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For an exhibition at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery at Bristol Community College featuring 21 alumni over a 40-year period, Chief Curator Kathleen Hancock prepared a statement inviting the former student artists to reflect on the significance of their education. They remembered “classrooms where critique was an act of generosity, where curiosity was expected, and where learning extended beyond technical instruction into a deeper understanding of how to engage the world.”
BCC’s art program is certainly not an outlier. It was true of the Swain School of Design. It remains true at UMD, even with the issues that arose a few years back. And if the experience of my colleagues is to be believed, it is the case at the Rhode Island School of Design, at Yale, at Cranbrook, at Pratt, at Parsons, at the Maryland Institute College of Art and myriad others. And I do especially believe those last five words: “…how to engage the world.”
In the last few weeks, I have visited “From Here: Bristol Alumni in Art, Design, and Creative Practice” at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz, painter Pamela Hoss’ “A Lifetime of Looking” at the Dartmouth Cultural Center (DCC) and photographer Dilge Dilsiz’s “What Remains” in the Visitor Center at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park (NBWNHP). All engage the world, albeit in rather different and unanticipated ways.
The exhibitions constitute a serendipitous trifecta.
Hancock notes that “From Here” is an acknowledgement of both place and a point of departure. It speaks to BCC as a spot where art students began their creative journeys.
There are a number of artists in the exhibition that have a decidedly pop art sensibility, and none more so that painter David Aguiar, displaying “Would You Die for Art?” It includes an exploding “BANG!” seemingly right out of the original Batman television series (which premiered in 1966), Warhol’s illustration of a banana that was used on the album cover of “The Velvet Underground & Nico” (released in 1967), and a painted version of a segment of the infamous assassination photograph of a Viet Cong political operative (taken by photojournalist Eddie Adams in 1968.)
Rene Gagnon’s “Segmentals Vll” (spray paint, oil bar, ink, liquid polymer and a textured pickup truck bed liner) is a delightfully silly large scale painting, existing in a place between pop, abstraction and calligraphy that joyfully includes a grinning cartoon skull.
“Past, Present, Future Unknown” by Rhode Island-born, Scotland-residing Jeff Edwards has an undeniable painterly sensibility about it. But the vibrant portrait, possibly of the artist himself, is a Giclée print of a color negative and it exists in the realm between art and science.
“Wild Geese” by Germana Rodrigues manages to be both mysterious and charming. A woman stands in an urban landscape. Her hair is an updo and she has on a pair of pearl earrings. She wears an apron with a butterfly pattern. She coddles a large fowl in her arm and from its leg, there dangles a golden heart and in the sky, many geese flock.
Judy Volkmann’s “Meditation #3,” depicts a hummingbird far too close to a woman’s face and perhaps what is a drop of blood on her lower lip. Both paintings give off a lowkey Hitchcockian vibe.
Bhen Alan’s “Communion” is a three-dimensional wall unit that looks a bit like an upscale paper towel or wrapping paper dispenser. On a roll of brown paper, there are tiny etching and aquatint prints featuring images of a man about to indulge in something … a toke? A snort? But whatever it is, it certainly isn’t the Holy Eucharist.
Over at the Dartmouth Cultural Center, Hoss exhibits roughly a dozen works of art in a variety of media. She is an impeccable painter, collagist and draftswoman.
Like the BCC alumni show participants, she long ago learned how to engage the world. For her, it is with a strident discipline, affection, dedication, kindness and grace. She has done many portraits of friends, family, colleagues and local artists. Now in her late 70s, Hoss is an elder stateswoman of the local art community.
“The Wedding Dress” is a self-portrait as a second-time bride. With a beatific look on her face and the poise of a dancer and her arms slightly raised, she resonates with the presence of a matriarchal goddess of ancient mythology.
“Seventy” is an elaborate drawing with a relatively contemporary self in a tutu and ballet slippers in the center, surrounded by other versions of herself, such as a kindergartener, an elementary school kid, a tween, a teenager and as a college girl.
“Kim” is a portrait of Kim Gatesman, a printmaker, painter and multidisciplinarian artist, who was once a student of Hoss. She sits in a wooden chair with her fingers interlocked and sporting but the barest suggestion of a smile.
The exhibition is rounded out by a few backyard paintings, including “The Secret Garden,” a vertically oriented landscape that includes a birdbath, potted plants and a distant statue; and “Summer Sanctuary,” its horizontally oriented companion piece.
Dilsiz is an artist from Turkey, currently residing in Cincinnati, who works within a number of disciplines. Her work is hauntological (a term derived from Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book “Specters of Marx”) suggesting that the present is never fully present but rather twisted by residual cultural, political, or social memories of what once was or what was yearned for.
At the NBWNHP, she displays “What Remains,” a series of self-portrait photographs, wearing white, red or black dresses, and the symbolism of those colors is open to interpretation. The images of herself were taken at Fort Taber, East Beach, the hurricane barrier and an unidentified South End mill.
While the backgrounds are crisp and sharp, the artist herself is out of focus, blurred into purposeful distortions that may allude to being a stranger in a strange land. Noting that New Bedford was the “city that lit the world,” the room is intentionally underlit. Visitors are encouraged to utilize one of the provided too-dim lanterns to explore the space. The photographs are intermingled with lengths of rope and netting and a few lines of text that reads:
“inhabiting a trace
one cannot possess
worn thin &
chewed down
to the bone…
what remains
clings to the fiber”
Dilsiz, like Hoss and the alumni of BCC, learned how to truly engage the world, which is perhaps the most significant thing any artist should strive for.
The names of the three exhibitions, with a bit of editing and the addition of but a single word could read:
“What remains from here is a lifetime of looking.”
And that’s not a bad motto for such a serendipitous trifecta.
“What Remains: A Solo Exhibition by Dilge Dilsiz (Artist-in-Residence)” is on display at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park Visitor Center, 33 William St. until Oct. 10.
“From Here: Bristol Alumni in Art, Design, and Creative Practice” is on display at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery, Bristol Community College, 777 Elsbree St., Fall River until Oct. 15.
“Pamela Hoss: A Lifetime of Looking” is on display at the Dartmouth Cultural Center, 404 Main St., Dartmouth, until Sept. 26.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
