NEWS FROM CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 26, 2004
CONTACT: Mike Stepanovich, 661/664-2456 or mstepanovich@csub.edu

California State University, Bakersfield’s Todd Madigan Gallery is hosting an exhibition of new work by CSUB faculty titled “The Painting has a Dream.”

The exhibition, which runs through Nov. 13, includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography and installation pieces.

“The title of the show is a Sonic Youth lyric and conjures a vivid idea that a painting could possess a conscience,” said Ted Kerzie, CSUB art professor and chair of the art department. “What would a painting dream? Are paintings the record of dreams to begin with? Do paintings dream of three dimensions, wanting to be sculpture, wanting out of the pictorial plane?”

Each artist, all CSUB art professors, in the exhibition brings to this concept an original, independent and mature work or group of works.

• Using found materials which she then manipulates, Joyce Kohl bridges ancient traditions with modern industrialization in her steel and adobe assemblages. Kohl says she is “alluding to architecture and artifacts, both primitive and contemporary” and wants the viewer “to reflect on the artifacts that we leave behind for future generations.”
• Like Kohl, Mike Heivly is connecting past generations to contemporary issues in his series of recent photographs. The work consists of several 36-by-24-inch minutely detailed close-ups of headstones of veterans buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. The extreme close-up of the images coupled with the repetitive, horizontal installation works to magnify not only the text on the head stones but the enormity of it’s meaning.
• Kerzie takes viewers to a hypnotic nether world in his abstract paintings. They are acrylic on canvas and are made by a process of painting colors on canvas through stencils that Kerzie designs himself. The result is a rich and rewarding optical exercise.
• George Ketterl creates a different kind of optical effect with his unique approach to painting. He makes an image behind the painting that can barely be discerned through the tightly stretched silk that makes up the outermost pictorial plane. If Kerzie’s work lets the viewer consider the imagined three-dimensional space, Ketterl’s paintings let that space actually exist physically in the work.
• Margaret Nowling has done a full-scale, room-size installation designed to elucidate the very private process of art making. Including numerous drawings, sculpture and painting she reveals to the viewer how her ideas evolve in preliminary sketches and writings. Operating almost like a workspace she actually makes her process the work. And adhering to the Dada concept introduced by Marcel Duchamp that “the viewer finishes the piece,” Nolwing leaves an area for viewers to comment on the piece and add their comments to the work itself.
• David Laughing Horse Robinson’s paintings in the show entice the viewer immediately with their vivid colors and vibrating shapes. Robinson, like Kohl and Heivly, deftly bridges his contemporary mark-making with his ancestor’s symbols in his bold paintings.
• Drew Dominick bridges old and new, too, by culling another view of the American West as seen through the eyes of Charles Russell or Frederick Remington. Borrowing from the work of these two American masters, Dominick takes their images and out of disparate materials found around the house or studio, transforms them into three-dimensional tableaus that ironically refer to history but are made up of modern materials like drywall and telephone books.
• Sarah Vanderlip’s large-scale photograph documents a recent sculpture she made of two highly polished aluminum end caps (or truck heads) that one often sees on the ends of big oil tanker trucks. They are welded together, professionally polished and mounted vertically to the ground. The surface is so reflective that it absorbs whatever it mirrors acting like a large vortex – an "Alice in Wonderland" kind of hole in the earth.

The gallery is open Tuesdays through Thursdays from 1 to 5 p.m., and Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. For more information please call the gallery at (661) 664-2238.

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