Reece Museum, ETSU

J.J. Cromer

until September 27, 2018

"Self-Taught Art By Any of Its Names" at the Reece Museum, East Tennessee State University, celebrates the work of over 20 self-taught artists. Presented in cooperation with Grey Carter – Objects of Art in McLean, Virginia, the exhibition questions: “Should not their work be acknowledged and accepted for what it is?” and “Why shouldn’t these artists’ efforts be recognized without the implied caveats of additional labels or unique storyline?”

East Tennessee State University
PO Box 70300, Johnson City, TN 37614
www.etsu.edu

Black Sheep Gallery, Nova Scotia

until October 21, 2018

Black Sheep Gallery presents works by Jacob Roth, who began sculpting at the age of 82 and worked into his nineties, creating over 100 sculptures.

Black Sheep Gallery
1689 West Jeddore Road, West Jeddore Village, Nova Scotia, B0J 1P0 Canada
www.blacksheepart.com

Museum Gugging, Maria Gugging

Gaston Chaissac

until October 7, 2018

Museum Gugging presents art brut works by well-known and newly discovered classics in "existence.! humans in the jean-claude volot collection", the first showing of Jean-Claude Volot's collection in Austria.

museum gugging
Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, Austria
www.gugging.at

Ealing Art Trail

Treatment Rooms, courtesy Carrie Reichardt

September 7–9 and September 14–16, 2018

Artists in Ealing, UK, will open their homes, studios or other local venues to exhibit and sell their work in the annual Borough of Ealing Art Trail (BEAT).

ealingbeat.org.uk

Article Preview: Raising the Dead

Czech artist Jana Paleckova reworks vintage portraits, delving into the afterlives of images

AUTHOR: GRACE-YVETTE GEMMELL

Untitled (oval framed image), 2015, 18.5 x 22.5 ins. / 50 x 57 cm

Jana Paleckova abhors a vacuum. After scouring thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales and antiques shops, on the hunt for orphaned vintage photographic portraits, the 36-year-old self-taught Czech artist found herself left with a nagging itch that she has been scratching ever since. Begging explanation, Paleckova instantly sensed that something was missing from these forgotten portraits, whose histories had long fallen into obsolescence. Stasis, in some ways, is restless, just as silence can speak multitudes. Unable to shake the tantalisingly suggestive, yet ultimately entirely concealed nature of the once-cherished, now long-forgotten stories behind these hauntingly poignant, discarded artefacts, Paleckova felt a compulsion to take matters into her own hands by teasing out entirely new visual narratives where photographic documentation left off (or perhaps fell short). The result is a large body of work that raises questions as to the slippery nature of documentation and preservation, the suggestive potency of deeply personal images when taken entirely out of context, the equally illuminating and deceptive quality of elaborate self-presentation, and the ways in which photographic images take on a life of their own long after capturing a specific, solitary moment in time.

 Untitled (Shadow Puppet), 2017, 15 x 10 ins. / 38.1 x 25.4 cm

Not content to let the dead bury the dead, Paleckova began subtly manipulating these discarded portraits, gingerly lacing them with tenuous but significant modifications achieved by painting directly onto their black-and-white and sepia surfaces in muted gradations of eye-catching oil pigments. Working spontaneously, while quickly responding to the portraits on a gut instinct, Paleckova’s oil-paint interventions in many ways bring to mind the automatic processes favoured by practitioners of Surrealism. Paleckova’s work equally recalls the core practices cultivated by direct carvers, with their emphasis on “liberating” meaning from source materials and their insistence upon “the truth of materials”, or the idea that properties inherent to the raw materials an artist uses should remain physically apparent and largely intact in the creation of finished artworks.
    

Untitled (Group of Men), 2018, 12 x 15 ins. / 30.5 x 38.1 cm

Working through a rhetoric of amplification, however, Paleckova’s addenda possess at best an uneasy relationship to their source material. The objects and figures originally captured in the portraits remain at odds, or only in strained and precarious concert, with the visual addenda that encroach them. At times the subjects appear confused by the intrusion of the new content, while at others it is difficult to imagine the addenda as having never been present in the portraits to begin with. Paleckova’s works present hybrid images that operate in a round of competing proofs, each inflating and exceeding, confounding and complementing the other. Rather than clarifying or even over-determining the interpretation of the original images, Paleckova’s oil-paint additions – which are more hypertext than subtext – are of such an enigmatic and fragmentary nature, at odds with the apparent content present, that they instead serve to further muddle and fracture, no matter the potency of the anecdotal teases. This, however, seems to be the point.

Untitled (Man with Two Sets of Eyes), 2016, 6.38 x 4.25 ins. / 16.2 x 10.8 cm

 Jacques Rancière qualifies what he considers to be “the pensiveness of the image” as “the latent presence of one regime of expression in another.” (1) Treating the neglected photographs as both found objects and artefacts, Paleckova’s oil-paint interventions are “pensive” in that they preserve the integrity of the original images captured in the portraits, while playfully and perversely distorting and supplementing them with highly fanciful visual addenda that one might suspect would send their original subjects rolling in their own graves.

Notes
1. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator. London and New York: Verso, 2011, p. 124.

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