Fall 2007
 

James Turrell: Knowing Light
Saturday, October 13, 1:30 - 4 p.m.

Symposium and Dedication of Pomona College Skyspace
Bridges Hall of Music, 150 E. Fourth Street Pomona College

• Keynote Speaker: Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• Professor William Banks, Perceptual Psychology

• Conversation with James Turrell and Professor Arden Reed

Information for Educators located here.

Project Series 33: Jessica Bronson
September 4 - October 21, 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 5 – 7 p.m.
Artist Lecture: Wednesday, September 12, 4:15 p.m.

	Jessica Bronson perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) 2006 Seven light emitting diodes, integrated circuits and microchip housed in steel casing

Jessica Bronson is at the forefront of a generation of artists who use video to explore the history of film, installation strategies, narrative meaning, and sculptural practice. For over fifteen years, Bronson has created videos, moving-image installations, and, more recently, and on view here, LED-based text works that use images of nature and landscapes as a means to explore issues of mediation, representation, and subjectivity.

Mediation resides at the core of Bronson’s practice. Since the early 1990s, her work has oscillated between representations of the real and the artificial and confounded real time and cinematic time to create new perceptual experiences of everyday natural phenomenon. In her earlier work, Bronson typically combined and manipulated images and sound from thousands of frames of appropriated films, as well as her own footage of shots of natural subjects—such as clouds, flowers, trees, rivers, landscapes—in a series of video works that often use special effects to explore representation and perception.

For this exhibition, Bronson presents work that explores these issues in a new media—LED text pieces—and that continues to address her fascination with mediated experiences of nature. The works on view—perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) and for Helen Keller (both 2006)—reflect her ongoing interest in linking science and art practice, in particular the science of perception. They consist of moving text installations that employ the phenomena of retinal painting, in which one sees the image peripherally, or when one is not looking directly at the source. Emitting words and sentence fragments from sources related to color theory and perception, each body of work addresses a specific instance, phrase, or idea. For example, perpetual perceptual (speculative spectrum) references both Newton’s and Goethe’s investigations of color perception with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet text that flashes “an incidental result for/of an elemental principle.” A work about color and its absence, for Helen Keller is an all white LED that flashes “remain colorless,” referencing both Helen Keller and the culmination of the color spectrum.

Both works play with the transient, sensory experiences of perception and contemplation, where image resides as idea and idea represents image, creating a host of associations that Bronson artfully encourages. For Bronson, the poetic conflating of text/image/idea points to the nature of consciousness and perception, and the role of subjectivity in shaping experience, and therefore, meaning.

Project Series 34: Iva Gueorguieva
October 27 - December 16, 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 27, 5 – 7 p.m.
Artist Lecture: Monday, November 5, 3 p.m.

For almost ten years, Iva Gueorguieva has been painting strikingly beautiful abstract canvases with a foreboding undercurrent of agitation and drama. For the artist, painting consists of an emotive and sensuous experience framed in a conceptual and philosophical structure. Grounded in a firm grasp of modern art history, philosophy, and contemporary painting, her interests center around the absurd, the grotesque, caricature, and universal conditions of humanity: beauty, sex, violence, death. Olympia and The Dead Matador—created specifically for the exhibition on view here—represent the fullest expression of her painting to date.

Gueorguieva chooses feeling over reason, intuition over calculation, and the subjective over the objective. Like Romantic artists of the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries, she responds to the sublime and the gothic. And like her Romantic predecessors, Gueorguieva’s work takes an expressionistic and dramatic form, reflecting her state of mind.

Gueorguieva is also deeply invested in the history and practice of painting. She finds herself drawn to artists who successfully linked the philosophical, literary, and artistic concepts of the absurd and the uncanny with virtuosic painterly technique. Honore Daumier, George Grosz, Otto Dix, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya are all sources of inspiration with their powerful artistic expressions of raw emotion. Gueorguieva also responds to artistic strategies found in early modern art, in particular Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and German Expressionism, that paralleled her own: the fracturing of multiple spaces, the layering of simultaneous multiple narratives, and the liberation from a pre-Modern, or Renaissance, space.

The Project Series
Now in its tenth year, the Project Series is the Museum's program of focused exhibitions of work by Southern California artists. Its purpose is to bring to the Pomona College community art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, and concepts. Organized by Rebecca McGrew, this series is supported in part by the Pasadena Art Alliance and Sarah Miller Meigs. A catalogue accompanies each exhibition.