W.A.R.P. Professor, Sean Miller organized "PACKED", at Stetson University. The show features Bethany Taylor, Connie Hwang, Sergio Vega, and Arnold Mesches. Check out the fantastic review below!
Daytona Beach News-Journal
Art 'packs' heat in Stetson gallery show
By LAURA STEWART Fine Arts Writer
DELAND -- The provocative, surprisingly witty new exhibit at the Duncan Gallery of Art offers a brave new world of bold, broad and probing statements.
That's not so much because pieces like Sean Taylor's "100 Paces" is a 2006 videotape, projected onto a blank wall, or because Bethany Taylor's 2007 installation, "After the Clean-up," uses nothing more than bent wires and tangled skeins of red string to make its powerful statement.
It's simply because all of the show's unconventional pieces conform to an even more unconventional thesis: they're portable, easily packed and set up in a new space -- even on the fly, and even without the special atmosphere of a gallery.
Deceptively simple and as small as the disc that contains it, Taylor's video is a gripping time-bomb of complex concepts. Both beautiful and terrible in its martial precision, a drill team of Irish Defense Force soldiers pinwheel and pivot, their grim camouflage reflecting the gray walls of their Dublin barracks.
Warriors become part of a grand choregraphed chorale, in a blurring of the line between war's destructive impulses and art's creative energies that lasts only for the length of the recording -- or, thanks to its transformation into art -- forever.
Just so is "After the Clean-up" an arrangement of everyday materials that can be set up quickly, and revised in keeping with whatever setting Taylor chooses for its future installation. A pile of mops rests on the gallery floor, stained the same unsettling red-brown as the piles of string that surround them. Scattered on the white gallery wall behind the cleaning supplies are clusters of disaster-related imagery, each shaped from thread-like wires to resemble doodles. There are bombs falling from an airplane and grenades of all sizes, gas masks and prone bodies, skeletal ladies with mops, actual skeletons.
Compact though the objects in "After the Clean-up" would be, packed into a box or bag, they expand hugely on the wall to illustrate monumental concerns, and societal problems. Not the least among them, ironically, is the main idea underlying the work: of cleaning up after a variety of man-made disasters, whitewashing their impact, and covering up their causes.
"Packed" is a marvelous exhibit, one that combines sharp intelligence with profound questions about contemporary life. A former prison guard addresses past atrocities in Amanda Dunsmore's "Billy's Museum" and, by lavishly adorning the smallest details of museum life, Connie Hwang and Sean Miller confront traditional approaches to art.
And in a work like "Gore Buses and Pretty Buses," a black-and-white wall-mounted poster that's part of Aisling O'Beirne's "Some Things About Belfast (Or So I'm Told)," humor and horror vie for dominance -- and end up enlightening their viewer. The new Duncan gallery exhibit, easily packed and shipped and reassembled, is everything art should be: serious, and serially
