There are times in an art exhibit where gallery visitors find themselves in front of a piece, scratching their head and wondering, “What does it mean?” If only the artists were always there to explain their process, inspiration and purpose.
On select Tuesdays, the Carpenter Performing Arts Center is hosting a window into artists’ minds with the series “Artists in Their Own Words.”
The artists currently featured at the University Art Museum, Jud Fine and Barbara McCarren, are will be providing insight into their works, lives and careers tonight at 5 p.m.
Fine and McCarren have very different creative styles. Fine describes his process as beginning with clarity and arriving at complexity, while McCarren says she begins with complexity and arrives at clarity.
Cooperation isn’t a simple endeavor for this duo – who are also husband and wife. However, after 22 years of conscious collaboration in the studio, the two have reached an understanding about how to “work apart, together.”
Despite their differences, the two have put their works together and even collaborated on some of the pieces available in the UAM exhibit “AND/OR.”
The exhibit has sixteen pieces that are part of McCarren/Fine’s long-running project Continental Edge Dwellers,” where they address land (the beach), water (the sea), and the line of division (the coastal shore).
The sea is at once a line, a space and a condition, McCarren/Fine say. For them, the impenetrability of the sea meeting the intimacy and comfort of land speaks metaphorically to human constraint, providing them their field for imaginative expanse.
AND/OR specifically focuses on the water’s edge, to observe critically a great and immanent mystery of our future, the polar ice caps. In a time where the “Sea and Ice Index” on the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website updates on a daily basis, McCarren/Fine reflect on the give-and-take between our planet’s most precious resource – fresh water – and the very ground beneath us.
Furthermore, they are also showing two pieces from their “Currency” series that observes global economic issues. The series includes the peice “Offshore,” which arranges international currencies in a circular pattern, fanning out in a gradient of dark blue to the palest green to denote the top nine nations used for offshore tax havens.
To get a better grasp on just how this couple is able accomplish their cooperation, and to achieve better understanding behind what inspired AND/OR, hear it straight from their mouths, for free at the CPAC.