while the world is becoming a much smaller place. The 2017 Clemson National Print and Drawing exhibition explores change in a wide range of approaches to unpacking this idea.
Consisting of 62 works by 59 artists from across the United States, the biennial show was juried by faculty emerita Sydney A. Cross. More than 340 images were entered by 118 artists. Cross received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northern Arizona University and her Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University. She taught printmaking at Clemson University and she was awarded the title of Distinguished Alumni Professor. Always professionally active in her field, she held the office of president for the Southern Graphics Council, the largest printmaking society in North America.
The works will be on view from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Thursday. For more information, contact Lee Gallery Director Denise Woodward-Detrich at woodwaw@clemson.edu.
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Participating Artists AWG, Miguel Aragon, Todd Arsenault, Anne Beidler, Mark Bischel, Kelsey Bledsoe, Cynthia Brinich-Langlois, Jessica Burke, Karen Brussat Butler, Anne Chesnut, Allison Conley, Jacob Cotton, Andrew DeCaen, Darcy Edwin, Katie Efstathiou, Beth Fein, Craig Fisher, Kendra Foster, Karen Gallagher-Iverson, Oscar Gillespie, Brian Gillis, Sharon Harper, Yuji Hiratsuka, Melinda Hoffman, Andy Holliday, John Holmgren, Nick Conbere, Zach Horn, Richard Hricko, Jayne Reid Jackson, Joyce Jewell, Brian Johnson, Matthew Kluber, Lauren Lake, Treelee MacAnn, William Mathie, Juliet Mattila, Corrin Smithson McWhirter, Johanna Mueller, Nick Osetek, Andy Owen, Caroline Owen, Ethan Peeler, Aaron Pennington, Johnny Plastini, Haley Prestifilippo, Adrian Rhodes, Rachel Rinker, Nicholas Ruth, Emmet Sandberg, Blake Sanders, Mark Sisson, Emily Stokes, Lynda Harwood Swenson, Michael Weigman, Art Werger, Linda Whitney, Chris Williford, Jackson Zorn
The Lee Gallery The Lee Gallery at the Clemson University Center for Visual Arts provides the university and surrounding community with access to regional, national and international artists. Through a variety of exhibitions and special events, the galleries at Clemson University are dedicated to teaching, providing a space to display student and faculty research and serving the community, as well as providing internship opportunities for undergraduate art majors. Exhibitions held in Lee Gallery examine contemporary issues that underscore academic programs and serve the broader mission of the university. Visitors to campus can enjoy exhibits showcasing undergraduate, graduate and faculty work as well as nationally and internationally recognized artists. The Lee Gallery maintains exhibition spaces at College of Architecture Arts and Humanities Dean’s Gallery in Strode Tower, Sikes Hall showcase space, the Brooks Center for Performing Arts lobby showcase, and the Acorn Gallery in Lee Hall II. The Lee Gallery is located in Lee Hall I on Clemson University’s campus. Gallery Hours are 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday and select Fridays for special events.
Todd Anderson, assistant professor of art and printmaking at Clemson University, displays one of his reductive woodblock prints in “The Last Glacier”, an artist book of 23 image plates of glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana, by him, Bruce Crownover and Ian van Coller. Image Credit: Ken Scar / Clemson University
CLEMSON — With a heavy mug of coffee in one hand, Todd Anderson moves through his personal studio like a chef moving through a four-star kitchen: fluidly, efficiently, among the tools of his trade: neatly stacked cans of paint sorted by color, saws and drills tucked away without a hint of sawdust, brushes hanging neatly, chisels gleaming. Every label of every can and jar and bottle faces outward, lest confusion disrupt the rhythm of his work.
Anderson, an assistant professor of art at Clemson University, is a printmaker, skilled at transferring beauty and wonder from landscapes onto paper to share his experiences with the public.
When guests arrive at his studio, which used to be his garage, Anderson slips on a pair of shoes, turns off a stream of classical jazz and begins to tell a story about his latest project, which recently gained national attention.
“I think we all understand that the world is changing in sweeping and dramatic ways,” Anderson says, his voice quiet and earnest. “My belief is that those places need to be seen, they need to be experienced and they need to be creatively documented.” It’s a holy trinity that guides his work.
Since its founding 100 years ago, Glacier National Park has lost more than 80 percent of its glaciers. Over the past six years, Anderson says, he hiked more than 500 miles through that park for a project called “The Last Glacier.” He and two collaborators, painter Bruce Crownover and photographer Ian van Coller, recently finished the project, resulting in original artwork that includes 15 specially bound 25- by 38-inch books with Anderson’s original prints, Crownover’s paintings and van Coller’s photos.
“My intent as an artist is to share the beauty of a changing world,” Anderson says.
In demand
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the New York Public Library are sharing the work; they each bought a book on the spot. The Library of Congress bought another. Clemson’s Emery A. Gunnin Architecture Library, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale, and several private collectors have also invested in the artistic, historical records.
The Last Glacier quickly garnered the kind of attention artists dream of. But Anderson couldn’t look lighter, more carefree. He says he spent a great deal of his life camping, hiking and climbing his way through the Rocky Mountains, sleeping with the stars overhead. It’s easy to picture him on a mountain in a three-day beard and a worn flannel shirt, accidentally hip.
On being outside, Anderson says, “If you’ve felt frost on a sleeping bag, or seen dew on cobwebs in the woods, you can understand the value of that experience.”
Rock climbing shaped his arms and hands; they’re strong, purposeful. His blue eyes sparkle with an infinite appreciation for wonder, reflecting a scientist’s curiosity and exacting patience. There are stories in those hands and eyes, and a quiet urgency to tell them.
An Anderson woodcut print of the Grinnell glacier in Glacier National Park.
In the late oughts, Anderson heard the Rockies’ glaciers were melting. “My first thought was, this is the environment that I love, these alpine environments, the beauty of these places. I felt sad, first and foremost. And then I thought, ‘Well, who is documenting these places?’”
When months of searching for someone recording the glacial recession turned up empty, Anderson decided to do it himself. “It was really out of a sense of responsibility,” he says.
The three collaborators are currently wrapping up a second project, documenting glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park. Anderson is also waiting to hear about a grant from the National Science Foundation that would send him to Antarctica.
The Last Glacier is a compelling and invaluable work, said Gary Machlis, the University Professor of Environmental Sustainability and scientific adviser to the director of the National Park Service for eight years until early January 2017. “Climate change is the environmental challenge of our age, and responding to this challenge requires a constellation of voices — including those of artists like Todd.
“Art can be a portal for understanding in a visceral, emotional way what science attempts to demonstrate through theory, data and analysis,” Machlis said. “Todd’s work is powerful, and his collaborative team is unique and so committed to their task. Viewing the images in ‘The Last Glacier’ is a reminder of what is at risk and what might be lost if we do not act.”
In 1910, there were 150 glaciers within the new 1 million-acre Glacier National Park in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. When Anderson started his work, in 2010, all but 25 had melted.
Glaciers, the marvelous remnants of the last ice age, are made from the bottom up by layer upon layer of snow that melts into ice, the accumulating weight pressing the earth, picking up and setting down boulders as they slide incrementally. For the past 7,000 years, the glaciers in the park have stretched for miles, like giant beached whales caught between mountains and frozen by time.
Melting ice, rising seas
Lakes dot a valley in Glacier National Park that a glacier once filled. Photo courtesy Todd Anderson. When glaciers melt they don’t simply disappear, they become water. Increasingly, they’re adding to rising sea levels.
Melt from all the glaciers and ice sheets in the world are responsible for two-thirds of global sea level rise (the rest is attributed to warming seas), according to Andrew Fountain a glaciologist at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, who agreed to write a scientific note about the next project by Anderson and his colleagues.
Twenty years ago, Fountain said, alpine glaciers, like the ones in Glacier National Park, were the first to melt. “Now Greenland is beginning to melt,” he said.
By 2040, with a 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperature, sea levels will rise significantly along 90 percent of the world’s coastlines, affecting hundreds of millions of people, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fountain has introduced many artists to the wilderness in Antarctica, where he conducts some of his research. When Anderson asked him, out of the blue, to contribute to an artistic project, Fountain considered it a way to tell more people about the melting glaciers.
“Getting this information out to people is super important,” said Fountain. “It’s a gateway to science. I might be attracted to the subject by graphs and plots, but others might be attracted by art.”
It’s a symbiotic relationship, Anderson said, as scientists wrap the art in a scientific context.
“Working with scientists is very critical to my projects. We’re trying to bridge gaps and we’re trying to connect with as many folks as we can,” Anderson said. “What the scientists provide is things that we can’t provide – analytical analysis and whole, unique perspectives of what’s going on with the landscape.”
There is also common ground among artists and scientists, and aficionados of each. Science, Fountain said, can be incredibly creative, like when it’s time to choose the right approach to finding a solution. And when looking at Anderson’s art, the glaciologist sees clues to the glacier’s life, such as whether it’s advancing or retreating.
Democratic medium
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Anderson found work at Tandem Press, an international printing house affiliated with UW’s School of Education. Tandem has a tradition of attracting famous artists to experiment and print in its studio. David Lynch, Chuck Close, Art Spiegelman and Judy Pfaff are among its alumni.
Essentially, Anderson worked with artists accustomed to producing singular pieces of art and helped them create prints that “would be totally and wholly unique, but you could make 20 or 30 of these things and more people could have it.”
Printmaking, he said, “is an inherently democratic medium, and for me that was really what grabbed me.” “The Last Glacier” project is similarly intended to be shared with the masses, Anderson said. “Our mission is to get the work into the public sphere,” he said.
And he wants future masses to experience the work, which makes acquisitions by the Met, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress special.
“One of the things I want to do as an artist is to talk about the immediacy of things going on in the world. But art, as I understand it and the way I approach it, it’s a multigenerational conversation,” Anderson said.
In museums, “when we look at a painting from the 1800s it helps us understand what people’s values were, what people thought about.
“It’s just as important when future generations who go to museums and get to see this work. It’s not just saying, ‘Oh, there used to be a glacier here,’ but it’s also saying, ‘This is a little bit about us.’ In a very, very small way. Of what we valued as a society and what we thought about, the challenges we were trying to face and engage.”
Working with collaborators also amplifies the message and grows the audience. Anderson initially planned to work alone, but the glaciers were so vast and distant – 10 to 15 miles from an access road – that he enlisted Crownover and van Coller to help cover the territory.
The result, Anderson said, is “three very unique artistic visions of essentially the same thing. The hope is that by presenting the viewer with three different versions of three different artists, that folks might be able to latch on. If they don’t like my work, maybe they’ll really like Bruce’s. Or if they don’t like Bruce’s, maybe they’ll like Ian’s.”
Todd Anderson, assistant professor of art and printmaking at Clemson University, carves out a “stamp” to create a reductive woodcut print of a glacier for “The Last Glacier”. (Photo by Ken Scar)
Mirroring the glaciers
If you’ve stood on a glacier, or on a mountain two miles high, standing in front of Anderson’s finished prints will stir a familiar chill in the air, as if someone opened a window 10,000 feet up. The prints reveal scars from the violent upheaval, subduction and collision of the Earth’s crust. You’ll feel the cool blues of the ice, the ancient gray of the rock and yellow, purple, pink and blue of sunrises and sunsets seen through thin air.
Anderson spent weeks each summer working in situ, researching the glaciers – which ones to document, how to access them, seeing them at different times of day as the sun shifted shadows and revealed new details. He hiked, sketched and photographed, getting to know each one before it ceased to exist.
Back in his studio, where the prints come to life, a mixture of fluorescent bulbs balance the blues, reds and greens to shine as white as possible.
In the middle of the space sits a printing press, perched atop tiny feet, perfectly level. The press is new; at least it’s new to Anderson. It arrived recently by freight to his home in one of Clemson’s leafy neighborhoods. The press is his six-burner gas range, where the ingredients of his art – science, nature, light and the wonder of the Rocky Mountains — mingle and fuse.
Slowly, they develop as reductive woodcut prints in a process involving time, pressure and the deliberate carving of a landscape until nothing is left but a picture, a life cycle that mimics his subjects. Anderson chose to recreate the glaciers as woodcut prints because, he says, he wanted “an organic, visual language,” and woodcuts, by their nature, provide a “visual texture.”
Both glaciers and prints are constructed of layers, but while glaciers are built from the bottom, prints begin at the top. They require the artist to complete the piece in his mind, then work backward.
Anderson transfers a sketch to a rectangular block of basswood, imported from Japan, then begins working in negative space – using fingers and hands that once routinely clung to rock to slowly, expertly, carve away wood, creating an image by removing what he doesn’t want in the print. The first layer he carves away, from the top of the block, will be the first image on the paper, the bottom layer of color.
“I might do that 10, 15 or 20 times. So I’ll have 15 or 20 sheets of paper that look the same,” he says. “Once I’m done doing that, I’ll take that same block of wood, clean it off, carve it out a little bit more, I’ll ink it up with a new color this time, then I’ll print it on top of what I printed before.”
He has to print light colors first, and he’s constantly calculating “the value of the color and the opacity of my ink, so that I can make a whole image look right. At least in my mind how it looks right.”
One layer, one carving, one color, one pressing at a time, all the while thinking backwards, or upside down, removing negative space from the top that becomes the bottom. Eventually, the full image appears. But, at a cost.
“By the time I get done making these artworks, the blocks themselves are really exhausted, and there’s no way of going back and remaking the artwork,” Anderson says. “The process is mirroring the fate of the glaciers themselves.”
Anderson said he doesn’t create “message” art. He’s not delivering a political statement. Not directly, anyway.
“There’s a complexity to these ideas” of art, experience, climate change, he said. “What I’m trying to present as an artist is visual complexity. But there’s moments where, when it works right, you can get lost in these things and you start seeing the cobwebs. You start seeing things. There’s an experience that art can give you, which is just wonder, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Anderson received funding from the South Carolina Arts Commission, the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for this work.
For more information, and to see the work by Crownover and van Coller, go to TheLastGlacier.com.
Anderson’s print of Salamander Glacier in Glacier National Park. Image Credit: Todd Anderson
Earlier this month, Center for Visual Arts-Lee Gallery at Clemson University interns visited the studio of sculpture professor and the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate program coordinator, Dave Detrich. All of the art department professors are not only teachers, but they are working artists. Interns were able to view his sculpture in person and they had an opportunity to ask him questions. Here is a summarized account of his answers.
What is your visual arts background?
Detrich was initially interested in architecture. His mentor and professor, Dan Lowery, at Southwestern Illinois College, served as huge inspiration and motivation towards a career in art. He received his BFA from the Kanas City Art Institute, Missouri and his MFA from Alfred University, New York. Viewing the building of the St. Louis arch inspired questions about the anomaly on the landscape within his work.
Has your industrialized location influenced your work?
St. Louis’s urbanization, industrialization, and its city parks are all cultural initiatives that have inspired Detrich’s sculpture. His father’s job working on a motor assembly line also influenced the direction of his work.
What is the context that your work presents itself?
Detrich focuses heavily on preparatory research and values originality of content he is addressing. Often, he extracts elements discourse subjects to create irony.
Is there a reason you have been using wall sculpture versus sculpture in the round in your current work?
The wall is a place he consistently goes to as a building site. His current work considers consumerism in the automotive and fashion industries. He is using a coring tool to create circular cuts in magazines of these subjects and arrange these chance cuts into connected images.
Is there a reoccurring starting point that you return to for inspiration?
Through collecting, Detrich tries to find the ironic connections between things unrelated. Many of his ideas are the result of months of processing through ideas, making the forecast of his work unpredictable.
You wrote that your sculpture is most successful when it poses a question rather than make a statement. If it does this, what action do you want your viewers to take?
He believes his work is successful when it invites his viewers to ponder rather than answer a question for them. He does not seek an editorial approach, but rather one that initiates a dialogue.
Detrich’s current works are investigating the poetry of paint chip names, the intersections between automobiles and fashion, and the elements of Piet Mondrian’s minimalism.
The visit was enlightening to the students. They were able to understand Detrich’s artistic journey, his particular mode of working, and his translation of ideas through his sculpture and its impact on viewers.
Clemson University in Clemson, SC, will present the Clemson University Department of Art Faculty Exhibit, featuring works by the Clemson University faculty, Oct. 5 – Nov. 12. Guests are invited to interact with the exhibiting artists and hear about the work during the Artist Talk to take place Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m. and Oct. 28, at 11 a.m. An exhibit reception will be held on Oct. 8, 6–8pm in the Center for Visual Arts – Lee Gallery, 1–101 Lee Hall.
The participating artists include: printmaker Todd Anderson, sculptor David Detrich, digital media artist David Donar, sculptor Joey Manson, painter Todd McDonald, digital media artist Christina Nguyen Hung, sculptor Greg Shelnutt, functional ceramicist Denise Woodward-Detrich, photographer Anderson Wrangle, drawer Kathleen Thum, and sculptural ceramicist Valerie Zimany.
Relationships dominate our human experience. These experiences shape us into who we are as individuals and how we interact with the rest of our environment as a society. This existence between ourselves and our environment is a constant balancing act of impacting and being impacted by the vast conglomeration of experiences.
Having the faculty’s work accessible in the gallery adds a new dimension to the teaching environment at Clemson University, allowing students and visitors to see into the thoughts of the artists. In this exhibition, the work prompts questions to the viewer of human engagement in natural, societal, and personal environments.
The work of David Donar, Kathleen Thum, Todd Anderson, and Joey Manson turn our view outward into the natural world. David Donar uses a mixture of traditional and new media to explore the landscape before human influence. In his film, he looks at Lake Ouentironk, also known as Lake Simcoe, a fresh water lake north of Toronto, Ontario. Through the use of watercolor painting he creates “vibrant and moving picture to capture the various seasons as well as the fluid changes of water, land, and sky” to render for the viewer an area as it was over four-hundred years ago.
Interested in the human species’ relationship to the earth, Kathleen Thum examines complex relationships between nature and humans through the use of intricate line. The tubules are given a life of their own as she examines how they might be affected by pressure, gravity, fluids, and gases. In her current work, she specifically examines the relationship a species has with its environment, and how environmental changes cause species to flourish or perish. In the case of the relationship humans have with Earth’s natural resources, she asks: “Are we, as a human species, at our maximum Carrying Capacity in regards to the earth’s natural resources?”
Through the work of Todd Anderson, the viewer is challenged to make a connection between themselves as part of the human population and the greater environment. Where Thum studies natural resources, Anderson makes a study of human impact on the environment by documenting the retreating glaciers of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park in Alberta, Canada and Montana, US. Over the course of his documentation he has seen 25 glaciers reduced to 18 since 2010. Expected to disappear by 2020, Anderson seeks to use his field data of sketches, watercolors, and photographs to create original fine art woodblock prints. He hopes The Last Glacier “will serve as a historical record of this momentous time of change within the park and offer unique insights into the larger issue of climate change”.
Joey Manson works with industrial materials to make large scale sculptures that embody organic qualities. These abstracted representations of our present environments, technological and natural, become “an exploration of our built, social, and environmental constructs”, says Manson.
Following is an examination of our social environment by Valerie Zimany, Greg Shelnutt, Anderson Wrangle, and David Detrich. With the use of sculpture and ceramics, they pull apart and clash together cultural elements.
Valerie Zimany’s bright colors and imagery clash on the softer surfaces of her ceramic sculptures, where she uses these “forced relationships” to “question compatibility.” After graduating with a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA, Zimany went on to study at Kanazawa College of Art as a “Fellow” in Kanazawa, Japan. With a foot in these two backgrounds, Zimany uses her work to study how these cultures intersect. “In my current work,” she says, “I visually examine complex relationships between the East and West, nature and technology, and intimate and public worlds.”
The work of Greg Shelnutt has a narrative quality inviting the viewer to “question accepted notions about culture.” His use of materials such as metal and wood give a rustic quality and depth to his work. The storytelling these objects provide shifts between subtlety or forwardness. He couples recognizable objects in American culture with strong phrases, sparking conversation with his viewers. “As an academic artist living in South Carolina,” he says, “–I feel that part of my obligation to the profession is to engage with the broad public.”
Similarly, Anderson Wrangle uses black and white photography to document a moment that will forever impact our history.
David Detrich describes what drives his work as “paradoxical tensions that are created when oppositions find a common ground.” Using color wheels and swatch groups, he creates an interesting narrative of color and poetry. Detrich asks, “How is aesthetic taste derived?” Is it experienced intuitively or learned by an external force? Contrasting commercial design with high art practices, the viewer is invited to discover what drives their taste.
Todd McDonald, Denise WoodwardDetrich, and Christina Nguyen-Hung turn the viewers attention from the outside world of nature and culture, and into the more intimate realm of home and self.
Through his vibrant paintings, Todd McDonald explores how humans perceive their environment and how this perception has evolved to include digital media as a lens. He catalogues the change in perception through painting, one of the original lenses for which humans recorded their environment. McDonald says, “As methods of image making evolve we are confronted with new visual qualities that affect the way we see and consequently create models of ‘our world’.”
Fascinated with the idea of utility, Denise Woodward-Detrich investigates the interaction between functional objects and our day-to-day activities. In a study of balance, her beautifully glazed ceramics take on interesting shapes as they equally embody functional, visual, and tactile intrigue.
Christina Nguyen-Hung zooms the scope of her study to microscopic levels. As an interdisciplinary artist who combines electronic and biological media, she is interested in thinking about “material relationships between the individual (human body) and its environment in new ways.” To explore these relationships, Nguyen-Hung uses a common chicken egg and its mutable properties to study how common household items can transform the egg through what she describes as “little kitchen science.”
Lee Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Monday-Thursday.
The exhibition, artist talks and reception are free to the public because of the generous support given to the Center for Visual Arts.
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About the Center for Visual Arts
The Center for Visual Arts (CVA) at Clemson University is where students, visitors and scholars explore contemporary perspectives in art and culture through research, outreach programming and studio practice. With a mission to engage and render visible the creative process, the CVA is a dynamic intellectual and physical environment where art is created, exhibited and interpreted. It educates through academic research and practice with art at its core, drawing upon varied disciplines to examine critically cultural issues and artistic concerns.
Earlier this month, Center for Visual Arts-Lee Gallery at Clemson University interns visited the studio of sculpture professor and the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate program coordinator, Dave Detrich. All of the art department professors are not only teachers, but they are working artists. Interns were able to view his sculpture in person and they had an opportunity to ask him questions. Here is a summarized account of his answers.
Is there a reason you have been using wall sculpture versus sculpture in the round in your current work?
