Exhibition Season 2007/2008

Celebrating the School of Art's last year in the Visual Arts Building on South Jackson Street, Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries introduce for 2007/2008 a season of exhibitions, workshops, and performances that maximize our current locations while looking forward to our move to East Campus, where we join the Performing Arts Center, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Hugh Hogdson Music School, completing the University's long-held vision of one cohesive node for all of the arts.

The eleven artists in this year's Exhibition Series operate at the intersections, margins, and spaces in between traditional disciplines, emphasizing art that must be experienced and engaged in the moment. Opening in Fall 2007 at Main Gallery, Richard Roth returns to painting with Cowboy Magic, a body of abstract paintings that argue to be viewed and engaged as "events," retaining the experience, memory, consciousness and processes that initiated them, perhaps originating during the ten years that Roth abandoned painting altogether, and turned to the found object and collection in his studio practice.

Following in October, Cranbrook Academy's Elliott Earls brings his particular and vital aesthetic to the Main Gallery in a week-long residency, culminating in a publication, performance, and exhibition that are all generously funded by the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts as well as the School of Art Visiting Artist/Scholar Series. With confirmation of Athens Cine as the venue for Earls' multimedia music performance, Earls will offer Athens audiences his signature, ever-evolving compositions of song form with hybrid media, the same that have been seen at art and music venues worldwide, from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to Experimenta 99 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Artists exhibiting at Main Gallery in Spring 2008 include Lamar Dodd Chair David Sandlin, who we welcome as the School of Art's artist-in-residence for 2007/2008. Born in Ireland and raised there until the age 16, when the family re-located to rural Alabama, Sandlin has built a formidable career on his hyper-graphic renderings of American Puritansim, patriotism and hypocrisy, all hellfire and damnation - strangely familiar, and immediately compelling.

Amsterdam-based graphic designer and printmaker Harmen Liemburg is the second artist to exhibit at Main Gallery in Spring 2008. Liemburg offers an installation and series of prints, inspired equally by traditional sources, most especially Japanese woodcut prints, and ephemeral contemporary product packaging.

Concluding Spring 2008 at the Main Gallery is Nano-, an exhibition that results from a faculty-initiated collaboration between the Digital Media department of the School of Art and the Physics Department. Using powerful image-rendering cameras and technology, this exhibition presents images of the world on a molecular level (the "nano-scale"), manipulates, and enlarges them to landscape proportions, investigating the natural world on an unusual scale, and questioning its role in our lives.

Intent

The Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries are dedicated to understanding and promoting contemporary art as a tool and a catalyst for education. The Galleries consistently produce rotating exhibitions and programming that examine the cultural and social contexts around us, challenge contemporary perceptions of art making, and provide a framework for intellectual and creative inquiry. By inviting established and emerging contemporary artists, designers, critics and curators of national and international stature from off-campus as well as within, and setting them in direct dialogue with University and local audiences, the Galleries establish immediate relevancy. The Galleries and their vision are well-aligned with the University’s commitment “to teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things,” and to excellence in creative endeavors that are focused on organized programs to create, maintain, and apply new knowledge and theories, promoting a rigorous and lively creative atmosphere conducive to experimentation, innovation, scholarship and inquiry.

Main Gallery Exhibition Series 2007/2008

Cowboy Magic | Richard Roth
On View September 6 - October 5, 2007
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 6, 6 - 8 pm, Gallery Talk at 7 pm

Elliott Earls
On View October 19 - December 7, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, October 19th, 6 - 8 pm
Visiting Artist Lecture: Tuesday October 16th, 5:30 pm
UGA Student Learning Center, Room 102
Performance: Thursday, October 18th, time t.b.a.
Athens Cine, 234 W. Hancock, Athens, GA

David Sandlin
On View January 17 - February 15, 2008
Opening Reception: TBA

Harmen Liemburg
On View February 28 - April 4, 2008
Opening Reception: TBA

Nano-
On View April 11 - May 9, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, April 11, 6 - 8 pm, Gallery Talk at 7 pm

Visit Main Gallery
Visual Arts Building, 285 S. Jackson Street
Athens, Georgia 30601 (706) 542-0069

Hours
The Main Gallery is open Monday through Friday.9 am - 5 pm
Closed Weekends and University-observed breaks