Spartanburg Art Museum
200 East St. John St., Spartanburg, SC 29306
Phone: 864.582.7616
www.spartanburgartmuseum.org
Spartanburg Art Museum
200 East St. John St., Spartanburg, SC 29306
Phone: 864.582.7616
www.spartanburgartmuseum.org
Discarded mattresses, old toys, yarn and wooden coffee stirrers are among the unusual materials on display in an exhibition that shatters expectations about what sculpture can or should be made of. Off the Wall opened May 17th and runs through August 5th at Spartanburg Art Museum (SAM), 200 East St. John St, Spartanburg, SC.
Each artist's works vary greatly in form and content, but all are rooted in the transformation of everyday materials. In one of the works on view, Ron Longsdorf uses insulation foam to create a facsimile of a telescope which contains a hidden projector. Another artist, John Kelly, turns sheets of plywood into electrified boxes that produce sound and video. Anna Kell creates monumental artworks from decorative domestic cast-offs like sofas, mattresses, upholstered footstools, puzzles, patterned textiles from clothing, and even lampshades.
Jonathan Brilliant - 2012 winner of one of South Carolina's most coveted art awards, the South Carolina Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowship - is also showing for Off the Wall. Brilliant's work is entirely composed of coffee shop ephemera: paper cups and lids, cardboard drink sleeves, and coffee stirrers. One might expect the resulting artworks to be modest in scale, but they typically fill entire galleries - a recent installation at the Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art suspended 70,000 stirrers and 6,500 sleeves between floor and ceiling, requiring braided aluminum cable and steel ferrules for support. The artwork Brilliant has contributed to the exhibition has been created specifically for and entirely on-site of the Museum, and was unveiled to the public for the first time on the night of the exhibition opening.
Brilliant's work is being presented as part of the South Carolina Arts Commission 50th anniversary state-wide Visual Arts and Crafts Fellows exhibition program that includes 90 artists and 15 partner organizations. Elizabeth Goddard, Executive Director of the Museum, said:
"When it came to selecting a Fellows artist to exhibit concurrently with our contemporary sculpture exhibit, Off the Wall, the work of Jonathan Brilliant nestled in seamlessly to the concepts and themes presented by the other sculptors. I first saw his site specific installations using common coffee stirrers in Grand Rapids during Art Prize when I served as curator for the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts. I was completely mesmerized, puzzled and curious and a host of other wonderful responses one feels when engaging with intelligent and wildly creative work. When I saw his name listed in the roster of past SC Fellows, I knew I had to bring his work to SAM and pass that feeling I had back in atrium of Kendall College of Art and Design along to our viewers." - Elizabeth Goddard, Executive Director, SAM
Traditionally, sculpture is understood to be made from raw materials such as marble, wood or bronze. Off the Wall examines how contemporary sculptors have created a new paradigm, reacting to the modern world's increasingly artificial or virtual environments by creating artworks from pre-existing or reclaimed materials. Contemporary sculpture isn't just about memorializing famous events or creating appealing objects, but rather, asks how objects both acquire and lose meaning. Off the Wall brings together 11 sculptors who seek to answer this question - creating strange, new spaces and objects in the process; spurring visitors to explore ideas of alternate uses for everyday objects and reconsider the ways in which they move through and utilize space.
Off the Wall is free and currently open to the public. The exhibition will continue through August 5th, 2018. For more information, visit spartanburgartmuseum.org.
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Interview with Jonathan Brilliant (interviewed by Mat Duncan):
Who are you and what do you do? My name is Jonathan Brilliant. I'm an installation artist based in Raleigh, NC. Sometimes the easiest way to describe installation art is its a mixture of sculpture and architecture, but rather than having a fixed studio where I produce the work and then transport it to a presentation space, the space where my work is presented is the site of production - so, if you see a work of mine, it means I built it in that place.
Is "Brilliant" your real name? Yes, that's my real name - by birth.
Why do you choose to create "installation" artwork? Two reasons: the practicality of it - I don't have to maintain an ongoing production studio, if someone wants a work from me, they bring me to make it. And second, conceptually, I've always found a huge disconnect between the isolation of someone working in a quiet place and then work being thrown into the gallery that has no relationship to the place where the work was made, so to dissolve that boundary, I try to create, produce, and exhibit the work all in the same context. Its not always possible, but with this body of work that is the case.
So what exactly are you doing at SAM? The piece in your alcove gallery, its part of a body of work where - the initial seed that started it was wanting to be like a British artist, and those British artists in particular were people like Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, etc. - there's sort of a British method where they would gather materials from their natural environment and build works with it. But over a decade ago I decided my natural environment was a coffee shop, I thought - I'll take materials from it and build by hand. So the piece you're seeing in the alcove gallery is woven from wooden coffee stir sticks, stacked coffee cup sleeves, braided aluminum cable, and then the wall piece is actually espresso rubbed into panels.
How many coffee sticks did you use? Approximately 60,000 sticks were used, however I don't count - I just know that each case of sticks is about 10,000. Within that are boxes of a thousand, and I know how many square feet I can get out of each box.
Did you use glue? No, no glue was used. This piece is woven in place with tension and compression. Glue is not actually a structural material. That's a great conversation I have with STEM and STEAM students that view my work.
What about the coffee shop is appealing to you? Why its appealing is - it was practical. At the time when I initiated this work I wanted to make a leap in scale, and the coffee shop was my studio. I was making drawings in a coffee shop - this was in the years before the laptop farm coffee shop world. So, I was still trying to be an artist but I had a job that started at 10am so I would get up at 4am and at 5 in the morning the only place that's open is a coffee shop, so between 5am and 9:45am I would do all my drawing and work in the coffee shop. So then, when I wanted to make this leap in scale with the sculptures I'd been working with it just seemed a logical leap to me to cull materials from my natural environment...it all sort of folded together.
What's the biggest piece you've ever made? I don't know, I always build them to suit the space I'm in, so the piece at SAM feels as big or as small as the one I made for a 5,000 sq. ft. space.
Is there a message for the audience in the artwork? The only message would be that if you want to experience this work - the only place with you can physically, with your own body, experience it is in the space. So, the meat of it is that you're not going to experience it as an image...if when you see artwork, it just looks like the documentation, there's no point in making it. If there's a content, its that I still believe there's an experience that can only be had by physically coming out and reacting to an artwork. That seeing images is not the same, and so I hope the message that people get is - come out and experience something that can only be experienced in person.
The Spartanburg Art Museum was founded in 1907 by artists Margaret Law and Josephine Sibley Couper, with the view that "art should not just be the luxury of a few, but the luxury of all." Today, it is one of only a handful of Contemporary Art Museums operating in the Southeastern United States, supporting the creative capacities of the region through an international exhibitions program, youth outreach programs, an art school, a large permanent collection, and an extensive public art program and calendar of community events.
The Spartanburg Art Museum is a regional museum promoting contemporary visual arts by inspiring and engaging people of all ages through exhibitions and education.
Please feel free to contact our Community Development Coordinator and Curator of Collections, Mat Duncan, for more information.
Name: Mat Duncan
Phone: 864.582.7616 ext. 211
Email: mduncan@spartanarts.org
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