Scott Belville, Michael Oliveri and Hy Yeon Nam

REVISITING ART HOUSE ON CITY SQUARE AND TEMPORAL DISTORTIONS: ARTISTS WORKING IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOUTH

Curated by John Lee Matney and Tyrus Lytton

The art in Temporal Distortions is brought together from world-class artists working in the contemporary South. They are leaders and innovators in their fields, each bringing a unique voice and methodology. The work shares a synchronicity: a search for understanding through—and of—place. Much of the recent philosophical history concerning the nature of “place” and how we operate within or around it draws heavily from Martin Heidegger. Even the latest metaphysical trend, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), deals with the inside-versus-outside dynamic of place. OOO poses the metaphysical question of whether things exist only within our perceptions or independently of them.As a culture of nomads able to travel great distances via car, bus, train, boat, or airplane, our sense of place is constantly shifting—often in ways that neither yesterday nor tomorrow can fully comprehend. Orson Welles and Alvin Toffler referred to this as a symptom of Future Shock. Curtis Mayfield wrote one of his greatest songs touching on these themes. Once seen as a sickness, this disorientation has become something we barely question—just a fact of life .Change has always carried unsettling implications for some, often accompanied by new or different pressures. The collection of works in this exhibition not only questions our interaction and being with place—it also celebrates it. They celebrate it as a lover might—without ignoring the darker desires alongside the light, or a hairy nostril beside a delicate earlobe. The works in Temporal Distortions each examine place and being in their own way. What makes them extraordinary is that they offer no answers—only more questions. I hesitate to write about them at all, as my insights may not be yours. These works do not demand explanation—they simply are. The Ubuntu philosophy suggests that we gain our humanity through our society—that we must actively engage with our culture to become truly human. Perhaps these works, and our interaction with them, not only enhance our human nature but offer us a place where we can be human.

Art Rosenbaum

Art Rosenbaum’s life-sized paintings loom as a richly layered cultural observation, defying easy explanation. Their scale, detail, and symbolism weave a tapestry of community, memory, and American experience that resists being summed up in words.

Art Rosenbaum, born in 1938 in Ogdensburg, NY, was a painter, muralist, and illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. He earned his AB in Art History and his MFA in Painting at Columbia University and has worked in France on a Fulbright in Painting; he also held a Fulbright Senior Professorship in Germany. Among his exhibitions were the New Orleans Triennial and the Corcoran’s 41st Biennial of American Painting, and his works are in many collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Columbus (GA) Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art. His solo show in 2000 at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York was reviewed in Art in America. The Liverpool (UK) College of Art and Design presented a solo show of his work as part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial. A major retrospective “Weaving His Art on Golden Looms: Paintings and Drawings by Art Rosenbaum” was mounted at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2006. He has executed mural commissions at the UCLA School of Law, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Russell Special Collections Library, both at the University of Georgia. He has taught studio art at the University of Iowa and the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where he was named the first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts.

Art of Field Recording Vol. I: Fifty Years of American Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum won a Grammy for Best Documentary Recording.

His folk music field work in the South and Midwest has resulted in over 14 documentary recordings, several of which are on Smithsonian-Folkways. His boxed set, released on Dust-to-Digital, Art of Field Recording Vol. I: Fifty Years of American Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum won a Grammy for Best Documentary Recording in 2008. He wrote and illustrated Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (1983), and Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition on the Coast of Georgia (1998), both published by the University of Georgia Press; his study, The Mary Lomax Ballad Book: America’s Great 21st Century Traditional Singer was published in 2013. A performer on a variety of folk instruments, he has appeared at numerous folk festivals both solo and with groups like the present-day Skillet Lickers, has cut three banjo/vocal LPs and CDs, and has written and illustrated three instruction books on traditional banjo styles.

Hye Yeon Nam – Hooray

In Hooray, Hye Yeon Nam explores her acclimation to life in the United States and her experience as a woman navigating cultural and societal systems—both here and in her native South Korea. Her work investigates not only the contrast between geographically distant cultures but also her position within systems of power. In this mechanical installation, viewers cast shadows over photovoltaic sensors, triggering wooden totems to bow in response. At the same time, a video loop shows the artist repeatedly bowing with a smile, layering meaning through gesture, repetition, and technology.

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist and HCI designer exploring how technology can improve our interactions with other agents - humans, robots, or nature. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon has participated in exhibitions, festivals, and showcases at ARS Electronica Center, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Asia Society Texas Center, Japanese American National Museum, Times Square,Eyebeam, Conflux festival, D.U.M.B.O. Festival, the Lab in San Francisco, Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica (FILE), SIGGRAPH, Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI), International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Creativity & Cognition (C&C), and several festivals in China, Istanbul,Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel and LIVE TV show Good Day Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Business Insider, Slashdot, Engadget among other publications. She is currently an associate professor of digital design at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

Michael Oliveri

Michael Oliveri presented a series of compelling photographic prints that delve into the unseen microscopic world. Utilizing an election microscope, Oliveri captured highly magnified images of subjects such as insect remains and cellular structures, revealing intricate details often overlooked.

Michael Oliveri is an artist, designer, fabricator with the passion to bring unusual innovation into the world. He was born in Southern California and received his MFA in New Genres from UCLA, and a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has worked in the design, entertainment, internet and surf industries throughout his life. He was the creator of the ArtX department at the University of Georgia where he taught for the past 20yrs. He is the owner creator of Foamocean.com and Boxforthebirds.com. His work is conceptually based, utilizing a wide range of media from large photographic prints to multi-media installations and performances. Live animals, immigrant workers, hydroponics, radio signal technology, effects processors, video, and SEM imagery are examples of his palette. He currently lives and works in Laguna Beach California.

Kathryn Refi

Kathryn Refi’s work transforms empirical data into visual poetry. Using digital sensors, she recorded the ambient colors surrounding her over a 24-hour period. The resulting painting is both a personal document and a lyrical abstraction—a meditation on presence, perception, and the passage of time.

Kathryn Refi’s work explores the intersection of objective information and subjective experience in shaping both personal and collective histories. While rational and scientific methods are often employed to understand the world, these findings are inevitably colored by individual emotions and lived experiences. The same event, song, or story can be interpreted and remembered in entirely different ways by different people.

In her practice, she approaches information drawn from their own life with an objective lens in an effort to better understand it, while also recognizing and embracing the inherent limitations and contradictions of that pursuit. Ultimately, the personal truths we construct are as imperfect and adaptable as we are.

Scott Belville

Scott Belville paints what we often overlook or throw away: discarded objects, oddball figures, the refuse of everyday life. With care and precision, he renders these castoffs with love and attention, transforming the overlooked into something rich with meaning.

Scott Belville was raised and educated in Georgia. He received an MFA in painting at Ohio University in 1977 and currently teaches art at The University of Georgia in Athens. Belville’s solo exhibitions have taken place at the Jus de Pomme Gallery, New York; Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York; P.S. #1, New York; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; and the High Museum of Art. He has received many awards and grants including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in painting, a Georgia Council for the Arts Grant in 1993, and a Ford Foundation Grant in 1979. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collection at MOCA GA.

Paul C. Light Jr

Paul Light’s process draws from the legacy of abstract expressionism while challenging contemporary ideas of perception and metaphysics. His work pulses with energy, navigating the space between tradition and inquiry.

Abstract artist Paul Light Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1966. Before earning his MFA in painting at SCAD-Atlanta in 2012, Light had an extensive business career where he fueled his creative side as a graphic artist, and product designer. It was in these years that he met and was mentored and greatly influenced by Paul Chelko, a well-respected artist and philosopher who lived and worked in Atlanta. Later, Light earned a BFA in Animation and opened a small painting studio at Tula Art Center in Atlanta. Subsequently, upon earning his MFA in Painting at SCAD Atlanta, Light returned to Tula Art Center and opened a new studio. Light’s work is currently shown at Mason Murer Fine Art and Besharat Contemporary – both in Atlanta, GA. He has been in a number of group and solo exhibitions in and around Metro Atlanta. Light’s work is held in private collections in Atlanta, Virginia and New York City and in and in public collections such as the SCAD Permanent Collection.

Tyrus Lytton

Tyrus Lytton graduated from The University of Georgia with a degree in fine arts as a Presidential Scholar, and held an Artistic Merit along with a Kiah Painting Scholarship while receiving an MFA in Painting from The Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. He has exhibited nationally, abroad in Japan

MArK ST. JOhN Erickson’s REVIEW OF TEMPORAL DISTORTIONS

contemporary art with a southern accent by Mark St. John Erickson, Daily Press, 2013

Grammy Award-winning musicologist Art Rosenbaum knows a good thing when he hears it.

Yet in addition to the finely tuned ear with which he earned an award for best historical album in 2008, the University of Georgia professor has such a keen eye that much of what he’s seen while making field recordings in the South has resulted in equally evocative portraits. Several of his canvases rank among the most noteworthy works in “Temporal Distortions: Artists Working in the Contemporary South,” which is on view at Williamsburg’s Linda Matney Gallery as well as its Art House on City Square. And it doesn’t take long to recognize that this New York native has embraced the people and culture of his adopted homeplace with a passion that makes his paintings distinctive.

In “Stone Mountain Wobblers,” strong outlines and vibrant pigments combine to create a trio of young musicians who worship old-time banjo and fiddle music with an iconic, even archetypal flourish. Behind these animated players hang portraits of two African-American performers and an early bluegrass quartet, underscoring a Southern musical lineage that spans two races and reaches back generations.

“The thing about a lot of art being made in the South is that it has a direction. It has a perspective. It has a distinctive feeling unlike any other place in the country,” gallery owner and co-curator Lee Matney says. “Sometimes it’s rooted in tradition — and sometimes it’s rooted in change. And many times it has this quirky quality that’s hard to think of as coming from any place else.”

Made up of 50 works by 27 artists, the show was put together by Matney and co-curator Tyrus Lytton after visits to a dozen studios in search of art “both from and of the South.” What resulted was a collection that reflects the duo’s strong connection to Georgia and its influential art centers at the Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of Art at the University of Georgia. Yet despite that Peach State focus the exhibit is also unexpectedly diverse, ranging across a wide array of traditional and new media as well as both native talents and artists who have come from someplace else.

In addition to Rosenbaum — whose large portraits embrace the culture of the South as his own — the checklist includes Korean-born Hye Yeon Nam, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student whose multimedia explorations of her experiences as an immigrant were showcased at the National Portrait Gallery.

In “Hooray!” she combines legions of miniature bowing figures with a puzzling video in which she herself bows over and over again in a near-inscrutable homage to her viewers. Step up close to her small army of genuflecting drones and you can hear dozens of tiny electrical servomotors kick in as — one after another — they bow and scrape, rise and bow again — in a light-activated knee-jerk response to your every movement. In the middle of this submissive crowd stands poor Nam, whose own irresistibly reflexive urge to kowtow plays on and on before fading to black. “As a woman and a Korean immigrant in the United States, I have struggled to adjust to my new culture,” she confesses.

Among the show’s most curious and arresting attractions is a series of surreal portraits by Atlanta-based painter Kent Knowles, whose Air Force parents now live in Newport News.

In the large-scale “Island,” especially, he places his strange, otherworldly-looking subjects in still more eccentric and outlandish worlds that teem with tantalizing narrative symbols and clues. But exactly what his silent, big-eyed sitters are thinking — or what experiences they’re going through — are mysteries left to be puzzled out by his viewers.

Ditto for the oddly familiar yet alien realms conjured up by University of Georgia artist Michael Oliveri through wildly magnified visions of creatures drawn from the microscopic world. Part plant, part animal and part something yet to be defined, these peculiar beings bristle with evocative forms and seemingly endless detail. Yet like the giant landscapes that also come from this nano-sized domain, they trigger more questions and wonder than answers.

OTHER ARtiSTS IN TEMPORAL DISTORTIONS

Jeffrey Whittle

Jeffrey Whittle is a figurative painter living in Athens, Georgia. His mediums include oil on panel/canvas and mixed media. Whittle’s recent paintings explore beauty, love, and an expansive sense of time, By juxtaposing the ephemeral (flowering plants) with the infinite (star-scapes) my desire is to represent of both day time and night time simultaneously as well as the eternal/fleeting temporal experience.

He received his MFA in Painting from Cornell University and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He has been the recipient of numerous artist’s grants, residencies, and awards. Jeffrey Whittle teaches studio art courses at the University of Georgia and has a long association with Italy and coastal Maine

Teddy Johnson

Teddy Johnson's paintings explore storytelling, history, color, culture, and form. Solo exhibits include: The American Poetry Museum (2020), The Linda Matney Gallery (2019), The Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower (2016), MK Gallery (2016), and the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley (2013/2014). His paintings have been featured in Fox 45's Hometown Hotspot and Baltimore Style Magazine. As a curator Teddy has collaborated on shows in Clarke County, VA, Baltimore, MD, Arnold, MD, and Brooklyn, NY. Teddy's education includes a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MFA from The Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, and two semesters of study in Cortona, Italy. He is the Cade Gallery Director and an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Anne Arundel Community College.

More about Teddy Johnson:

A ROLLING INTERVIEW WITH TEDDY JOHNSON

2023

Paul Thomas

Dana Jo Cooley

Born in Whitwell, Tennessee, Dana Jo Cooley is a contemporary artist and theologian. She is a presidential scholarship recipient and graduate of the Savannah College of Art & Design. Dana Jo holds a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt University with a certification in Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture where she received a Creative Merit Scholarship. She served as President of Poiesis at Vanderbilt Divinity and remains Poiesis Alumni Ambassador. Dana Jo is an Artist in Residence at the Downtown Presbyterian Church Artist Studios in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dana Jo’s work spans a variety of media and formats, including miniatures, sculpture, installation, performance, music, and public art. She is represented by Linda Matney Gallery. In 2022, Dana Jo created site-specific works in collaboration with Durkan’s Artlifting Project for Mohawk Industries in Las Vegas, Chicago, and New York City. The team was awarded Best of BDNY for Abstract Artistry.