Fall 2023 Exhibitions
Bill Hutson’s career as an artist was distinguished. He enjoyed over twenty solo exhibitions,
including the recent city-wide exhibition in his hometown of San Marcos, Texas, and
participated in more than fifty group exhibitions all over the world. The artwork
shown here displays only a small portion of the pieces held by the Phillips Museum.
Spanning many decades, this exhibition highlights the many styles and series that
Hutson is known for. Many of his artworks were inspired by the locations he lived
in and the abstracted symbols give the viewer an opportunity to contemplate a deeper
interpretation of the paintings.
For over forty years, landscape and our perspectives on it have been R Scott Wright’s
primary subject. While human impacts on the natural world have always been central
to his work, in these recent paintings he is exploring narrative to share his concerns
in a new way via his art. These images take on tragic notes at times, but they are
about hope and lessons learned. In this light, he recalls the words by poet Mary Oliver,
“Attention is the Beginning of Devotion.” Sayaka Ganz was born in Yokohama, Japan and grew up living in Japan, Brazil, and Hong
Kong. Raised with the Shinto animism belief that all things in the world have spirits,
when she sees discarded items on the street or thrift store shelves, she feels a deep
sadness for them and is moved to make the abandoned objects happy. Ganz uses common
household items to create animal forms with a sense of movement and self-awareness.
She uses plastics because of the variety of curvilinear forms and colors available.
She manipulates and assembles them together as brush strokes to create an effect similar
to a Van Gogh painting in three dimensions.
Listen to Ganz discuss her process and answer questions about her sculpture and exhibition
Reclaimed CreationsColor, Symbols, and Texture: The Artwork of Bill Hutson
Coming Storms: Artwork by R Scott Wright
Sayaka Ganz: Reclaimed Creations
Artist Talk with Sayaka Ganz
My drawings, paintings, prints, artist books, poetry and videos use metaphor and act
as visual responses to what memory is and how it functions. They reside in concert
with the interlacing of science texts, connecting the personal to the universal. My
installation moves through ideas in art and science research as a parallel universe,
manifested through a series of conversations I had with Dr. Dasa Zeithamova, a neuroscientist
and professor at the University of Oregon, exploring the function of the human brain
to find meaning, the different ways of knowing and self-expression, and the importance
of stepping out of our silos and forming relationships. The presentation of texts
and spoken word suggests the ways that language and memory are intertwined. Common
Hour Presentation Sept 21 @11:30, Barshinger Hall. Followed by a reception at Phillips
Museum.
Common Hour speaker and artist Patricia Moss-Vreeland discusses her methods and artwork
in this lecture about memory, neuroscience, and art. It seemed to come from nowhere—a slight tremble in my left hand in the summer of 2019.
In time came the diagnosis: Parkinson’s. As a natural-light documentary photographer,
I began to retreat. How could I hold and maneuver a camera while battling a constant
and worsening quaking?
TREMOR is the result of this ongoing quest.
My tremor is not foreign to me now. It connects to nature, and nature’s movements
connect back to the tremor, expanding its power and its reach. Together, these forces
create their own art, converting what some perceive as a disability into the opposite—into
possibility and positive energy, into a mounting sense of wonder.
In Search of Meaning: Memory Becomes Us, Patricia Moss-Vreeland
Common Hour : In Search of Meaning, Memory Becomes Us
TREMOR: Reflections on the Nature of Parkinson’s, Kristin V. Rehder