“Painting in the World: Reflections on Politics, Violence,
and Reconciliation”
NAU Art Museum, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ
September 16 – November 22
Reception: 
5 – 7 p.m., September 18, 2014

In September 2014, the Northern Arizona University Art Museum
will produce a juried exhibition of paintings created around
inter-woven themes of politics, violence, and reconciliation. The
NAU Art Museum believes that the global community faces a
turning point today in which economic, environmental, and ethnic
pressures threaten the integrity of whole societies. The Arab
Spring, wars arising from religious extremism and, conversely, the
efforts of many nations to maintain stable, consensual societies
are among the themes we hope to address in this exhibition.
Artworks included in “Painting in the World: Reflections on
Politics, Violence, and Reconciliation” have been selected from
the submissions by Dr. George V. Speer, Director of the NAU
Art Museum.

Juror:
George V. Speer is the director of the Northern Arizona
University Art Museum and Associate Professor of Art History.
He received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis
and his Master of Arts in Art History from Southern Methodist
University. Prior to his appointment at Northern Arizona
University, Dr. Speer was Curator of the Luce Foundation Center
for American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington, D.C. His research interests focus on twentieth-
century American art and culture and the political origins
and consequences of representation.

Sarah Wilkins 2014

The Juror: Alabama native Robert Sherer is an internationally exhibiting artist known for his use of unconventional media and for four incidents of art censorship. His career in the arts has also covered such disciplines as arts juror, critic, lecturer, educator, art dealer and international art competitor. Sherer studied painting, drawing, and printmaking at Walker College, Atlanta College of Art, Georgia State University, Rhode Island School of Design and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1992. He represented the USA in the 2002 Triennale de Paris, the 2001 Florence Biennale and was awarded a Lorenzo de Medici (il Magnifico) medal for his mixed media work in the 2007 Florence Biennale. His work is the subject of an art book, Blood Works: the Sanguineous Art of Robert Sherer, published by Kennesaw State University Press. Art galleries currently representing Sherer’s work include Kunstbehandlung Galerie, Munich, Germany; ArtExpo Internationale, Venice, Italy; and Lyman-Eyer Gallery, Provincetown, MA. He is a professor of art at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta.

“VISIONS 2014: Invention as Art,” at High Point University:
HIGH POINT, N.C., July 31, 2014 – The Sechrest Art Gallery at High Point University will feature the work of 11 renowned artists from across the country in its third annual exhibition “VISIONS 2014: Invention as Art.” The exhibit, which opens Aug. 18, will remain in the gallery until Oct. 16. A reception will be held on Sept. 12 at 7 p.m. The VISIONS exhibition explores the realm of inventions in 2D and 3D format, showing artwork in the form of drawings and sculptural works, including kinetic sculpture that started out as invention. Gallery hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Admission is free. Call 336-841-4680 for further information. Press release continues at: http://www.highpoint.edu/blog/2014/07/sechrest-gallery-to-showcase-invention-as-art/

Sarah Wilkins     Blowout Preventer   2014

Pablo Picasso: I want to know one thing. What is color?
Come see for yourself how artists from all around the country
have responded to the challenge “What is color?” – in large scale
installations, works on canvas, assemblage, photography, mixed
media, fabric art and sculpture. 100 pieces were selected out of
the 1740 submissions received, by esteemed juror, Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum Assistant Curator, Lauren Hinkson.

Says Hinkson of her experience jurying the show:
The submissions for Color span a wide range of media and
subject matter with some artists embracing a bold and vibrant
color palette while others took the title of the exhibition as a
point of departure to explore the notion of color conceptually.
Many of the paintings manifest strong links to historical styles
such as gestural abstraction or photorealist painting. The
installations and sculptures reflect an expressive use of materials
that sometimes reveal humorous or poetic underpinnings. The
final exhibition highlights the high quality displayed in all of the
submissions while representing the diversity of these
sophisticated and intelligent works.
 

Sarah Wilkins          Escapist Fantasy  2014

“Dimensions 2014,” Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, Winston-Salem NC
Associated Artists of Winston-Salem celebrates the 50th anniversary of our National Juried Exhibit, “Dimensions”. The first “Dimensions” exhibition was held in 1964, so this year’s competition serves as a testament to the ongoing success of the show.
Juror Jean McLaughlin
June 6-July 7, 2014

Sarah Wilkins         Islands of Stability 2014

Mondrian was one of the early modern painters who explored ambiguous pictorial space.  And in this computer meta-analysis of the “image features” of his paintings over time, we zoom out for another take on his body of work.  His point of jumping off into total abstraction and moderated color happens late in the game. The computation further suggests –metaphorically –how we find ourselves as artists and viewers toggling between the concrete and screen worlds in the short space of one century.  (Caution extreme math ahead.  The video animation is fun though).

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“Here is an example of the use of animation to show patterns in time. Mondrian’s paintings are plotted sequentially according to the year when they were painted; the year is shown in the upper left corner. (Note: Since we don’t know the exact dates of the paintings, a particular order used to render paintings in each year is not important.) Visualization uses a standard statistical technique called PCA (Principal Component Analysis) to project 60 different visual features calculated over each of Mondrian’s paintings into new dimensions. (PCA_1 is mapped into X, and PCA_2 is mapped into Y).

As previous visualizations, this animation maps visual similarity into distance. However, now distance codes similarity not along a single visual dimension such as brightness or saturation, but along dozens of dimensions combined together.

Digital image processing allows us to measure images on hundreds of other visual dimensions: colors, textures, lines, shapes, etc. In computer science, such measurements are often called “image features.”

We can map images into a space defined by any combination of these features. For example, the following visualization of Mondrian’s paintings maps uses average saturation to X-axis, and average hue to Y-axis. (X coordinate of an image = a median of all pixels’ saturation value; Y coordinate of an image is a medan of hue values.)

Although an average of all pixel’s hues may seem like a strange concept, this feature measurement turns out to be quite meaningful: it reveals that almost all of 128 Mondrian paintings created between 1905 and 1917 fall into groups: those dominated by yellow and orange (bottom) and those dominated by blue and violet (top).”  Looks like this:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/06/mondrian-vs-rothko-footprints-and.html

Piet Mondrian Paintings

An estimated 64 million new residences are currently vacant, built to promote China’s GDP but not attracting enough affluent buyers.  Without jobs, there is little incentive to move to these cities, which at best have 20-25% occupancy–Ordos, Zengzhou, Baihai, Tianducheng, Tieling, Lanzhou New Area, and more. In Lanzhou 700 mountains are being leveled to create the new metropolis. The speaker in this video calls them “the modern equivalent of building the pyramids”:

An exhibit of four artists work for the month of December in the Suntrust Gallery.
Sarah Wilkins exhibited sixteen paintings done in 2012 and 2013.

To find out what’s currently happening at The Durham Art Guild, go to:

www.facebook.com/The DurhamArtGuild

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Golden Belt Building 3 is open to visitors every Third Friday
from 6-9 pm. Works of about 30 artists are on display in studios.

For current info about what’s going on at Golden Belt:
www.facebook.com/goldenbeltarts

“Islands of Stability”                                                 30″ X 90″  Acrylics on canvas

Permanent installation at UNC Chapel Hill.

world of illusion

WHERE

ONCE