Contemporary Photography and the Garden—Deceits and Fantasies
Christian A. Johnson Memorial Gallery
Through April 17
Gardens have always represented the efforts of civilization to tame nature. This exhibition brings together more than 70 images of gardens—from Japan, Indonesia, Europe, India, South America, and the United States—as seen by 16 photographers. The works depict a range of cultural manifestations, from tranquil and seductive havens to places of tension, where exquisite beauty seems to exist uneasily with inexorable forces of nature. The exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts and made possible, in part, by a grant from the A. R. Brooks Trust and the Founders Circle of the AFA. At Middlebury it is supported by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund.
Art Now: Recent Middlebury College Presidential Portraits
Through August 14 Art Now is an ongoing exhibition series that presents contemporary works in a variety of media. This installation presents portraits of Middlebury College presidents commissioned over the past 15 years. At its focus is a newly created hologram portrait of President Emeritus John M. McCardell Jr. A hologram renders its subject in three dimensions that change, in both parallax and perspective, as the viewer moves. While official portraits have a long and distinguished history as institutional symbols, holographic portraiture has barely entered its formative years. Also included in the exhibition are portraits of Olin Robison (1989) by Jack Beal and of Timothy Light (1998) by Kate Gridley.
Paul Pfeiffer: Morning After the Deluge
Upper Gallery
May 19–August 14
This contemporary video installation by New York digital media artist Paul Pfeiffer consists of a single highly compelling, 18-minute video loop in which the artist merges two films, one of a sunrise and one of a sunset, into one work. The sun, half rising and half setting, remains fixed in the center of the screen while the shimmering ocean horizon moves across it. This juxtaposition of two realities—the reality of the viewer's prior experience with sunsets and the reality of what is actually happening on the screen—is designed to challenge the viewer's notion of location and consciousness by altering the classical perspective of the horizon and eradicating the viewer's frame of reference within the landscape.
Pfeiffer, a Filipino-American who studied fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Hunter College in New York, got his start in digital media and image editing while teaching digital design at Parsons School of Design in New York. His works are fraught with attempts to reconcile human perception and comprehension while simultaneously investigating the effect that media images have had on our understanding of identity. Specifically, his work has focused on how the advent of new digital technology has revolutionized how we perceive and understand the human experience. Many of his works are deeply informed by art historical study.
Morning After the Deluge (2001) is one of Pfeiffer's largest works (it's projected at 9 by 12 feet), and it is very closely related to and inspired by JMW Turner's painting of similar title, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory)—Morning After the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843). In his version of Morning After the Deluge Pfeiffer mimics Turner's treatment of the surrounding landscape by removing the foreground and leaving the viewer no choice but to become part of the scene. Pfeiffer's sun, a conflation of live footage he recorded of sunrises and sunsets in Provincetown, becomes the fixed element in the work while the horizon is made to move across the sun in an endless journey from top to bottom and back again.
Pfeiffer's commentary on Goethe's theory of light and color suggests that just as the eye creates its own internal lighting and color effects so too reality is formed not of its own accord but by the viewer according to his or her perception of the scene. The eye, and hence the viewer, controls the experience.
Ultimately, however, Morning After the Deluge provokes within the viewer questions about individuality and identity, and, as Pfeiffer himself has indicated, it serves to return the viewer to a confrontation with death.
Ongoing Exhibitions
Ancient and Asian Art from the Collection
Lower Gallery
A French limestone Head of a King on loan from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art joins this fine installation of western antiquities and Asian objects.
European and American Art from the Collection
Cerf Gallery
On view this term are works from the permanent collection selected to illustrate western art history from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. An added attraction is Leatherstocking's Rescue II, a painting by American eccentric John Quidor on loan from Bowdoin.