Drawing Professor Leigh Ann Hallberg and Hanes Gallery Director Paul Bright have been keeping busy during the pandemic. They share a studio and a home, and more and more they also share a creative approach. Hallberg has absorbed some of Bright's approach to the quotidian, the overlooked, while Bright has adopted a more conceptually capacious approach that maintains a common "philosophical" thread for streams of work that range more broadly in outward appearance. A contemplative aspect pervades both of their respective work, as well, as they process the unbelievable times we are living through.
DRAWN Artist Profile
Leigh Ann Hallberg and Paul Bright at SECCA
DRAWN
"When I moved from lithography - in which I had created figurative works realized with traditional drawing approaches - to making collages, I was asked if I missed the activity of drawing. But I realized that I was still applying the principles and actions of drawing by tearing and cutting the material itself. This kind of “drawing” is tactile, haptic, dimensional. It occurs while directly forming and contouring the sheets and crusty laminations of paper I now use. These “drawn” elements - the rips, tears, cuts and edges, whether produced by my hand, someone else’s, or by the elements and already present in the found material - are among the defining characteristics of the collages.
My collages also sometimes incorporate “meta-drawings”; parts of reproductions of drawings by other artists, further layering the work and the tension between what is “found” and what is “made.” And as it turns out, the “figure” was never really lost in my work’s transition from traditionally drawn images to collage. Fractured text and partial images of bodies - “figures” abstract and representational - are enmeshed in the materials, surfaces and layers of the collages, their shapes defined by a great variety of linear edges and boundaries.
(It’s interesting to note that, before the term collage was applied widely to art, the artist and master collagist Kurt Schwitters frequently labelled and numbered his works in collage as a species of drawing, his Merzzeichnungen (Merz drawings)."
-Paul Bright
Comacina: Improvisations and Variations
an exhibit by Paul Bright
An exhibition centered on artist Paul Bright’s residence on the island of Comacina in the summer of 2018, which resulted in an artist’s book, [im]provvisorio.
"In the summer of 2018, I was awarded a residency on Comacina, the small (and only) island in Lake Como, Italy, by the Brera Academy of Art (Milan). I intentionally arrived with as few preconceptions as possible about the work to be made over his two-week stay. My stay coincided with a complicated period for me, and I felt the need to respond directly and “simply” to the place and what it offered.
With a perimeter of only a mile and a quarter, Comacina might be the most history-packed few acres of real estate in the world. At one time it held at least six religious edifices – convents, baptistries, churches, basilicas – as well as fortifications, dating from the late Roman period until 1169 when most of the structures were razed by invaders from Como, led by Barbarosa as retribution for the island’s alliance with Milan. In 1939, rationalist architect Pietro Lingeri built three houses on the island towards the realization of making the island an artists colony. The buildings featured the clean lines and simplified masses typical of modernist structures, but were constructed with local materials and incorporated elements reflecting the vernacular architecture of the region. One of Lingeri’s houses functions as the residence for Brera artists.
After settling in, I reflexively (and unsuccessfully) tried out some habitual art-making responses. During these initial days, me and my wife, artist Leigh Ann Hallberg, repeatedly made the 5 or 10 minute walk to a stony beach (Spiaggia CO162) on the north end of the island, scattering two opposed flocks of ducks and collecting rocks, shells and detritus, bringing them back to the house only because the material was interesting. (Almost all of my work as an artist has a basis in the found, and an approach which recognizes that the world offers enough material with which to work, and where the transformation -the “art part”- happens in the choosing, arrangement and composition of the found elements per se, more than in their alteration or mimesis.) I began improvising with arrangements of the objects, 2, 3, 4 or 5 items together, and realized the relationships were at least visually interesting. I started photographing these groupings against a paper backdrop, or more frequently, on a milk-glass table. Lacking a tripod, the images were all taken with a hand-held camera. After Leigh Ann suggested that the combination of two objects seemed most successful (and I concurred), many of the images had to be re-photographed due to motion blur. The groupings I was photographing were improvised and provisional; the objects were intuitively grouped, photographed and rearranged, to exhaustion. So the portmanteau English-Italian word im-provvisorio came to describe what I was up to; improvised images of provisional arrangements of found objects.
While settling on these pairings (often with minor variations between images of the same objects), I also visualized the final form in which I wanted to present the work; a “book” of 14 images (one for each day of my stay in the area). I thought about the look and concept of type specimen books and of printed “natural histories,” particularly how the natural history examples were usually depicted “not (at) actual size”; likewise, the scale of each of my book’s images to the objects I photographed varies considerably. The natural history images and type specimens are presented in the placeless space of the page, and I wanted the specifics of my images, the subtle colors and textures, the effects of lighting, to be similarly dislocated from an identifiable, quotidien context, regardless of how ordinary each object might be. For me, this approach encouraged a more metaphoric reading of the images, reflecting back what a viewer might bring to and project onto them, and allow the work to open up to a world beyond the literal fact of itself; in addition to but apart from just a visual record of the objects’ material presence.
When I returned home, I had selected the 14 photos to be cleaned up for printing (a tedious process removing color casts from the “placeless” backgrounds where several light sources had left their hues). I soon conceived of the book as a “hardcover without a front cover,” intentionally simple, direct, even “found” in feeling. I worked with a master digital printer, Arlington Weithers, to produce the images, and I’ve constructed each of the copies by hand, ultimately for an edition of 14."
-Paul Bright
LEIGH ANN HALLBERG'S MURRAY BAY: STANDING WAVE & PAUL BRIGHT'S WALDEN (II)
Leigh Ann Hallberg’s series of works Murray Bay: Standing Wave and Paul Bright’s aural collage Walden (II) will be on view in the Davis Gallery at Sawtooth from January 15 – March 19, 2021. Several salon-style events will accompany this exhibit throughout its run.
"This group of works is derived from two blankets that belonged to my Nana, my mother’s mother. She referred to them as the “nice” blankets. They were well-used and my mother kept them after Nana’s death. Stained, faded and worn, many years later Mom was going to discard them: I kept them. After looking at and thinking about them for a number of years, I have reconfigured them to speak about perception, history and time.
The title first refers to Murray Bay, Canada, a city on the Saint Lawrence Seaway where the blankets were made by women, some of them First Nation’s women. The blankets were of high quality and reflected a resurgent interest in crafts and the handmade (although the patterns were not indigenous). They were purchased by tourists and also commissioned for ocean liners. It’s unclear how my Nana acquired them, but they may have been a wedding gift.
The second part of the title, “Standing Wave” is a phenomenon described in physics. Explained in Dictionary.com, a standing wave “oscillates in place without transmitting energy along its extent. Standing waves have stable points, called nodes, where there is no oscillation. Examples of standing waves include the vibration of a violin string and electrons orbitals in an atom.” Standing waves seem an apt metaphor for the blankets where the strings of warp and weft converge and resonate with one another. They create nodes, oscillations and interactions from the energy of all of the conditions the material has been subject to and the people who have made or interacted with the blankets over time. Where the patterned fibers diverge, history and time pass through. My interventions with sewing, knotting and repairing allow me to engage in the history of the blankets- inserting myself- tying me to them and their history. My aesthetic choices in these interventions are made intuitively and often in the meditative state brought on through the repetitive process of stitching.
I am also working with the idea of human perception which is remarkable in its complexity and specific adaption for human life, but certainly not comprehensive in its scope. Perception is both dependent upon and subject to the “tricks” of illusions. One blanket suggests painted imagery- a seascape- sea and sky, obviously two dimensional, but spatially illusionistic. In some works, I have reassembled the blankets’ pattern from non-contiguous sections so that the pattern is retained, but a rupture or slippage is also visible. In some instances, the pattern’s shift is dimensional- so that the pattern appears continuous, but a difference in the physical structure exists in three planes. I also use mirroring and inversions of the pattern to evoke some of the limitations of human sight, the shortcuts, assumptions and projections our perceiving minds employ to make their particular sense of the world.
The work on paper included in this exhibition “Phenomenological Walk 1” also plays with these concepts. The drawing is concerned with perception in combination with the “pixilation” of weaving as an indication of the limitations of binary approaches to fully reveal experienced reality. The drawing combines elements of observed experience transcribed as varying levels of descriptive drawing interleaved with a fluctuating matrix or grid of “woven” watercolor patterning. The drawing also incorporate regions and patterns of “metal leaf” which, like all such highly reflective surfaces combined with painted ones, creates a variability based on reflectance that disturbs the otherwise stable space-time continuum of the drawing’s surface. Medieval painters considered regions of their works rendered in metal leaf as “darks” as opposed to “lights,” but they function both ways, puncturing the picture plane with deep recession, or projecting in front of and beyond the plane with specular highlights. The resulting “interdimensionality,” while referring to the focus on semipermeable membranes and the physically woven character of the other works, activates the drawing in singular ways. In addition to demonstrating a diversity of approach within the enlarged conception of “drawing,” my work occupies a personal space that perhaps makes visual energies of great scale more approachable."
-Leigh Ann Hallberg
