This time around artist Lydia Anne McCarthy created three images in conjunction with the Still Life Masterpieces exhibition. McCarthy, a graduate of the UNC–Chapel Hill MFA program, spent the past year living and working in Sweden. Her desire to return to Sweden, to the people, culture, and landscape that she fell in love with, informs the billboards she created. The work is an homage to her time spent exploring the landscape, a manifestation of her desire to return, and a recognition of the impossibility of longing.

In her photographs McCarthy evinces her memories of “wandering through the forest to pick berries and mushrooms; stray reindeer roaming the highways; and the stark rugged terrain spotted with lakes and filled with wildflowers,” but, forced into existence, they have decayed. McCarthy makes reference to traditional still-life paintings, as well as the tropes of advertising and studio photography, causing a disconnect between the beauty and allure of the form and the unappealing objects depicted within. The form produces an expectation of desire, but the content is undesirable, thus “creating tension between what is photographed and how it is photographed.”

McCarthy’s photographs are also steeped in the tradition of vanitas, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17^th century. Vanitas symbolizes the inevitability of death and the transience and hubris of earthly achievements and pleasures. Skulls, rotten fruit, mirrors, and scholarly objects are often signposts of this tradition. Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s Vanitas Still Life (1668), with its skull, broken lyre, papers, and nearly burnt-out candle, and John Frederick Peto’s Student’s Materials (circa 1890–1900), depicting a book with its cover dangling by a thread and melted candle, are excellent examples of the vanitas tradition in Still-Life Masterpieces. The molding strawberries and cheese, animal skull, mirrors, and art books in McCarthy’s pictures are more than memories of Sweden—they are also traditional symbols of vanitas. These works are an acknowledgment by the artist that, like the fruit in Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, her own desire (to relive her time in Sweden) “is unsustainable and with time passing, will begin to decay.”

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images:
Lydia Anne McCarthy, Osthyvel, handduk, blommor och blåbär, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Renskalle med böcker, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Last fall UNC grad Carolyn Janssen created three billboards featuring digitally manipulated worlds filled with marauding Amazons, in environments that were both strange and appealing. This spring we’ve opted to do something entirely new: we invited college students to submit images and ideas for billboards. And what a response we received! After sorting through all the entries, we chose three artists: Sydney Cobb (Alamance Community College), Isaiah Johnson (St. Augustine’s College), and Cindy Kohnen (Meredith College).

Cobb’s billboard, Fireflies, refers to a favorite Southern pastime. “This piece portrays a childhood memory of catching mystical fireflies in one of my grandma’s mason jars,” Cobb says. “I always loved opening the jar and watching them fly away.” Cobb notes that our current exhibition, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, provided inspiration. “My piece is a free-flowing and natural piece, much like his artwork.”

Johnson’s winning entry, One Brick, One Seed, is a photographic manifesto about the linked urban and natural landscapes. “I didn’t want to be literal with nature and all the beautiful aspects of it, but to show the evolution of today’s world through one brick and one seed,” Johnson says. “This piece was inspired by the beginning of life itself, the buildings we live in, and the hands that built them. From that first hammer or screw, their constructions offer limitless inspiration. The components of this piece are the forest and the cityscape. The trees were placed above the buildings to highlight the line between two different worlds that are also closely related.”

Kohnen’s Cycles presents, in her words, “the different stages of life after death.” Kohnen explains, “I chose the white and pink petals to show the beauty in life but paired these elements with dirt to convey the sense of a fallen petal to the ground. As spring turns to fall, leaves also observe the remaining life in nature’s dying elements. The third [segment] shows the reincarnation of the dead petals and leaves through the image of live mushrooms and their roots. The repetition of the circular formation created with grass embraces earth’s life cycle. I used color throughout this series to depict and stages of human life, starting with birth, softness, and purity, and ending with wisdom, age, and decomposition.”

Congratulations to our three winners, and thanks to all our participants! Be sure to explore our Museum Park to view these billboards, and come back in the fall to experience a new round of Park Pictures.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images and captions:

Top: Sydney Cobb, Fireflies, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Sydney Cobb

Cindy Kohnen, Cycles, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Cindy Kohnen

Isaiah Johnson, One Brick, One Seed, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Isaiah Johnson

It’s that time of year again, dear readers! With the change of the seasons comes a new edition of our billboards project, Park Pictures. We’ve been promoting Park Pictures here on Untitled for more than two years now, and we’re still going strong! As you may recall, our Pictures are three “billboards” installed along the paved walking trails, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. These billboards change regularly to feature new works by different artists, both from North Carolina and elsewhere.

Last spring Anthony Goicolea created three billboards in conjunction with his solo exhibition Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea. This time around we’ve commissioned three works by California-based artist Carolyn Janssen, who completed her master of fine arts degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in spring 2011. Janssen’s works are digitally crafted worlds created by the expert superposition of images from Janssen’s own daily environment, including multiple representations of herself. This consistent layering allows the artist an element of control as she focuses on the process itself. “I used individual objects in the same way I would use a single brushstroke,” Janssen notes, “building each scene mark by mark.” Janssen’s knowledge of art shines through in her works, which are reminiscent of traditional landscape painting as well as the complex scenes of Bosch and Breughel. The images also refer to video game worlds and science fiction tableaux, which keep Janssen’s works rooted in pop culture.

The subject matter of Janssen’s billboards pertains to an imaginary dystopic society populated solely by Amazon-esque women who, the artist notes, “question and commandeer the landscape, engaging in narratives and mini-dramas, in which they build, fight, kill, and rest. At times calm, at times acting in apprehension to a present or past disaster, the figures reflect on a landscape broken, uncertain, and strange.”

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Last fall, Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker shook things up by riffing on three popular paintings from the NCMA’s American collection. This spring, we highlight three photographic works by Brooklyn artist Anthony Goicolea. Goicolea’s billboards coordinate nicely with the solo exhibition of his works, Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea, which will be on view in the East Building through July 24. The artist has long been interested in fabricating images of new, fantastical spaces that are familiar yet strange, enticing yet unsettling. The photographs the artist chose for Park Pictures stem from a series examining issues of environmental destruction, globalization, and the influence of humanity on the world at large. In addition to being inspired by the world around him, Goicolea also takes cues from art history. As he notes, “I’m influenced by the tradition of the sublime in 19th-century American landscape paintings,” much as Nancy Baker had been in our previous billboard series. Goicolea continues, “My series of photographs treat their environments as hyper-exaggerated frontiers … providing physical evidence and visual proof of an ongoing past narrative.”

Guardian features a snowy scene, completely populated by dogs that dwell amid the ruins of a colorful town. As such, it contrasts starkly with the verdant, lush surroundings of the Museum Park in springtime. Guardian can be seen in a different context in Alter Ego. Similarly, Ocean and Ghost Ship reveal water-based scenes that contrast with the types of landscapes in the Museum Park itself. Overall, the artist noted that his rationale for choosing images for Park Pictures was simple: “I thought it would be interesting to present a landscape within a landscape.” The novelty of the Park Pictures project was certainly an enticement for the artist. “I have never had any outdoor work presented before, but it has always been a bit of a fantasy of mine! I love the idea, and I am excited to see the billboards actualized.”

Anthony Goicolea, Guardian, 2008, digital print on vinyl. Photo credit: twbuckner via the NCMA Flickr group.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

The latest installation features work by Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker. You may be familiar with Baker’s work; her painting The Betrayal is part of the Museum’s permanent collection and is on view on Level A in East Building.

Nancy’s billboards are fun and funky, an interesting take on existing works. “Borrowing from three exalted artists from the NCMA’s American collection, mingling highbrow and lowbrow taste, I offer up three reinvented and reconfigured tableaus of the American tradition of landscape painting,” Baker says.

Her willing (or unwilling) subjects? Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador, and Inness’s Under the Greenwood. But viewers might not recognize them—the paintings have been bisected and then digitally reflected back onto themselves, as if by a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Suddenly something familiar becomes something new, strange, and even a bit disturbing. Surrounding the altered landscapes is a border of jewels, flowers, staring eyes, and other strange elements, acting, as Baker puts it, as “a Looney Tunes memento mori, in stark contrast to the dreamy realism of the [original] paintings.”

Baker links this memento mori theme with the title of her billboard series: Home Sweet Home. As she notes, “The title, appropriated from John Howard Payne’s ubiquitous poem, reminds us that ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ However, the idea of home in [works such as] Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador has become an historical rendering of a world now on the verge of self-destruction. Through no fault of Mignot, this unreliable narrative of fecund nature is testimony to our desire for fantasy. Like the oeuvre of Norman Rockwell, art can be the greatest and most convincing propaganda.” Baker’s works allow us to ponder important questions of reality vs. fiction, and how that distinction—or lack thereof—affects the natural world today.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Our Bierstadt has a history in contemporary art! Check out this post from 2008, which links the painting to an artist at the Brooklyn Museum–Ed.

André Leon Gray, The Choice is Yours, 2010, digital print on vinyl, 5 x 12 ft., Commissioned by the NCMA, funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health

Spring and summer are a great time to visit the Museum Park and discover the latest installation of the Park Pictures project. As you may remember, Park Pictures comprises three “billboards” installed along the paved House Creek Greenway. It is the second project in a continuing series of site-specific art entitled Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. The billboards change on a continual basis to feature new works by different artists.

While the last billboards featured one artist, the new set showcases three, one on each billboard. All of the artists—Stacy-Lynn Waddell, André Leon Gray, and Harrison Haynes—provide the viewer with a unique vision and interpretation. They were given freedom to design their own images without limits to a theme or guidelines, with one exception: artists were asked that their designs somehow relate to the natural environment or the park landscape.

Harrison Haynes, with Untitled (Two Hands), explores the timeless concept of our link to the natural world through a photograph featuring a man-made still life. “I’m interested in the modern human impulse to re-connect with nature,” he says, “And in this piece I want to address the potential for artificiality in fulfilling that impulse.”

In The Choice is Yours, André Leon Gray tackles a similar topic with an environmental slant. Gray’s large-scale image reproduces three mason jars used in canning or preserving food, with each holding a truly valuable treasure. The jars, Gray notes, “become a metaphorical solution to mankind’s neglect of his environment: preserve it or lose it.”

Stacy-Lynn Waddell’s work Look/See is comprised entirely of a mirrored vinyl covering, which reflects the world around it in a blurred, distorted manner. What exactly are we seeing in it? As Waddell explains, “By creating a sight of distorted reflection, I argue that we collectively grapple with determining the difference between perception and reality.”

The Art Has No Boundaries series is part of the Active Community and Neighborhood grant program funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health.

Jeff Whetstone, Signs, 2009, digital print on vinyl, 5 x 12 ft., Commissioned by the NCMA, funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health

While fall brings the closure of the Museum building, the beautiful weather beckons you to explore the sprawling Museum Park. The most recent addition to the collection in the Park is the billboard project Park Pictures. It is the second project in a continuing series of site-specific works of art entitled Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the outside part of the Museum. The billboards will change on a continual basis to feature the work of many different artists.

The inaugural artist, Jeff Whetstone, a Durham-based photographer, has long explored the interrelationships between humans and the natural landscape. His installation, Signs, is a three-billboard series that focuses on the bare branches of a winter landscape in such an intensely close manner that the image itself becomes almost abstract. He highlight this effect by photographing in black-and-white enabling him to remove some of the original meaning or intention behind the natural setting and insert his own interpretation. Whetstone often seeks words or messages among the gnarled vines and branches as if they are placed there through celestial intervention. He even highlighted words by hand with reflective tape to emphasize his findings.

“I have taken on the role of the visionary who seeks divine messages applied to the material of our world… the landscape has become a drapery onto which my fears and desires are projected,” Whetstone says.