Slocumb Galleries
Address: East Tennessee State University, Ernest C. Ball Hall, 232 Sherrod Drive, Johnson City, TN 37614
Dates: February 28 - March 24, 2023
Hours: Monday - Friday 9am - 5pm, with extended hours on events and by appointment
Website: etsu.edu/cas/art/galleries
Positive/Negative 38 - Participating Artists:
Ken Abbott, Hale Allen, Katherine Allison, Erin Anfinson, Jose Ardivilla, Michael Baggarly, Kamau Bostic, Jane Broderick, Jan Burleson, David Carlson, Nathan Childers, Bill & Tina Collison, Isabelle Du Toit, Mitch Eckert, Sheri Fafunwa Ndibe, C.E. Fitzgerald, Mark Flowers, Katherine Frensley, Cheryl Hazelton, Jean Hess, Kristy Higby, Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton, Forest Kelley, Christine Kuhn, Tina Linville, Emilio Maldonado, Randi Matushevitz, Maureen Meyer, Irene Pantelis, Hayden Phelps, Russ Revock, Wesley Roden, Erin Sedra, Anne Vetter, Carlton Wilkinson, Annamarie Williams-Buchanan, Chris Wubbena, Kevin Wurm
Juried group exhibitions typically feature a selection of artworks linked by a preset framework. This may simply relate to a particular medium or the place of production (a cross-section of the best photography of a region, for example), but it also may involve an overarching theme, with artworks serving as arguments in a larger curatorial expression. Charged with valorizing certain objects that they did not seek out, jurors may simply choose to acknowledge extraordinary individual achievement. But there is the temptation to see them as threads in a larger story—what does this body of works tell us about ourselves, our society, our world, even though it was never meant to be seen together?
Confronted with a diverse range of intriguing objects, I want to avoid the impulse to draw narrow conclusions about their combined meaning in the larger culture. But being human I look for patterns. Works chosen for this show are not objectively better than those not chosen. But subjectively, their appeal lies in what I perceive to be their potency—how they cut to the quick. Paradoxically, at a time when everyone seems to be shouting over everyone else, the effectiveness of these works resides not in bold declaration but in intense inscrutability, supplanting easy clarity with rich ambiguity. I see them in alignment with surrealist poet André Breton’s idea that “the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” Triggering an empathic igniting of the imagination, these artworks are marvelous in the way they uncover a veiled world of beauty or pain, wonder or connectivity.
I imagine that most people have seen art or heard music that has moved them so deeply that their psychic DNA was altered. Artists have an opportunity to inspire such transformations, to think of their work not only as a part of the artworld but as an instrument of broad resistance to the incurious and uncaring—a population that seems ubiquitous (although I don’t really believe it is as solid a bloc as it appears). This extends out--in a country divided into urban, suburban, and rural bubbles, galleries like this at East Tennessee State University have an outsized capacity to offer safe spaces for discourse, to establish the bond of creativity that might indeed have a unifying effect. And in the end, even if only a small percentage of the region’s population sees an exhibition here, they can take comfort in feeling themselves to be part of the world outside East Tennessee.
Mark Scala
Chief Curator
Frist Art Museum
