ALLAN GRAHAM/TH: AS REAL as thinking
dal 21/1/2000 al 12/3/2000
Segnalato da
21/1/2000
ALLAN GRAHAM/TH: AS REAL as thinking
SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe
SITE Santa Fe presents an exhibition by New Mexico-based artist Allan Graham featuring a comprehensive overview of his work. The exhibition, entitled Allan Graham/TH: AS REAL as thinking, is curated by Kathleen Shields. The unusual title of the exhibition comes from AS REAL as thinking, a line from a Robert Creeley poem together with TH which stands for Toadhouse, a pseudonym that Allan Graham worked under for part of his career. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, partially sponsored by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers Tax, with an essay by Kathleen Shields and will document Graham's work over the past
two decades. There will be a free public opening from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Saturday, January 23 and a gallery talk by Allan Graham on Sunday, January 24 at 2:00 p.m.
The 2000 season of SITE Santa Fe's Art & Culture series will be launched in conjunction with the Allan Graham exhibition with a reading by poet Robert Creeley on Thursday, February 17 at 7:00 p.m. Presented in part by Lannan Foundation, admission to the reading is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for students and seniors.
Born in 1943, Allan Graham has lived in New Mexico for nearly 35 years. Among other exhibitions, Graham showed Cave of Generation at the Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, New York in 1992 and The Collection of Panza di Biumo, Artists of the 80s and 90s at Museo D'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento and Rovereto, Italy in 1996. Collections of Graham's work are at the Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Allan Graham/TH: AS REAL as thinking will present selected works from the past 15 years
in individual, yet interrelated, installations that both underscore the experience of the respective groups of works and tie together the forms and ideas that underlie them. Concurrently, SITE Santa Fe will present a gallery of paintings, selected by Allan Graham, by his friend and fellow artist Oli Sihvonen (1921-1991).
AS REAL as thinking will include works such as Judas Hangs Himself, 1984, a pivotal piece in which the painting support seems to have turned inside out or its surface to have been split and
turned in on itself and Moon II, 1986, representing the period during which Graham abandoned the traditional painting format to create a series of large, eccentrically shaped, monochrome canvases.
Also part of the exhibition, TIDE, 1995, featuring four sets of cast bronze coffee mugs placed on
the floor suggests the simple beauty of everyday objects while offering subtle allusions to
intersections of presence and absence, fullness and emptiness.
AS REAL as thinking will also feature works from the Cave of Generation and Pre-hung series completed in 1992, as well as the Heart Sutra series, 1995-98, and UFO Paintings, 1998-99.
The most recent of Graham's work to be exhibited is Time is Memory, 1999, a site-specific installation of a circle of 16 meditation pillows each placed before a reading lamp illuminating a version of a Buddhist death poem. The lamps, powered by a solar energy system which tracks the sun from the roof of SITE Santa Fe, will become brighter or dimmer depending upon the time of day and weather conditions.
ALLAN GRAHAM/TH: AS REAL as thinking is made possible by generous grants by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Jim Kelly, Lannan Foundation, Rosina Lee Yue and Dr. Bert A. Lies, Barbara and Dr. Michael Ogg, and the Tesuque Art Book Fund.
SITE Santa Fe is located at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Call 505.989.1199 for more information.
Exhibition hours are: Wednesday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., Friday 10:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Admission is $5.00 for adults and $2.50 for students and seniors; members are free. Free
admission is offered on Fridays and this is made possible by a grant from the Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston, Texas. Docent tours are offered on Fridays at 6:00 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. Tours in Spanish are by appointment. SITE Santa Fe gift certificates are available.