Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project Presents RE-SEARCH: THREE PROJECTS

Charlotte Street Foundation's Paragraph Gallery & Project Space present Re-Search, an exhibition that brings together artworks by Thea Augustina Eck (Ann Arbor, MI), Erika Lynne Hanson (Kansas City, MO), and Hillary Wiedemann (Oakland, CA). The exhibition opens with a free public reception of Friday, November 18, 6-9pm, followed by an artists' talk with the three artists, also free to the public, on Saturday, November 19, noon.

research, n.1
†1. The act of searching carefully for or pursuing a specified thing or person; an instance of this.

At the core of these three artists' works is a performative process: the artist self-consciously enacting the role of researcher, on a quest for new discovery. In all three cases, the artists are mining for information buried in original source material, which they pursue through acts of close interrogation, re-interpretation, and reenactment. The outcome of this searching takes the form of artworks including photographs, video and sound, sculpture, and installation. Yet while Eck, Hanson and Weidemann focus on events and mediums that are disparate, themes of memory, notions of the sublime, perceptual shifts, and landscape connect their projects and form the bases for a conversation among their works.

Thea Augustina Eck: It is Never Tomorrow:
The Sir John Franklin Expedition of 1845 boasted the largest and most technically advanced British polar fleet of its time. Meant to finalize a route through the Northwest Passage as well as to take magnetic calculations around magnetic north, the expedition's two ships mysteriously disappeared and ended in the death of all 133 crewmembers and their captain. In response to their silence and subsequent non-return home, an abundance of search parties, including American vessels, slowly ventured into the Arctic to find the lost crewmembers, and ultimately to discover clues about their final days. A trail of belongings and oral history tales scattered its way across the high Arctic.

This expedition's disappearance lead to the creation of a westernized Arctic map, to British land claims and more lives lost, and to new Inuit populations encountered and traded with. A Victorian-romanticized daydream of the loneliness-enshrouded arctic manifested, filled with courageous men blazing paths in an alien land-all without the acknowledgement that this same land was inhabited for thousands of years prior. Charles Dickens wrote about it, British artists portrayed landscapes and sailor life in the Illustrated London News, and private séances cajoled contact with the lost crewmembers and Sir John Franklin. It became not the private Arctic for British Admiralty, but a public arctic, an arctic weaving its way into the everyday network of British conversation. An arctic enmeshed in an over 150-years search for answers surrounding the tragedy.

This is where Thea Augustina Eck's It Is Never Tomorrow photographic series enters in: The unending search for the disappeared, where humans and wandering phantasms move through the landscape without knowledge of each other. Her photographs serve not to retell the Sir John Franklin expedition narrative, but to respond to the emotional landscape generated by its aftermath. They are the reply to loss, the act of being lost, and the searcher losing the path while in the midst of the search. They present the voyage into the Unknown, and also reflect the soliloquy of an artist's meandering path through a wilderness of pauses and enlightenment. In this, the Arctic functions as the backdrop, with its seemingly barren yet open and expansive horizon lines.

Erika Lynne Hanson: The Icebergs:
In 1859, Hudson River Valley School painter Frederic Church set out for the northern seas to paint the Icebergs. Church writes about the awe and experience of being amongst the glaciers: "Imagine an amphitheater, upon the lower steps of which you stand, and see the icy foreground at your feet, and gaze upon the surrounding masses, all uniting in one beneath the sea...Thus the beholder has around him the manifold forms of the huge Greenland glacier after it has been launched upon the deep, and subjected, for a time to the action of the elements." It is in his 1861 painting titled The Icebergs that Church tries to interpret this experience so that it can be shared with the viewing public. The romantic/realist style in which the painting is rendered leads it to be read as truth, as a record of time and place. But in fact the painting is an amalgamation of studies created over a summer.

It is this idea of reinterpretation that artist Erika Lynne Hanson is concerned with. Through creating weavings inspired by Church's sketches, which she situates in installations that also include objects and videos of melting ice, Hanson questions whether there might be new truths to be found "in an interpretation of a depiction of a stranger's memory." She describes her endeavors as follows: "The attempt to copy a painting through weaving exposes similarities, nuances, and failures. There is an inherent ephemerality in an object that is highlighted when you participate in its creation. The recognition that all things are in flux is vital and the Iceberg stands as an icon. The question is how are these musings translated into a context for the viewer to create their own connections and truths within objects?"

Hillary Wiedemann: Sans Soleil (Diffracted):

Sans Soleil, a 1983 film directed by Chris Marker, incorporates verbal ruminations on the nature of human memory: its nuances, fallibility, and perceptual shifts over time, with brief visual scenes from around the world. The film opens with a quote from TS Eliot:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place

Inspired by the themes in Marker's film, Wiedemann has attempted to dissipate memory even further by recording through diffraction grating, a video of the original Sans Soleil in its entirety. In Sans Soleil (Diffracted), she has removed the audio from the original film, and literally broKen Down its image into a projected visible spectrum as seen through a peephole. The result is an abstracted color field, a visible metaphor for the inability of memory to capture the entirety of an experience. The projection is a subtle suggestion of the original film, a recollection of a memory of a memory.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Thea Augustina Eck is an artist and researcher whose work responds to 19th and early 20th century Arctic and Antarctic exploration history. In the past 2 years, her work has been featured in solo shows at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the 1708 Gallery and the Earlville Opera House. From 2008-2009, Eck was an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow and Lois Roth Endowment Fellow at the Arctic Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her culminating solo exhibition received an Artist Grant from the United States Embassy in Denmark. Eck received her BAFA from Alfred University and the New York State School for Ceramics and her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her studio is currently located in Ann Arbor, MI and Pittsburgh, PA. www.theaeck.com

Erika Lynne Hanson's practice holds the act of weaving at its core, yet takes the shape of installations that emphasize the relationships of objects. The situations that are posed ask the viewer to question perceived expectations of stability. The ephemerality of an object is highlighted be it a plank of cedar, a potted succulent, or a bit of woven yarn. Hanson received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and holds a BFA in Fiber from The Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has recently been exhibited in Los Angeles, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chicago and Minneapolis. Currently Hanson has a studio residency through Kansas City's Urban Culture Project and is a Lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute. www.elhanson.com

Hillary Wiedemann is a multi-media artist whose work explores the subtleties of perception. Specific areas of interest include differences between passive and active states of experience, the shifts and breakdown of personal and shared memory, and a reconfiguring of the invisible to the audible. Focusing on the minimal moments of the everyday, she creates objects and installations that incorporate various mediums including video projections, sound, glass, light, reflective and refractive materials. Wiedemann received her MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts, and her BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited work in San Francisco, Oakland, Brooklyn, and Prague, and lives and works in Oakland, CA. www.hillarywiedemann.com

Charlotte Street Foundation is dedicated to making Kansas City a place where artists and art thrive. Through its Urban Culture Project initiative, Charlotte Street supports artists of all disciplines and contributes to city's vitality by transforming previously vacant spaces into dynamic venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

 

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