Flying the Friendly Skies; My Contribution to Improving the Economy

This week I have the pleasure of traveling to Florida to attend opening receptions for two exhibitions that include my work. It sounds very cosmopolitan and exciting, except that the exhibits are back to back and hundreds of miles apart.  I need to be in Sarasota one day, Tallahassee the next, and while it was easy to get flights to each from Charlotte, it was nearly impossible to get from one to the other. It all seemed so logical. Fly from Charlotte to Sarasota, then from Sarasota to Tallahassee and then back to Charlotte. But obviously no one mentioned this to the airlines. So I will leave Sarasota, fly to Atlanta, (almost home), and then back to Tallahassee. It looks like I will be in the air almost as much as I will be on the ground.


SARASOTA

Venetian Lace.014, size: 24 X 20", encaustic
wax,oil pigment, resin, iron oxidation on paper
on panel © 2011 

On Thursday November 3rd I will be in Sarasota to attend events for the exhibition WOW, Women & Wax, that will be at Arts Center Sarasota. Curated by friend and fellow artist Elena De La Ville, I am pleased to be included in this exhibition along with several artists I know and hold respect for their work. Elena chose ten women artists from across the country who work with wax, and asked each to send slides from which she could make selections for the WOW exhibit. I like being included in small group shows where each artist can present a group of works rather than a single item. I will exhibit several recent works from my traces series and Venetian Lace series, including three that have not yet been shown outside of the studio. I look forward to visiting with friends and enjoying the opening reception events at Arts Center Sarasota, and I look forward to Sarasota enjoying what I anticipate to be a strong exhibition.

  

   Venetian Lace.014, DETAIL

WOW, Women & Wax
Arts Center Sarasota
November 3 – December 21
Reception: November 3rd, 5:00 – 7:00 PM

trace.111, size: 36 X 18", encaustic
wax, oil pigment, resin, iron oxidation
on muslin on panel © 2011 

TALLAHASSEE


After what I hope to be a pleasant trip to Sarasota, including lots of seafood, I will travel to the  Tallahassee, via Atlanta, to the Mary Brogan Museum for an opening reception on Friday November 4th for the exhibit COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET: Clothing Art as an Emergent Form. This exhibit will include four of my works, none of which are encaustic. Here I will exhibit two digital drawings and two installations from an earlier series that focused on aspects of memory/ experience and items of clothing as a metaphor for daily struggles. Several works from this series are on my website and I continue to use the images and the content of memory in my encaustic work. 


This show should prove to be interesting with many of the artists using clothing in response to humor, politics and social behavior. Again, I am pleased to be included with a group of artists from across the country whose work I respect. I am also pleased to be exhibiting at the Brogan Museum which is a community resource for visual arts, science exploration, and humanities education, and serves a large population of visitors through a variety of educational activities. Oh yes and BTW, I just got notice they are using my vesture.0114 image on the exhibition catalogue. Always a nice added bonus!!

they stand alone • size: variable, shirts, hangars, ironing board, © 2002

daily vestments • size: 48 X 80 X 50", wood drying racks, digitally
constructed images printed on vellum © 2001

pinpoint revealed • size: 20 X 24", digitally constructed and printed
image, graphite on paper © 2005

vesture series.0114 • size: 20 X 20.75", digitally constructed and printed
image, acrylic, prismacolor on paper © 2006

COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET: Clothing Art as an Emergent Form

Mary Brogan Museum of Art

November 4 – February 26, 2012

Reception: November 4, 6:00 – 9:00 PM

Expect the Unexpected; Using Found Photographs

My previous post on a series of digital drawings developed in early 2000, noted my use of found photographs that included vernacular images of individuals and family groups. The series originated from a body of drawings inspired by a collection of old photographs I purchased at a thrift store in the late 1980's. There were about thirty-five photographs of a family that appeared to span three generations, and whose relationship could be identified by strong resemblances to one another. There were a few first names and dates on several of the photos from the 50's and 60's, but nothing to clearly identify the people or their location except for one school picture with a man's name, the school, his grade and the year.


The photographs lay dormant for several years until the mid-1990's when I pulled the stack out of storage and began to consider using them in work. I had been scanning and manipulating photographs for a body of digital drawings I was developing, and as I browsed through this collection of intimate and personal family snap-shots, the images seemed ripe for exploring and producing new work. A number of my digital drawings, that included individuals and group scenes from the photographs, were exhibited across the US, and several were reproduced in publications including a 2001 South Carolina Triennial exhibition catalogue, the cover of Skirt magazine, and the exhibition announcement for the Rutger's National '96 drawing competition. My works with images of these individuals had begun to develop a life, or virtual life, of their own.

For several years I worked using part and whole sections from the photographs, never knowing details or if the individuals were living or deceased. In actuality, I began to develop my own narrative that played out in my head and in the work. Curiously, I was toying with an aspect of power and control over the images in my possession, and ultimately feeling a form of control over the individuals themselves. There was the aspect of including the figures in work and juxtaposing them in ways to my choosing, and there was the aspect of public exhibition and reproduction of the work in print and electronic media that fascinated and intrigued me with the idea of a virtual life that was developing for the images of these people, and evolving in a manner that was beyond my control. Irresponsible ?.....maybe. Selfish ?.... probably, but I continued.

In March of this year I was reading a local newspaper when I noticed a photograph in the obituary section that caught my eye, an almost exact reproduction of one of the photos in my collection of originals. It was one of the family members. There in print, was a small column of information with names, addresses, dates and details, that gave identity to the figures I had manipulated in art-making for many years. Unexpected? Yes, very unexpected and quite a surprise. It was eerie and odd, somewhat like the feeling experienced as a child when you are caught at something you know is restricted.

Class photo from the collection of originals.

       

Obituary Photo.

           

                                                                                       

Original photo from the collection.

words not spoken © 1999
Jane Allen Nodine

Original photo from the collection.

obligatory response © 1999 • Jane Allen Nodine
McKissick Museum, Columbia, SC

                                       

Original photo from the collection.

indefinite concern © 1998
Collection State of SC

restrained resolve © 1998
Collection State of SC

don't look back © 1995
Jane Allen Nodine

conjunct suspension © 1999 Jane Allen Nodine

Original photo of a girl collaged into a mix-media drawing
soon to be published in Artist Among Us 2011

In the Studio: Heading Into the Millennium of 2000

When I introduced Studio RSVP a few months ago, I said we would journey back and forth looking at past and present to see if the more things change, the more they stay the same. This post will fast forward to 2000 and show work I called 'digital drawings'. I had been using computer technology for experimenting with images in the early 1990's, and by '95 had developed a series of photo-based work I began exhibiting. I used found and original photos, and was scanning them into the computer where I could use raster programs to exaggerate pixels, grains, dust and extraneous marks along with an electronic marking pad that I used for additional strokes and manipulating the image.

By 2000 I had developed a reasonable body of the work that was output as print/drawings on rag paper up to 60" inches. Using a monochromatic palette in the digital manipulation stage supported my interpretations of the dated subjects that related to past experience or memory, and allowed me to go into the final printed image and work with graphite, charcoal, and toned pencils to continue mark-making and manipulation. The end result looked photographic at a distance, but  faded into a haze of marks, pixels and grains as the viewer approached the surface. The images seemed to dissolve as the viewer drew closer. I was interested in the ever-growing world of images captured in photographic stills and motion that insinuated the possibility of holding on to some past thing, and in some absurd way placing it in the present. Photographic images tend to be promoted as a way of slowing time with an on-going effort to grasp at the ephemeral.

Posted here is a selection of work from the 'traces' series from 2000, that after being stored for ten years, was recently selected for the retrospective exhibition 'TRIENNIAL Revisited' at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina. The South Carolina TRIENNIAL Exhibitions were organized by the South Carolina Arts Commission and the South Carolina State Museum between 1992 and 2004, and exhibited at the State museum. I was most fortunate to have been included in four of the five total exhibitions. TRIENNIAL Revisited is a juried exhibition from those five previous exhibits,  and serves as a prelude and historical context for what will become the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial.

' sweet tea '   size: 28 X 40"  digitally manipulated photo, print on rag paper, graphite © 2000

' high of 98˚ '  size: 36 X 31"  digitally manipulated photo, print on rag paper, graphite © 2000

' shared reality '  size: 43 X 32"  digitally manipulated photo, print on rag paper, graphite © 2000

' inherent ambiguity ' size: 28 X 37"  digitally manipulated photo, print on rag paper, graphite © 2000

' tandem concern '  size: 25 X 35"  digitally manipulated photo, print on rag paper, graphite © 2001

In the Studio; Ending the 1970's

In 1979 I graduated from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and while it was the height of an economic recession, I was fortunate to receive two fellowships in my first year out of graduate school. First was the NEA/Southeast Seven IV artist fellowship from SECCA, the Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC. Next was an individual artist fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission, an organization that has been highly supportive of artists living and working in SC. I'll post more about the fellowships in the future, but here I want to show a few examples of how my work gelled in graduate school into a minimalist style concerned with materiality and a heightened concern with surface, as I began to embark on my career-adventure as an artist. Keep in mind the poor quality of images have come from scanned film slides over thirty years old.

The 'integument series' of canary paper and masking tape. Applied directly to the wall with the same tape. These were designed to roll into a shipping tube, install and present in exhibition, then tear down and dispose. You can imagine just how much gallery dealers and museum curators liked me.

The 'integument series' varied in size and occasionally included multiple panels. The folds were a numbered sequence I developed for each work, and the units repeated to construct a subtle pattern.

Here an 'integument series' detail shows the translucence and opacity of the paper and tape as it layers in the folds. Attached to a white surface with standard masking tape only at the top, the pieces would hover diaphanously, just inches from the wall emitting light and creating delicate shadows.

In conjunction with the works in paper, I was producing a similar body of work that explored the subtleties of material and surface using canvas, latex paint and graphite. You might image the fun of documenting on film white paint on whiter paint with graphite on raw canvas.

This detail shows just how subtle the variations are in the latex color on raw canvas with no graphite. A large part of these works rested on the surface change in the painted raw canvas to the unpainted areas. A detail that cannot truly be recorded in photography. Something I continue to struggle with in my current work.

The works on canvas were based on the rectangle and were typically sized 36" wide and 48" or 72" long. Like the paper installations these also used horizontal bands that repeated in a subtle numerical sequence.

This image is a bit more effective showing some of the banding variations from the paint, graphite and raw canvas.

This detail on canvas gives more clues to just how delicate and subtle the surface I was developing.

In the Studio 1970's

I completed BFA and MFA degrees in painting and drawing in the 1970's. I also completed enough hours in jewelry-metals to hold a minor. I studied and was richly influenced by artists of the period such as Eva Hesse, Dorothea Rockburne, Jackie Winsor, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Lee Bontecou, Robert Morris, Richard Diebenkorn, Sol LeWitt, Michelle Stuart and more. This post will give a sample of my experimentation with materials and concepts in painting and drawing. (Note the poor quality of these images that were originally shot to slide film in the 70's and recently scanned for this post. If I had all the money I spent on slide film and processing, I'd be rich today!)

Butcher paper, rope, steel wool, staples

Rope, butcher paper, paper-pulp, staples

butcher paper, oil, staples, burned on wall

Canvas, staples, acrylic latex on wall

Butcher paper, oil, staples, installed on wall

Side detail of butcher paper & oil installation

Pulp-work, paper pulp, masking tape, string, rag paper

This is me in 1976 on the announcement of my first solo show.

In the Studio 2011

Because of my devotion to teaching, I continue to enjoy my position as Professor of Art at the University of South Carolina Upstate, and as Director of the Curtis R. Harley Art Gallery. Both positions have contributed greatly to my journey and made available opportunities that would otherwise be unrealized. One of the great benefits of these positions has been the requirement, or rather the gift of travel.

I begin the blogging journey by posting recent works completed in 2011 from the Venetian Lace series that is created with encaustic wax, pigment, resin, graphite and oil on panel. Future posts will document works from the past and jump forward to current developments, weaving to and fro as I chronicle the evolution.

As the blogging continues with more details of my past work,  followers will see the Venetian Lace series is actually a stretch for me at this period in my career. For many years I have worked more monochromatically, and in many ways past work has been more focused on content. The statement about this series explains how I got to this point.

Venetian Lace Series

The Venetian Lace series began when I was experimenting with new color combinations and tree resin. Early results immediately reminded me of the beautifully textured and colorfully weathered walls of Venice Italy.  Further exploration of the process rendered rich textures and patterns that were pleasantly reminiscent of my Italian travels when I was teaching there in the summers from 1999 to 2008. These are a few examples that reveal the luminous layers and play of lacework in the series. Currently I have works from the VL series that range in size from 10” to 36”. 

Venetian Lace.01- size: 11 X 12.5"

Venetian Lace.02- size: 10 X 8"

Venetian Lace.03- 11.75 X 12"

Venetian Lace.08- size: 30 X 20"

Venetian Lace.10- size: 9 X 9"

Welcome !!

Welcome to Studio RSVP. My plan is to use this blog to chronicle the development of my work in the studio beginning with the 1970's when I was studying at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Please join me as I journey back and forth looking at past and present, and we just might see if the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jane Allen Nodine

I'm Jane, but in the South you usually have two first names so my family often call me Jane Allen. For details on me and bio information check out my website at:  www.janenodine.com and follow me on Facebook at Jane Allen Nodine, Artist.