This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 1, 1981)
Elizabeth Downing, Guilty Child, mixed media collage on paper, 29 Vi" X 21 Vi", n.d. (photo: courtesy of the artist). Studio 218 Foy Union Building Auburn University Auburn, Alabama July 9-23 Studio 218, a group of eighteen women artists who live and work in and around Auburn, Alabama, was formed in March 1980; its purpose, as the exhibition catalog states, is “to address itself to the particular needs of local women art professionals.” All but three Studio 218 members are or have been students or faculty at Auburn University, but a university connection is not a prerequisite for membership. Since the words “artist” and “group” are often considered mutually exclusive terms, the defi ciencies of Auburn’s art scene for lone women artists must be signifi cant. In examining why Auburn women artists need an organization, it should be noted that male chauvinism or exclusion-ism, if at all a factor, cannot be a primary reason. Auburn’s public cares little about serious, living artists, male or female, or about con temporary art. The university’s De partment of Art is, in terms of employment opportunities for local artists of either sex, essentially a closed shop. Locally the only other visible support system for the visual arts is commercial, and that is fragmented. A grass roots women’s art group offers its members exhibi tion opportunities, psychological sup port in a pursuit which may offer little tangible reward, and a congenial framework within which artists can openly discuss a known common in terest. Despite general local apathy to the visual arts, public response to the Studio 218 exhibit was excellent. Easi ly one fifth of the exhibit’s forty-five pieces, all in “traditional” media, would hold up exceedingly well to cri ticism anywhere. Most of the works were well crafted but not earth shat tering. The enormous variety of media was refreshing and ranged from relief sculpture, weaving, ceramics and assemblage to painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and collage. There was also a video presentation on opening night, featuring monologues by Studio 218 members about their work. The most consistently evocative works were those of Elizabeth Down ing, Agnes Bradley Taugner, Anne Hanger Markle and Rebecca Yeomans. Downing’s gaudy mixed media image, Guilty Child, typifies her recent artistic depictions of childhood traumas and fears by way of disturbing though plausible dramas. Taugner’s Two Old Dolls collage generates a pleasant, less visceral childlike reverie than Down ing’s, but is equally playful with imagery and materials. Markle’s small untitled collages are non- referential for the viewer, but the delicate colors and often close tonalities of her irregular yet somehow precise geometries define specific emotional states and spaces. Rebecca Yeoman’s mixed media drawing, Compote With Cherries, displays Yeoman’s deftness at in terweaving soft and beautiful colors with a gentle but energetic network of lines to define a still life as a hazy atmospheric image alternating with occasional assertions of volumetric presences. Any mention of individual pieces in the exhibit should include Teresa Rodriguez’s Love on a Bus and Natalyn Havenick’s Houses. Rodriguez’s oil painting seats four figures side by side on a bus, forcing them into varying awkward postures as they exchange glances, converse, chuckle or perhaps sigh among them selves. The painting is subtle social commentary in bright and shrill col ors, flatly painted except the ghost image of crusty underpainting, ex truding through the bus scene as a metaphor for a fading but persistent memory. Natalyn Havenick’s large painterly oil, Houses, is a six part grid (three grid units vertically and two laterally) with a house in each of five squares; the seemingly missing sixth house is a fill-in-the-empty-square situation. The houses are all different in hue, and they look more like haystacks than houses, so the picture lingers finally as a parodic tribute to Monet. I thought the crafts, sculpture, other three-dimensional media in the Studio 218 exhibit were either trapped within technologies, conceptually trite or just plain ordinary. Annie Ward Huey’s Inspired by Urchin transcended its materials. It was, in effect, a roughly spherical ceramic ball lighted from within, trailing feather-laden strings, as if it was a jellyfish with tentacles or an eye-level lamp with several tantalizing on-off cords dangling several feet from their light source. This exhibition, Studio 218’s third regionally, represented its partici- pants-members well. Each Studio 218 exhibition has surpassed the overall level of the preceding exhibition. If Studio 218 maintains this record of progress, the group will continue to justify its existence to its members with each subsequent outing. —Mark Price Mark Price is a painter and an assis tant professor of Art at Auburn University. CLEMENTE, CHIA, CUCCHI: Etchings & Lithographs by Three Young Italian Artists October 19 - November 21 JANE BICKERTON FINE ARTS 1440 High Point Place Atlanta, Georgia 30306 404/874-4750 By Appointment Only 21 Art Papers September-October 1981
