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Artist Studio
Top Events
Exhibitions and Events
11/23/08-
2/22/09
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Self-Portraits in the Activity Gallery
November 23, 2008 - February 22, 2009
The Activity Gallery is transformed into a studio for visitors to create a self-portrait or a rendering of someone else. Easels, mirrors, paper, oil pastels, and colored pencils are available for the artist in everyone. A place to display portraits is provided, and for the very young, a felt-board with shapes to make inventive faces. Also on display are self-portraits by area art teachers, created especially for this exhibit.
Brattleboro, VT ,
11/23/08-
2/22/09
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Dana Clancy: Network
November 23, 2008 - February 22, 2009
The portraits of Boston-based painter Dana Clancy subvert the traditional relationship between subject and viewer. Her figures peer out of irregular forms and bright shapes through which viewer and portrait subject seem to exchange gazes. She says, “My paintings are about observing and being observed. In my portraits I… suggest the inner life of the subject while drawing the viewer’s attention to his or her own act of looking at the painting.”
With social networking websites becoming one of the most active environments for “looking” in our digital age, Clancy turned to Facebook to create a group portrait for her new installation, Network. She included only artists who had “friended” her in the short time after she joined Facebook in summer 2008.
The largest hexagonal shapes in her “network” depict, with a loose, sketchy quality, her closest friends, who sat for their portraits. The silhouettes and carefully modeled figures in smaller panels represent friends whom she knows less well, or who live too far away to sit for portraits. They were drawn from digital sources such as the subject’s own Facebook photo. Colors describe subnetworks of personal connections among members of the larger group. The lattice of pencil-drawn circles covering the wall reinforces the idea of interconnectedness among people who participate in the virtual space of social-networking sites.
Combining portraits drawn from life with portraits made from digital sources highlights the contrast between the immediacy of genuine human presence and the illusion of familiarity created by these websites. It also makes Network a rich and complicated representation of the ways in which individuals can present a carefully crafted version of their identity in these virtual environments.
Rachael Arauz, Guest Curator
Brattleboro, VT ,
11/23/08-
2/22/09
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
The Brattleboro PhotoBooth Portrait Project by Christopher Irion
November 23, 2008 - February 22, 2009
This PhotoBooth project is part of an ongoing photographic project to document communities across the United States and create public installations of the collected portraits in the communities in which they were made.
During the last five years, San Francisco photographer Christopher Irion has traveled over 20,000 miles and made more than 7,000 portraits in 26 communities. The PhotoBooth, a lightweight, portable studio, can be shipped anywhere in the world. It has been set up in cafes and in parking lots, at county fairs and in parking lots, in large cities and small towns. Some months later, if possible, an installation like this is created as a way to raise questions about community and show the community back to itself.
Once someone enters The PhotoBooth, they become an integral part of the project. All who chose to participate in the Brattleboro PhotoBooth Project are pictured here.
We extend thanks to production assistants Breton Schwarzenbach and Genna Nethercott, as well as Alex Haines, Francine Vallario, Lila Reddy, Roxanne Reddy, and Teta Hilsdon and installers Jim Giddings, David Giddings, and Robert Spring, all of whom played an important part in the realization of this project. The Town of Brattleboro was indispensable in allowing the project to happen.
Brattleboro, VT ,
11/23/08-
2/22/09
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Injured Soldiers and Marines: Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
November 23, 2008 - February 22, 2009
Well-known portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders was invited to make portraits of seventeen Iraq war veterans to accompany the 2007 HBO film, Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq. The film tells the story of ten of these veterans, exploring the emotional and physical price each has paid, as well as their patriotism and future ambitions.
Greenfield-Sanders built his career taking pictures of celebrities. He typically photographs politicians, famous artists, and cultural icons against a neutral background with minimal props. These simple compositions, with the portrait subject in a frontal pose engaging the viewer with a direct gaze, bring each individual’s personality to the fore.
He employs this compositional simplicity in his portraits of Injured Soldiers and Marines. Although these particular subjects have limited physical mobility, and in some cases emotional devastation—factors that complicated the photographer’s ability to interact with them and arrange their poses—Greenfield-Sanders kept his compositions simple and allowed his sitters to settle into their own poses against neutral backgrounds.
The resulting images allow the subjects’ humanity and physical energy to define their portraits. The images allow us as viewers to engage with the subjects’ eyes, expressions, and postures before we focus on their physical damage.
Portraiture has always served the purpose of recording individuals for posterity. We do not typically think of scars and prostheses as objects of beauty. Yet Greenfield-Sanders brings his talent for observing beauty —and humanity—to documenting these seventeen individuals and the significance of their sacrifice. These images are meant to highlight the physical imperfections of each sitter, yet ultimately Greenfield-Sanders communicates the strength, dignity, and fullness of each complex individual.
Rachael Arauz, Curator
Brattleboro, VT ,
11/23/08-
2/22/09
Brattleboro Museum & Art Center
Chuck Close: Self-Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio, 2000
November 23, 2008 - February 22, 2009
Chuck Close, one of the most prolific and inventive portrait painters of the last few decades, is also an innovative printmaker. For Self-Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio, he chose the process of soft-ground etching.
Placing a piece of paper over the soft, waxy “ground” that covered each of twelve different metal plates, Close used a different colored pencil to make scribbled drawings on each plate. When he lifted the paper from each plate, some of the waxy ground pulled away, leaving bare metal where the pencil had made its impressions. Next he immersed the plate in a bath of acid that etched only the bare metal exposed by the drawing.
Close then inked each plate with a color corresponding to a different one of his twelve colored pencils. He printed each plate three times, creating a plate proof (a print with a single color), a progressive proof (a print showing the progression of the image as each color was added), and the final print (the accumulation of all the colors).
Usually, a single print made like this, from successive printings of multiple plates, incorporates only five or six plates. Close’s impressive use of twelve plates to create this work resulted in a densely layered and colorful image.
The final image, though a self-portrait, barely reveals any intimate emotional mood or expressive feeling. Close’s identity is revealed instead in his process. A rainbow of tangled lines featuring a soft, gestural quality brings the surface of the prints alive with the spontaneous movements of the artist’s hand. By offering the proofs for exhibition, Close foregrounds his working method and reveals the aspect of his identity as an artist that is creative, methodical, rigorous, and ambitious.
Rachael Arauz, Guest Curator
Brattleboro, VT ,
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