http://www.csufresno.edu/artanddesign/gallery/Current_exhibitions.shtml
2012 Artist Invitational
January 17 – February 10, 2012
KETAB: Scroll Series by Hadieh Shafie
Four artists’ exhibit works that imply an obsessive or repetitive process at the Conley Art Gallery in the Department of Art and Design at California State University, Fresno. The artists represented in the exhibition work in the mediums of digital media and photography (Kirkman Amyx), painting (Richard Bruland), ceramics (Roger Lee) and scrolled paper (Hadieh Shafie).
Art Professor Nick Potter, who helped organize the exhibition, said that “we were interested in bringing together a diverse group of artists who spend hours and hours working in a repetitive manner to create astoundingly interesting work.” Potter continues “a thread that combines the works of all these artists is the interweaving of concepts of time, repetition and obsessive art practices into the finished works.”
Photographer Kirkman Amyx is a digital media artist based in San Francisco. His recent work explores the use of photography as a data visualization tool which can allow for the seeing of patterns, structure, and meaning through image repetition. Through the use of image repetition, “Basic Cable” is a visualization that explores media over-saturation and the abundance of specialty programming. By capturing nearly 500,000 images, 7200 images per week and per channel, a unique visual representation is created of all 69 channels found on Comcast’s Basic Cable broadcasting.
Painter Richard Bruland has set himself the task of using only traditional methods and materials to produce paintings that - even in this modern world of sensory overload, can hold their own and draw people in. His work looks laborious and yet the forms he creates have an abstract quality. Born in Peru and now living in Los Angeles, Bruland is interested in making paintings that refer to landscape in a non-specific way. They are not about ‘that’ mountain or ‘this’ tree – instead they suggest the effects of nature and the real world.
Los Angeles situated ceramic artist Roger Lee explores the sensual relationship between the object and the body. He investigates forms that address the intimacy of form, scale, surface, gesture, and the human interaction. Through the repetition of folds and bulbous objects, Lee builds a relationship between the viewer and his or her body.
In creating her time-consuming paper scroll ‘paintings’, the Iranian born artist Hadieh Shafie marks the significance of process, repetition and time. In her KETAB: Scroll Series individual strips of paper have been marked with hand-written and printed Farsi (Persian language) text. Each strip is then tightly rolled to create a core, around which successive strips are added. During the repetitive process of adding paper strips to create individual rolls, text and symbols are sometimes revealed and often hidden within the concentric rings of the finished object. The time it takes to make each work can vary and the time spent in writing and rolling the strips of paper is an important part of the artistic process and a performative aspect of the making of this work.
