Calvert to Present Fine Arts Center Gallery Talk
JONESBORO – The Department of Art and Design’s Fine Arts Center Gallery at Arkansas State University will host a gallery talk by exhibiting artist Tiffany Calvert on Thursday, Nov. 2, at 3 p.m.
The public talk is held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Rainbow Chaos,” currently on view at the gallery. Admission is free to the talk and exhibition.
Calvert is an assistant professor of art at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, Visual Arts Gallery at SVA and E.TAY Gallery in New York and Carl & Sloan Contemporary in Portland, Oregon.
She is a recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship and residencies at the ArtOmi International Arts Center in New York and Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California. In 2010 she was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
The artist's paintings draw on historical and contemporary imagery to explore the shifting nature of perception. Her work is primarily concerned with fragmenting and obstructing images, interrupting the transmission of visual information in order to create an opening for the viewer. Composed of diffuse brush strokes, Calvert’s paintings generate an image that hovers in suspension, simultaneously on the verge of rupture and cohesion.
Recently, Calvert has investigated the assiduous detail of the Dutch and Flemish still life paintings. The overwhelming amount of visual information in this work often confuses rather than clarifies. Calvert uses this affect as an opportunity to explore the abstraction inherent in representation. In some works, Calvert makes painterly interventions into large-scale reproductions of still life paintings, matching paint to the original and camouflaging it into the image. The result is a painting that is “unseeable” – viewers can't rely on their perception to know whether they are looking at a photograph or an abstraction.
Calvert’s studio practice alternates between painterly concerns and the critical and theoretical issues surrounding representation and reliability. She currently works in paint, fresco and digital media. Her research interests extend to media theory in reality television and surveillance, and the effect of media on the substantiation of the image.
Fine Arts Center Gallery hours are 10 to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. For more information, contact the Department of Art and Design at (870) 972-3050.
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