October 30-December 16, 2012

MetroPAL.IS., the creation of the contemporary artist Shimon Attie, is presented in an oval configuration of eight video screens with the viewer standing within the oval. The artist’s intention is for the artwork to re-imagine and re-configure the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis by engaging their shared secondary hybrid identitythat of being New Yorkers. In many ways, the artwork is as much about what it means to be a New Yorker, to live in the United States, and to have a layered identity as an Israeli or Palestinian as it is about conflict in the Middle East. The artist invited twenty-four members of both communities, of various genders and occupations, into his studio to be filmed individually. They reflect in pairs not only their Palestinian and Israeli identities, but comparable occupations and conditions. Each participant read a scripted part from a hybrid document that Attie created, that merges the Israeli Declaration of Independence from 1948 with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence from 1988. When a few obvious key signifiers are removed, it is remarkable how much the two documents overlap and mirror each other. MetroPAL.IS. has been crafted and edited such that, like a Greek chorus, there are times when only one individual is speaking, or two, or eight, or none. Attie conceived of the piece in musical terms, with the relationship of individual voices being thought of as a score. The overall outcome results in the viewers finding themselves in a quasi endless hall of mirrors, of uncannily similar claims, assertions, and visages, alternating between a boisterous chorus and a single plaintive voice.

The success of MetroPAL.IS. is predicated in the belief that political discourse is best carried out by the personal voice of individuals, not by governments or political entities. Reconciliation is at the heart of MetroPAL.IS., yet ultimately the artist’s intention was to create a layered artwork that resists easy interpretation and defies expectations or preconceived notions as what it means to be an Israeli, or a Palestinian-and a New Yorker, or by extension, an American. The commissioning and presentation of this multiple-channel immersive HD video installation originated with and was supported by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Its presentation at the Benton is supported in part by the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Shimon Attie with Vale Bruck MetroPAL.IS., 2011 Eight-channel high-definition video installation Digital video, color, sound; 11:41 minutes Editor and audio post-production: Paul Hill, Wexner Center for the Arts Production Managers: Neta Zwebner-Zaibert and Hilla Medalia (kNow Productions) Field Producer: Jamie Abrahams Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

October 23-December 16, 2012

September 4-October 14, 2012
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5-7:30 pm
The Evelyn Simon Gilman Gallery

“The dark side of life” is a quote from the German artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) when comparing painting to the graphic arts. Klinger said that the black and white abstraction of the graphic arts was better suited to depicting the emotional and social realities of contemporary life than the coloristic optimism of painting. His work embodied this dichotomy as did that of his fellow artists Alfred Rethel (1816-1859) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). During the latter half of the 19^th century, all three created narrative cycles of thematically related works in print media that dealt with the realities of life directly and indirectly. Their picture stories, as a genre of storytelling, were hardly new, and their most immediate predecessors were from the 18^th century: William Hogarth’s “modern moral tales” and Francisco Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres. The three 19^th-century artists confronted contemporary society with narratives about the consequences of societies deeply divided by class and economics or with imagery that dwelled on individual psychology.

Rethel’s Another Dance of Death (Auch ein Totentanz, 1849) is the best-known visual commentary on the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848. While the title of the six woodcut images is based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death published in 1538, Rethel’s image of Death is as a seducer of the lower classes to riot to subvert the social and political order, but their actions result only in death and destruction. The thrust of Rethel’s visual commentary is reactionary and anti-republican, and has little sympathy for the lower and middle classes. His imagery, however, is both powerful and sarcastic, and found such a huge audience that the number of folios printed between 1848 and 1849 ran into the thousands.

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1897 narrative cycle The Weavers’ Revolt (Ein Weberaufstand) stands in striking contrast to Rethel’s position. Based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1893 play The Weavers (Die Weber), the narrative relates in generalized terms the events of an equally abortive revolt by Silesian weavers in 1844; an uprising that again leads only to death and destruction and not to change. Kollwitz’s sympathies, however, lie with the peasant workers and the intensely difficult economic circumstances under which they lived. Both Rethel’s and Kollwitz’s narratives serve political ends, and their differences reflect the increasingly complex social picture of 19^th-century Europe.

Max Klinger, like Rethel and Kollwitz, focused on the “dark side of life,” but for him it was more the individual than the social group. By “dark side,” Klinger meant psychological figments of the imagination, the sordid and the abnormal, the good and the bad of reality and of the psyche. In varying degrees these qualities are seen in Klinger’s narrative cycles that carry titles like Eve and the Future, Dramas, A Life and On Death, Part I and Part II. The most famous of his narrative tales and the most psychologically complex, however, was the cycle of ten etched plates comprising his 1881 story, A Glove (Ein Handschuh), which centers on the psychological turmoil of the protagonist who has found and kept the dropped glove of an unknown and beautiful woman. This sexual and fetishistic fantasy resonates in the 20^th century, and it predates Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams by two decades.

Besides these three folios, two other narrative series by Klinger and Kollwitz are presented in “The Dark Side of Life.” The five sets together represent the emerging interest in 19^th-century Europe in narrative series that thematically engage the modern world and whose visualization does not rely on religious or mythological premises. Rather the modern world is seen in an unconventional and oft times searing light.

June 2-August 5, 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 artwriting a Master’s thesis on the Use of the Found Object in Dada and Surrealismand 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.

 

 

June 2-August 5, 2012

 

 

March 22-May 20, 2012

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.

January 17-March 11, 2012

As a land-grant university, the University of Connecticut has a long history of acquiring and preserving garments and textiles pertinent to the history of the State of Connecticut. Since 1898, when the Home Economics Department was created, many talented professors and students have worked to amass over 8,000 items, 3,500 of which are garments, making the University’s Historical Clothing and Textile Collection the largest such study collection in New England.

Cloth-making in New England had long been the responsibility of women who were central to the region’s industrial transformationas domestic producers of clothing; as workers in the textile and shoe industries; and as consumers and wearers of clothing and fashions. While Boston, New York, and other urban centers supplied capital, manufacturers seeking skilled labor and water-power established textile mills across rural New England, bolstering the economies of Mansfield, Manchester and Willimantic, Connecticut and scores of other settlements.

At the same time Isaac Singer began a revolution in home sewing for women with his design of an affordable sewing machine with interchangeable parts. Singer’s sales jumped from 2,564 machines in 1856 to 13,000 by 1860. Women all over New England honed their sewing skills by making Civil War uniforms on their home machines. In 1866 after the end of the Civil War, Ebenezer Butterick began producing patterns for women’s fashions in various sizes. Suddenly women, even in the modest townships of New England, could create the latest styles from New York and Paris.

This comprehensive exhibition displays fifty exceptional garments that express the development of women’s clothing in New England in the latter half of the 19th century.

Guest curator: Laura Crow, Director of Costume Design, Department of Dramatic Arts and Curator, University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection.

 

 

 

January 17-March 11, 2012

The works chosen for this exhibition fall into thematic groupings that reflect the strengths in the Benton’s collections and relate to a variety of programs on the spring schedule.

Ellen Emmet Rand’s life-size portrait entitled The Singer complements a Sunday afternoon performance of French vocal music on February 19 and Ben Wilson’s 1943 painting Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is meaningful in conjunction with the January 22 musical program Noch frei in der Kunst!

A selection of landscape views from the 19th and 20th centuries comprises another thematic grouping. These works range from the classical, ca. 1810, Borghese Gardens painted by Giovanni Maldurra, to Karl Bodmer’s 1850s naturalistic Barbizon forest on the outskirts of Paris, Stephen Parrish’s charcoal and pencil drawing of the moonlit coast of Marblehead (1880s), and George Bellows vibrantly colored painting of the island of Criehaven off the coast of Maine, ca. 1915.

The Benton’s old master collections are represented by a selection of Southern European works dating from the late 16th century to the very early 18th century. Italian and French drawings, French, Italian and Spanish etchings, and Italian sculpture are the principal focus of this group of works. Some are anonymous such as the terra cotta sculptures, but others are firmly attributed to artists like the Frenchman Phillipe Verdier or the Italians Ercole Bazzicaluva and Remigio Cantagallina.

A recently acquired rare and early lithographic figural work from 1952 entitled Despair by the African American artist John Biggers will be exhibited together with a selection of other works by African American artists.

And finally, among the many other new acquisitions included in this exhibition are photographs by Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), who was most famous for his photographs of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.