Salina Biennial | 2020 Juror Statement
As the juror for the second Salina Biennial | Contemporary Art from the Mountain-Plains Region, I was first delighted by the response to the call for submissions -- over 600 works! by 235 artists! -- and then quickly challenged by the task of not only selecting excellent work, but also shaping a cohesive exhibition that might attempt to answer the question, “What even is contemporary art?!” The themes into which the works in the show were ultimately grouped emerged from the submissions themselves and the patterns of preoccupations I saw in them. My hope is that the resulting exhibition attests to the robust and lively arts scene of the Mountain and Plains region -- a scene that both demonstrates a great breadth and diversity of interests and modes of working and, at the same time, shares the core preoccupations of contemporary artists working globally.
The submissions and the resulting exhibition highlight a tension that characterizes contemporary art more broadly between, on the one hand, interest in pushing the envelope of the new and, on the other, a commitment to certain foundational traditions. The different sections of the exhibition draw out that tension. Work in the sections titled Pushing Materiality and Shaping Time and Space represents relatively new (historically speaking) ways of making art for a museum context and demonstrates a tendency within contemporary art to continuously expand the range of materials and experiences that fit under the umbrella of visual art. Working with contemporary art, one learns nothing so fast as to abandon expectations and embrace the mixture of curiosity and unease provoked by encountering something one does not know how to interpret. If you’re feeling bewildered -- welcome to the club! Let’s talk about it!
By contrast, the other three sections of the exhibition harken to more traditional interests -- in portraiture, still life, landscape, and abstraction -- that have defined the history of Western art from the Renaissance through the 20th century. The pieces selected demonstrate, I believe, how much can still be said and done within the constraints of these more familiar categories. And, of course, as always, what any given work can say and do for any given viewer will often exceed a curator’s ability to create neat categories into which to place it. As you go through the exhibition, I hope you make your own connections -- to individual pieces, as well as between works -- and think of the many exciting ways in which this show could have been conceived otherwise.
I am very grateful to all the artists who submitted work to the Salina Biennial and to Gretchen Boyum and the entire staff and board of the Salina Art Center for inviting me to be the juror and making the process of shaping this exhibition with them so enjoyable. It’s been a valuable experience for me, one that has inspired a deep curiosity and admiration about art and artists in a region to which I myself have only returned recently. I hope the Biennial inspires similarly positive feelings among the Art Center’s audiences, as well, and starts many thought-provoking conversations.
Ksenya Gurshtein, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS
Pushing Materiality
The works in this section take on surprising materials -- from raw coal (William T. Carson) to tissue paper (Meghan Miller) to keyboard keys (Bart Vargas). In their use of media, particularly Stephanie Lanter’s and Trisha Coates’ use of ceramics, they also break down any remaining vestiges of a boundary between “art” and “craft.” The works are big and bold -- something one often expects of contemporary pieces. Yet these works also defy the expectation that big and bold equals permanent and static. Some pieces are pointedly fragile. Others (Marc Durfee) are meant to be broken in the process of being seen. As in love and war, when it comes to means to an end, all’s fair in contemporary art.
Our Bodies / Our Selves
The works in this room speak to the ages-long tradition of representing human bodies and faces -- with various contemporary twists. Works in this room are proof that in a world full of selfies and casual documentation of our lives in myriad digital snapshots, portraiture as an art form still remains singularly powerful. It reveals something more than mere likeness and tells deeper and harder truths about ourselves and others. Works in this gallery that riff on familiar forms of photographic documentation were grouped together precisely because they underscore this point. The allusion of the section’s title to the iconic 1970 feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves is also no accident. Feminism, with its emphasis on the personal being deeply political, has been a profound influence on contemporary art and particularly contemporary portraiture, regardless of the makers’ gender. It is worth noting, though, that much of the work in this room is made by women, for whom the process of shaking off various patriarchal expectations and fully discovering their bodies and emotionally complicated selves on their own terms remains unfinished and urgent business.
...where nature ends...and culture begins…
The works in these two interconnected galleries depict “natural” and “man-made” environments, drawing on the historic traditions of landscapes and still lives. The division between the galleries is deliberately fluid, unstable, and somewhat arbitrary, however, since the works suggest, both subtly and unsubtly, the ways that things that are “natural” -- food and diseases, for instance -- intrude upon the human lived environment while the “human” -- pervasively present in everything from built environments to resource extraction to endless plastic trash -- intrudes on “nature.” The works selected do not romanticize nature, but do ask us to take a cold hard look at how we’re living as a species, with a number of works drawing particular attention to the habits of habitation found specifically in the American West. Do we like what we see?
Abstract Yourself
Explorations of visual abstraction and what it can do both aesthetically and socially to a significant extent defined the direction of art in the 20th century, creating both a remarkable legacy and, at the same time, lingering questions about how to frame the meaning and function of abstraction in a visual world that largely resists it outside the confines of gallery walls. After grappling with the question of “whither abstraction” for years myself, I recently became excited to think of it as a form of information and data visualization, whether it’s information on visual shapes and colors or on things which are fundamentally abstract and can only be experienced visually through metaphoric approximations -- Ann Resnick’s pieces created as a means of tracking the passage of time are a deeply moving example of this approach. The works in this room play around with form, serve as evocative traces of an artist’s activities in the studio, and offer a different approach to grasping the ungraspable, from spiritual and metaphysical experience to the inner workings of photographic technologies normally seen as producing the antithesis of abstraction. In each case, the map is not the territory -- that’s what makes it a map! -- and here, there’s the extra fun component of figuring out which is which.
Shaping Time and Space
One of the main ways in which artists are different from “normal” people is that their profession presupposes the need to make a lot of time and space to research, think, and reflect in unpredictable ways not dictated by standardized measures of productivity and efficiency. The works brought into the Salina Art Center’s Warehouse during residencies that are part of the Biennial are ones in which the artists in some ways share that freedom to explore freely as a gift with visitors, carving out time and space for others to meander, linger, listen, pause, reflect, and open oneself up to new experiences, often ones that engage senses beyond sight. Every once in a while, these experiences stick in the crevices of one’s mind as a moment when one felt one’s ordinary experience transformed or was transported from it.