The Fine Arts Center Galleries at the University of Rhode Island, are the gallery complex for our state's own research University. They are comprised of three public exhibition areas -- the Main Gallery, Corridor Gallery and Photography Gallery spaces. These spaces have evolved considerably since the Main Gallery first opened as the sole exhibition space in 1969. Now the three discrete Galleries serve 75,000 visitors annually, with abundant complementary lectures, attendant programs and illustrated publications offered without charge.

The Galleries present a challenging program of contemporary visual production, some 18 exhibitions annually. Focus is in principle non-local. Annual calendars seek a balance between nationally and internationally recognized and emerging artists through solo as well as focused thematic group exhibitions.

The FILM ON FILM exhibit runs November 4 to December 12, 2004, featuring work by artist William Larson in the photography gallery.

William Larson, Director of Graduate Photography and Digital Imaging, Maryland Institute College of Art, is a nationally known, highly regarded and widely exhibiting fine art photographer and video artist. His works have entered major museum collections including the LA County Museum of Art, the Getty, the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and have been featuring in numerous solo and group exhibitions, from Rochester, New York to Tucson, Arizona.

FILM ON FILM is an informed look at movie film's uniqueness-as material substance and as an evocative subject for photography. Moving pictures meet (photographic) 'static art' in this exhibition but there is no conflict in this encounter. As the artist explains, Most of us, on some regular basis, escape into cinema. Ironically, there are no moving images in cinema. The mind is the great animator of the seemingly invisible stream of still frames that outwit and mystify human visual perception.

In its own hard look at media with which we all consider ourselves familiar, FILM ON FILM is a direct engagement with the shifting role of technology. As we move comprehensively from analogue (recording) to digital (rendering), story telling, time and even motion are re-defined, Larson asserts. Until 1998 Larson himself had resisted personal artistic engagement with video.

Originally trained as a painter, he had been a successful photographer (a "still" image maker) for some 30 years. When Larson did begin to practice video, he used its element of time to expand upon the sense of physicality and process of photography. But FILM ON FILM returns us to a photographic series and one meditating on the presence of real time and space by using film as the very subject, the protagonist of the images. Larson distills the history of film in a series of compelling images ranging from, as he states,

Events as mundane as a woman blinking (in four frames, as it turns out) or as unsettling as a man caught on film leaping to his death (disarmingly rational as a still image of 23 sequential frames), all conspire to reframe our sense of film, it structure and properties, while triggering the magic between our imagination and memory of cinematic archetypes and vivid personal experiences in viewing films of all kindsŠ

In the image to be shown called 100 Frame Re-Make of 'Triumph of the Will' the late Leni Riefensthal's Nazi propaganda film, a classic of cinema history, is seen as a double loop of suspended, free standing celluloid, tracked from two clips that hold it as a cursive loop. As in every image in this series, the interactivity of film with the filmmaker's mechanical production devices and/or film projector elements lends a tremendously intriguing design structure and also at times, as in this example, a sense of ominous mechanical manipulation.

Grafting small scale but potent images of film onto larger mechanical devices is Larson's route to stressing that such ubiquitous image/machine connections mandate our re-thinking. Larson still manages to privilege images over machines, the latter of which function, he says, to render possibilities. But he asks us to remember the generative potency of an image base: "the illusions and latent power of images seem able to endlessly mystify and penetrate our imagination." From a critical and audience perspective, Larson's FILM ON FILM, paying homage to film (moving pictures) through photography (stilled images) is a fascinating, multi-layered experience. William Larson's project is especially timely and suggestive as electronic media overtake our field of vision and of practice.

All of the URI gallery exhibitions are developed through in-house curatorial expertise from an international palette, rather than being imported to the University for a fee from organizing institutions elsewhere. This unique position among university galleries in the northeast enables us to develop timely exhibitions responsive to the changing tropes of contemporary art as well as to address shifting pedagogical concerns of the immediate academic community.

A visit to the Photography Gallery at URL practically necessitates a visit to the Corridor Gallery -- you'll walk through it on your way to either of the other galleries. From November 12 through December 13, 2004, the "UTAMARO'S PAJAMAS" features collages by Gary Richman.

Richman says "The collage process, with its provisional conjectures is, I believe, the most efficient, unconstrained and unbiased means of making esthetic evaluations. But pure and simple presentiments build on each other and extenuate. The result is often more than the sum of its intuited component decisions."

Richman has taught for nearly 40 years at the University of Rhode Island, where he also regularly exhibits his distinctive collage-paintings and his limited edition artist's books published annually by Blue Book editions.

To Richman, process is highly valued in the creating of an artistic product, a value he transmits avidly through teaching as a Professor of Fine Arts. The process of creating his collage paintings involves a great deal of private, personal immersion, from making, then tearing paper, arranging and securing individual elements and finally hand-painting the surface as a coherent entity.

His paper patterns result from sprays, paints and resist techniques, with new methods always tested through trail and error. (Richman was intensively trained in Printmaking, earning an MFA from Indiana University.) Once the paper is organized in sufficient supply, in the artist's studio, it is torn into many pieces and then re-assembled to enact highly varied combinations, the most joyful part of the process for this artist. Next comes the tedious task of taping and fixing the pieces together and finally, hand-painting to consolidate a visually complex - sometimes intentionally consonant, sometimes dissonant - pictorial surface.

Richman's work is non-representational. Instead it is abstract, which is to say unlike nature and its look. It is therefore artificial and essentially premeditated. As he writes in the Artist's Statement for the exhibition,

"My brand of abstraction attempts to be unburdened by representational cues. Sometimes art like mine appeals because of an apparently liberating absence of temporal references. This series of images, like others I have made, has no illustrative or symbolic intent. These images do not require your conjecture or speculation; they may be appreciated in the manner of certain non-intentional and often transient phenomena, like tree falls and sand drifts or the wrinkles of Utamaro's pajamas."

Richman's allusion to Utamaro, the highly regarded Japanese Ukiyo-e (Floating World) artist, is apt. Richman's artistic sensibility owes much to his influential 19th-century exemplars, for whom the cherished interplay of space and surface is fundamental. Indeed, such interplay has come to define what we mean by a work of "modern" art.

The third space is the Main Gallery. From October 12 to December 8, 2004, this space holds a group exhibit called "ABSTRACTION PURE & IMPURE", curated by Galleries director Judith Tolnick. These focused thematic group exhibitions curated by Tolnick are a highly anticipated annual offering. Prominent tropes on the national contemporary art scene are distilled and showcased through Main Gallery exhibition and accompanying illustrated brochure.

ABSTRACTION PURE & IMPURE is the latest installment to identify and treat a vital contemporary current. It examines the powerful resurgence of abstract (non-representational) painting, spirited work that reflects the present time and also frequently comments on a host of modern exemplars.

From a wide range of backgrounds and training, eight extremely talented contemporary artists are featured. They are Stuart Arends (born Iowa, lives Roswell, New Mexico); Carlos Estrada-Vega (born Chihuahua, Mexico); Tayo Heuser (born Washington, D.C., raised Africa, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan and the Ivory Coast; lives Narragansett, Rhode Island); Miki Lee (born Seoul, Korea, lives New York, New York); Markus Linnenbrink (born Dortmund, Germany, lives Germany); Jane Schiowitz (born Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, lives New York, New York); Stephanie Weber (born Lubbock, Texas, lives Berkeley, California) and Stephen Westfall (born Schenectady, lives, New York, New York).

The nearly 30 loans likewise have been drawn from near and far. In addition to the artists, generous lenders to the exhibition are the New York galleries Elizabeth Harris; Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.; lyonswiergallery; Margarete Roeder; Margaret Thatcher Projects; and from New Mexico, Richard Levy Gallery and a private collector.

While the traditional medium of oil on canvas is evidenced in the exhibition, works to be showcased also confidently manipulate many mixed-media combinations. Formats are insistently wide-ranging, too. Visitors will encounter over life-sized sheets of paper, unfurled, carpet-like, incised with near-obsessive calligraphic markings (Tayo Heuser); "sake" boxes which are 3-dimensional (5 sided) wooden supports for oil, pencil and wax drawing (Stuart Arends), a freestanding, more than 4-foot stack of epoxy resin and pigment called Landschaft (landscape) in German but entitled Layered in English (Markus Linnnenbrink); an intimate, only 10 inch square curvilinear grid painting (Jane Schiowitz); an even smaller painting, 5 1/2 inches square, whose grid is hand-crafted from individual cubes of pigment formed from oleopaste (Carlos Estrada-Vega); an exceptionally long, attenuated painting on aluminum called by the artist a "Strip" (Stephanie Weber).

Two other featured artists resist exaggerating literal materiality but nonetheless manipulate composition and space radically, positing unanticipated pictorial tensions. For Stephen Westfall, compositions demonstrate a knowing sense of inclusiveness-urban connotations pull at abstraction and vice versa, graphically. For Miki Lee, painting surfaces are activated theatrically by the illusion of a curtain pulling away, figuratively drawn back or alternately drawn closed, a dominant theme in her boldly ornamental paintings.

Geometric harmonies, distortions and illusionism are abundantly activated by blocks, bands, stripes and tabs throughout this exhibition and these maneuvers bind together this grouping of artists. Rather than reference the canonical Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s or the Color Field paintings of the 1960s, however, these works tend to recall abstraction from an earlier, ca. 1910 period, that of Wassily Kandinsky, a theoretically driven, but still pre-formalist time. Like Kandinsky before them (who understood so well the late 19th-century symbolist project of Gauguin), and like several artists thereafter, those included in present grouping each invents anew and afresh personally viable forms of abstraction.

As the Curator writes in the illustrated brochure accompanying this exhibition, "Each [artist] moves away from describable subject matter and into the development of pictorial form issuing from the dictates of what Kandinsky famously called 'inner necessity. These artists generate and organize form without reliance on external necessity while several do make productive reference to structures of the physical world. In essence, however, these artists install and cultivate a new and exciting sense of order peculiar to themselves. And they present and resolve many interesting tensions along the way."

As this exhibition abundantly suggests, the vitality of abstraction is palpable in this, the first decade of the 21st century. Abstraction today possesses an absorbing energy and variety that arguably recapitulates its character exactly 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century.

The late modern spectator is more or less still us, after all. Like her/him, we are visually, emotionally and politically battered by the world. A century ago there was widespread cultural hope that art could provide powerfully absorbing structures of feeling both to collect and displace emotional chaos. Abstract paintings became sites of intelligent withdrawal, places for engagement with the self on an authentic, focused level.

Considered in this way abstraction, by now both pure and impure, is persistently contemporary. It remains a liberating point of origin and point of return for many of the most accomplished artists working today. Similarly we, as spectators, renew ourselves through the provocative, powerful experience of sheer looking.

The Galleries' fundamental purpose is to educate. We strive to stimulate the creative, curricular and cultural life of the broad University of Rhode Island community as well as the general public of southern New England. We also undertake to emphasize modern and contemporary art's enduring conversation with the humanities, including the social sciences.

Plan a visit to the URI Fine Arts Building on URI's Kingstown campus. There's always something to see. The Main Gallery and Photography Gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, Noon-4PM & Saturday - Sunday, 1-4PM. The Main Gallery is also open 7:30-9:30 PM Tuesday through Friday. The Corridor Gallery Hours are from 9AM - 9PM daily. The Galleries are closed on federal and local holidays.

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