Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations)

Curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Whitney Moeller
Assistant Director
(312) 996-6114
gallery400@uic.edu

Color: Remixed and Expanded at Gallery 400

Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations)
April 27-June 9, 2012

Manglano Ovalle Guerro Negro3

Image: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Guerrero Negro, 2008, super 16mm film digitized to HD video.

April 17, 2012 – Chicago, IL — Exploring color as both a formal and a social force, Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations) arrays artworks around the gallery according to a loosely organized color spectrum. Envisioned by artist-curators Pamela Fraser and John Neff as an environment—a landscape—the project is created not only from works using spectral color, but also from instances of achromatic, invisible (infrared, thermal, supernatural), and variable (metallic, iridescent) color in art. Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations) reveals and embodies how artists navigate the complex interactions between colors, histories, references, and sensations. The forthcoming exhibition at Gallery 400 features work by 18 artists including Polly Apfelbaum, John Baldessari, Anne Collier, Gary Hill, Gaylen Gerber, Rashid Johnson, and Judy Ledgerwood, and runs from April 27 to June 9, 2012.

The guiding metaphor of a spectral landscape, and the inclusion of atmospheric or immaterial color phenomena, positions the exhibition beyond standard ideas of color as being composed of individual colors, as in color charts. In contrast to the conventional way of seeing color as the “color chip”—an isolated, perfect specimen of pure and even hue—Spectral Landscape concentrates on zones where colors blend and/or overlap, and where colors intersect with social, political, and historical concerns. The exhibition advances approaches to color that don’t conform easily to well-established territory, categories, or expected ways of conceptualizing color.

To this end, the exhibition features a diverse group of artists that represent a wide variety of genres and working methods. Gary Hill’s 1994 single-channel video Remarks on Color is a large screen presentation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book of the same name, which draws attention to the process of comprehension while reveling in the pleasure of beautiful concepts and sumptuous color. Richard Mosse’s photograph of a politically charged landscape derives its intense hot pink color from a discontinued military surveillance technology called Kodak Aerochrome, a type of film with infrared capabilities. Polly Apfelbaum’s name conjures up images of immersive floor installations filled with dazzling colors and patterns. Like much of her past work, Apfelbaum’s works for Spectral Landscape, Miss America and Reno, represent the artist’s connection to vernacular aesthetics and popular culture. In Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s video Guerrero Negro, 2008, the flat, saturated colors of a color-correction card play against the bright salt flats at El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, and against the skin tones of various individuals. The conjunction of simple elements, different embodiments of color, makes the piece a complex reflection on the construction of color as natural, cultural, or technological. Spectral Landscape also features three new, site-specific works by Gaylen Gerber (a backdrop paper installation), Anna Kunz (an immersive environment combining everyday objects and extant lighting), and Judy Ledgerwood (a large-scale wall painting).

What these and the other artists whose work is featured in Spectral Landscape share in common is a curious, probing, and non-doctrinaire approach to the use of color. The “shared differences” of these artists return us to the metaphor and material reality of the spectrum: it is a way of organizing experience that recognizes indeterminacy rather than imposing discreet categories on fundamentally unstable phenomena. Spectral Landscape addresses and enacts some of the methods these artists have adopted in order to navigate—to chart—the complex interactions between colors, histories, references and sensations, and to locate their work within that landscape of relations.

Related Programs:

Opening Reception
Friday, April 27, 5-8pm

Color Films
Film and Video Screening
Curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff
Wednesday, May 23, 7pm

The film and video works gathered in Color Films aren’t just in color; they’re about color. Like the exhibition Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations), the works are organized along a spectrum that registers changes in color, but also in expressive modality: from red to abstraction to orange to ritual to yellow to landscape and so forth. The films and videos all share an investment in locating these diverse incidents of color within lived experience. Featuring Infrared Nail Pull by Paul Dickinson, Carrie Yellow by John Kramer, Pink and White Terraces by Nova Paul, Flushing by Cheryl Donegan, and more.

Tours

Gallery 400 offers guided tours for groups of all ages. Tours are free of charge but require reservation. Please complete our online form (accessible on our website at gallery400.uic.edu/visit/tours) to schedule a tour of Spectral Landscape. For more information, or to discuss the specific needs and interests of your group, please contact us at 312-996-6114 or gallery400@uic.edu.

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Spectral Landscape (with Viewing Stations) is supported by the College of Architecture and the Arts, University of Illinois at Chicago, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Founded in 1983, Gallery 400 is one of the nation's most vibrant university galleries, showcasing work at the leading edge of contemporary art, architecture, and design. The Gallery's program of exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings, and performances features interdisciplinary and experimental practices. Operating within the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Gallery 400 endeavors to make the arts and its practitioners accessible to a broad spectrum of the public and to cultivate a variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives. Gallery 400 is recognized for its support of the creation of new work, the diversity of its programs and participants, and the development of experimental models for multi-disciplinary exhibition.