A solo exhibition by Mary Stuart Hall

Artist talk and reception Friday, November 15 at 5 PM

The Carlos Gallery in the Nabit Art Building at the University of the South is pleased to present Sympathetic Dissonance, an exhibition of sculptural installations by artist and Sewanee alumna Mary Stuart Hall, C’04.

Mary Stuart Hall creates sculptural installations that mediate text and other forms of cultural artifacts into a multi-dimensional experience. The construction of knowledge based on digested experience, combined with rich emotional content generate architectural forms integrated with interactive technology. The emotional experience of loss and inadequate memory runs through the content of the work.

In this exhibition, Hall explores a phenomenon known as sympathetic resonance, where under certain conditions, bringing a ringing tuning fork nearby can make a silent tuning fork begin to ring. Illustrating the materiality of sound in space, Sympathetic Dissonance considers how the idea and reality of encountering a landscape can be incongruous. The installation relies on the complex experience of a place and space to create a contrast between the idea of a place, an imaginary landscape, and the sensational experience of the material world.

Hall states, “The distance sound travels can define a space in ways that walls or lines on a map cannot. Political boundaries have evolved as lines often divorced from the everyday experience of a place. In contrast to a binary expression separating here from there, an ancient Germanic tradition defines the boundary of a town with a church bell. Any person hearing the bell is inside the town. By using sound to define a boundary, the perceptual experience of a place is incorporated in its existence. One could even be in two places at once.” Sympathetic Dissonance complicates the understanding of how we measure space and define a place.

Mary Stuart Hall is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She has exhibited work throughout the US and internationally, including an award for Best in Show at MINT Gallery’s annual juried exhibition. She was an artist in residence at ADAM Lab at Georgia Tech in collaboration with Eyedrum Gallery, and she was also the MFAST Artist in Residence at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Graduating with a degree from the University of the South, Hall completed a Masters in Art Education from the University of Georgia, and is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She teaches visual art at the Galloway School in Atlanta.

The University Art Gallery is honored to present Allegiance, a quiet and intimate exhibition of complex and beautiful woven textiles by Los Angeles-based artist Diedrick Brackens, on view from Oct. 25 through Dec. 13, 2019.

In Allegiance, Brackens plays with our expectations and associations, turning symbols, lyrics, and materials to new purposes. He refashions American and Confederate flags, he quotes and recasts the lyrics to the minstrel song Dixie and to the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, he makes the language of advertising both sentimental and subversive, and he - an African American whose antecedents picked cotton in Texas - self-consciously transforms that fraught material into beautiful textiles.

Richly allusive, many of the pieces on view in Allegiance meditate on flags, their uses and their dense networks of associations (Americana, heartland, heritage, freedom). The symbolism of flags is disrupted, teased, and softened, and these abstracted flags are seen as if through a veil. We are invited to adopt a personal, thoughtful, and emotional point of view, and to meditate on the negotiation of belonging. We are invited to inhabit an intimate perspective, and to quietly imagine alternative ways of being and of relating to one another.

Brackens seeks to explore the liberating, redemptive potential of an intersectional perspective and a queer visual language – what possibilities might such a point of view and such a visual language offer all of us?

PLEASE JOIN US!

Diedrick Brackens will speak about his work at 5 p.m. on November 8, 2019 in Convocation Hall. Reception to follow.

Brackens was awarded the prestigious Joyce Alexander Wein Prize by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2018, an award honoring individual African American artists who demonstrate great innovation, promise and creativity. His solo exhibition darling divined, curated by Margot Norton and curatorial assistant Francesca Altamura, was on view at the New Museum, New York from June 4 to Sept. 15, 2019, and will travel to the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles in January 2020. Other recent solo exhibitions include a slow reckoning at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University (2017), and unholy ghosts at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2019). Brackens’ work was recently featured in the Hammer Museum biennial exhibition.

Opening reception and presentation Tuesday, October 29 at 5 PM, Torian Room, Jessie Ball duPont Library

The Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies and the duPont Library at University of the South are pleased to present Faces of Sewanee, a group exhibition of portraits by student artists from the Topics in Contemporary Painting class, under the guidance of Professor Jessica Wohl.

Faces of Sewanee gives Sewanee students a chance to actively engage in the conversation about representation on campus, particularly with regards to tradition, history, legacy and story-telling as understood through portraiture. In considering who they want to represent on the walls of our institution, students selected 18 individuals, from a wide variety of social identity groups, to celebrate through the painted portrait.

The paintings, displayed near eye-level in the student learning commons, compliment the portraits of the institution’s Vice Chancellors that currently hang in that space. By displaying these works alongside those of the Vice Chancellors, students, faculty, staff and alumni will be equitably represented, through the painted image, as significant contributors to our campus community.

About the project, Wohl states, “This exhibit allows members of our community, some for the first time, to see themselves, or someone like them, on the walls of our institution. The project is part of an important conversation institutions are having nationwide regarding who has been worthy of reverie and representation in the past, and who is worthy of representation in the present and the future. In this exhibition, the portraits celebrate all of us.”

At the opening of the exhibition, Professor Wohl will address the origins of the project and outline how this exhibition correlates to broader contexts and conversations about culture and representation in our country. Following this introduction, the student artists will briefly present on each of the portraits they painted, outlining their own stories, those of their subject and the inspiration for the people they choose to portray. A reception will follow.

In lieu of "Library hours: 7:30-1 a.m." please correct with "For additional information and hours visit library.sewanee.edu"

Torian Room
Jessie Ball duPont Library
178 Georgia Avenue
University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee
For additional information and hours visit library.sewanee.edu