A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Alfred University
SUBJECT TO CHANGE
HENRY GLAVIN
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
The Alfred University Honors Program
Under the Supervision of:
Chair: Wayne Higby Committee Members:
Ashley Lyon
Stephanie McMahon
May 14, 2014
The artwork created during my senior year has been an exploration of material and visual language in order to discover the most effective way for me to communicate through art. Influenced by ceramics, glassblowing, printmaking, and photography, I began to extend the surface of my paintings by layering material.
Exhibiting my work six times in the past year has allowed me to develop my process and visual communication skills, culminating in my BFA thesis exhibition Stills.
My work is often based on personal narrative. However, I strive to embed my story in abstraction to allow the viewer to enter the work and engage in
conversation with it. Struggles with speech have always pushed me to communicate through material in order to illustrate emotion. The need and desire to publicly express myself led me to investigate methods of exhibiting in gallery spaces, which has had a large effect on the trajectory of the work. Due to this desire to publicly speak through my work, I have made the effort to present the work as part of six exhibitions. In the context of these exhibitions, I was able to treat my time in the gallery as a part of the making process and, therefore, this time became integral to my ability to communicate. Instead of seeing the gallery as an end point for the work, it became a second studio. By spending a week installing a floor installation or deconstructing layered paintings over time, I have explored a form of private
performance, which I feel elevates the relationship of communication between the viewer and object. My honors thesis project extends to a broader spectrum of work than my BFA thesis exhibition to include all of the work created during my senior year.
A painter raised me. My first access to art was abstract painting. At a young age I began to struggle with communication due to a speech impediment. I was quickly drawn to visual expression and followed in my mother’s footsteps. I arrived at Alfred University having only had experience with drawing, painting, and a little printmaking. While I felt more competent expressing through making rather than speaking, my drawings and paintings were not satisfying my desire to communicate through visual means. During my sophomore and junior years at Alfred, I moved away from traditional painting. I found sanctuary in printmaking, glassblowing, and ceramics. While all of these material perspectives influenced my making process,
clay was my greatest discovery. The combination of a labor-intensive process and demanding technique with the direct use of my hands, in order to create form, was extremely freeing and rewarding. Moments of loss of control and dependence on the process during the firing were also appealing. When the clay is malleable it is completely vulnerable and responds to your hands the way paints kneels to the brush. This control changes during the firing and glazing process where a series of crucial events in the object’s success are to an extent out of the maker’s power. This process dependent mode of working has deeply influenced the way that I create art.
I began to search for the moments in making where organic beauty was able to live along side marks specific to my visual voice.
I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, in the spring of my junior year. This experience also had a huge effect on my current voice. In stark contrast to Alfred, a rural village full of art facilities, Florence provided me with an incredible wealth of cultural resources, but a lack of art making resources. This forced me to find new ways of exploring material and process. I began create work out of material
influenced by the city: wood out of dumpsters, food crates I stole from the market, and stucco instead of clay. In addition to new developing new ways to approach material, I was also maturing my visual voice through photography. Throughout my travels, I have relied on my camera as a way to digest whatever new place I was in.
The persistent effort capture moments has changed the way I think about painting.
With these experiences behind me, I started my senior year knowing that I wanted to return to the language of painting. Although other mediums had been rewarding, I knew that painting was where I could communicate most effectively. I just had to approach it without placing any limits on the way I used material and process. The first exhibition I was apart of during my senior year was Ekphrasis, a group painting show. This was at a point in my work where I was heavily influenced by other artists and was exploring how they broke the rules of traditional painting. I was able to show two pieces, Compile (Fig. 1) and Kiefer triptych (Fig. 2), and get valuable feed back from in gallery critiques. While my work had not yet developed into the in gallery “during the show” transformation process, I had used layering techniques in the development of the work. I used tape, plaster, and painting to
build up thick surfaces influenced by the work of Mark Bradford and Anselm Kiefer.
These works went through many different compositional changes and were in many ways a struggle to complete. I used the material and concepts I edited out of Compile to create Compile Perspective Study (Fig. 3). While this work was never shown in a gallery it was an important change in the way I approached arriving at a final work of art.
The next piece I created, Jim White (Fig. 4), was a big step towards
developing a method of building an extended personal narrative within a painting.
The painting was a biographical piece about my grandfather who had passed away several years earlier. Using tape and paint, I layered images that reminded me of him as well as specific moments we shared. By the end of creating the piece the initial images had been abstracted by surface and material so much that the final image appeared to be an abstraction. I was attracted to the openness of the image, although it still seemed to represent his character. While this painting is eight layers deep, I never completed the process. As a result, most of the work and imagery remains buried. The piece was shown in a Best of SUNY exhibition in Albany and is currently in the New York State Museum. Jim White was my first work of the Subject to Change series, which I consider still incomplete.
In a large scale 2013 installation, January (Fig. 5), I combined found objects such as raised garden beds, stakes, windows, and doors, with ephemeral and process driven material such as burlap, drywall tape, paper, and drop cloths. The piece was meant to be viewed from Robert Turner Gallery’s second floor mezzanine, forcing an elevated one-point perspective that visually flattened the installation and imposed a boundary between the viewer and material. I was lucky to get this chance to have a two-person exhibition entitled Venn Diagram and worked with Claire Morgos for a straight week in the space creating the installations. I had never worked with
another artist in this way, and while we created our own individual pieces we tried to build a relationship between our works. For this piece, January, I also worked off of a personal narrative setting, which suggested my mother’s vegetable garden at our farmhouse. I attempted to abstract this setting through interjecting other materials from the farm (burlap, windows). By including these materials in a work that evolved
in the making process, I was able to establish a consistent aesthetic that allowed these materials to function like drawing components. Usually my work is on the wall and allows the viewer to closely confront the surface. In this piece I treated my surfaces with a similar energy. However, I enhanced the scale and forced the work to be distant from the viewer. I found this experience to be extremely rewarding. I remain excited by this work’s unique relationship to the space and the wide range of conversations that were generated above it.
After Venn Diagram, I changed back into a painting mode and created a labor intensive piece entitled Trellis (Fig. 6). With this piece I felt I had really developed a way of painting that allowed me communicate through my art more effectively.
Following a personal narrative based on photographs, memories, and abstracted settings, I painted a densely layered painting on various types of tape that were supported by a trellis structure. After I had finished building the surface with image and material, I installed the work in a gallery setting (although it was never publicly exhibited) and began a meditative deconstruction process in private, which I
documented through still photographs. While this piece raised many questions, including my material choices and execution of process, it was a huge turning point in my approach to painting. I found a way to extend the surface, use my hands directly in the image making process and lose control as well as insert organic beauty in the process through the unpredictability of the way the tape responded to the paint.
After completing this piece, I was asked to show work in a diptych show hosted by the painting club. In this exhibition I was able to investigate the same process of construction developed in Trellis by showing a work entitled Off the Porch (Fig. 7). This work was built on a window and layered images of two chairs, followed by layers of canvas and burlap. I build a box-like-structure (also used in Jim White and January) on the floor in front of the work, so that I had to enter it in order to interact with the material. The work also followed a personal narrative involving my relationship with my twin brother. I was referencing our figures through the image of the chairs. Over the course of eight days, I deconstructed the work so that the pile of ephemera grew on the floor inside the box as layers where revealed. While this
work accessed the method of suggesting the painting’s layers of time, I believe that the connection between the piece on the wall and the material on the floor was disjointed and therefore I judged the work unsuccessful. I also experimented with displaying the documentation along side the in progress piece. I believe that this distracted from the actual work in the moment and that the documentation should function alone. This piece gave me a lot to improve on for the next work.
I came to the clear realization that the artist has experiences both physical and psychological during the making process. These are personal and in many ways lost, while the viewer experiences moments in the art that are not available to the artist. This builds a three-way conversation between the artist, object, and viewer that becomes richer with the evolutionary transformations of the work. This dynamic reveals a subtle, complex and indispensible form of communication.
My final show in Robert Turner Gallery was a two-person show on the Mezzanine that included the deconstruction of six works over the course of the exhibition. I included work from throughout the year, all of which was layered and allowed for multiple readings. In this exhibition, I focused on executing multiple permutations of my process, in order to explore new methods of working. The work included in the exhibition was Agnes Martin (Fig. 8), Modern Dichotomy (Fig. 9), Seat (Fig. 10), Case (Fig 11), Shed Study (Fig. 12), and Court Study (Fig 13). This show taught me a lot about how my process functions in a gallery setting and gave me the opportunity to prepare documentation of former work and exhibit it in conjunction with new work for presentation during my thesis show.
My BFA Thesis Exhibition, Stills, is the culmination of my investigation into my particular idea of visual communication. Included will be three new works: one work from Subject to Change and the documentation of eight works from
throughout the year. Instead of working on the pieces in the gallery over an extended period of time, each piece will be shown in a separate stage of it’s development in order to communicate my interest in process. Around the corner from the work will be eight digital prints of past pieces to show a development of my ideas throughout the year and to experiment with the effectiveness of the pieces
living on through digital images. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photography, which was composed in a grid, influence the format of the documentation.
My senior year has been a tremendous opportunity to develop an
independent studio practice where I have had all the freedom of a private practice, but the support and input of an academic setting. Art making is an integral part of my life and I feel as though I have begun to develop a methodology of making that will allow me to best visually communicate. The opportunity to investigate so many permutations of my process in the gallery setting has allow me to develop and test the commutative abilities of my paintings. This has helped me find my visual voice.
My work has grown over the past six months more then any other period in my life.
I am excited to keep the momentum going after school.
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