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The William Benton Museum of Art www.thebenton.org
In concert with the School of Fine Arts’ digital media initiatives and the debut of the interdisciplinary Digital Media Center early last year, the Benton presents an exhibition focused on the social and creative impact of digital media’s most ubiquitous arena: the Internet. From the development of the largely text-based and specialized World Wide Web of the 1990s through to the highly visual, user-generated Web 2.0 of the past decade, artists have continuously found inspiration in the form, context, and material of the Internet for their art practice. Screenshots brings together a group of national and international artists working in response to the production, circulation, and consumption of visual material online. Starting at the site of the computer screen, these artists appropriate and alter images and video from websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Craigslist. Reformatted and reframed through the process of collating, the digital image finds a place within the physical space of the gallery. This shift in environment moves the focus from the technology of the Internet to the activities, behaviors, and experiences that technology fosters for users both online and offline. In his 1927 essay Mass Ornament, cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer stated that to understand the character of a moment one should look to the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” of that time. Kracauer’s investment in analyzing the unconscious production of his surroundings for its larger meaning offers an apt approach for confronting the deluge of Web-based visual content. The screen and the images it offers are all surface; yet, through accumulation the six artists in Screenshots aim for depth, highlighting collective experiences of our contemporary moment and considering the impact of the Internet on the field of art. Screenshots features works by Pauline Bastard, Natalie Bookchin, Daniel Gordon, Phillip Maisel, Jon Rafman and Penelope Umbrico. Curator: Ally Walton, University of Connecticut M.A. candidate, Art History, 2012.
Philadelphia sculptor Leo Sewell (b. 1945) grew up in Annapolis near a naval community dump where he began playing with its “found” objects before he was ten. With the help of his father and access to his father’s workshop, he began creating assemblages using fasteners and welding. While in college in the 1960s, he studied modern art—writing a Master’s thesis on the “Use of the Found Object in Dada and Surrealism”—and decided to dedicate his life to making sculptures from manufactured objects. Over the subsequent fifty years, he has produced more than 4,000 sculptures. Sewell’s naturalistic creations are composed of recognizable objects of plastic, metal and wood that are selected for their color, shape, texture, durability, and patina. Using nails, bolts and screws, he assembles the sculptures into a variety of subjects and sizes including a house cat and other animals, a life-size lady and other figures, a forty-foot Statue of Liberty hand and torch and other installations. On exhibition will be more than a dozen of his colorful works, all of them “green,” both whimsical and serious, and the offspring of trash heaps, yard sales and flea markets. The January–March Events Calendar includes lunchtime Gallery Talks, afternoon Conversations in the Gallery, a series of Fashion Drawing workshops, and on February 18, 2-4 pm, a family event—“Vogue, Victorian Style,” with hands-on activities that involve learning about accessories, style and art of Victorian New England fashion. |
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