Exhibit: Tuesday, Jan. 20 – Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015
TACOMA, Wash. – Two new exhibitions open at Kittredge Gallery on January 20 that center on drawing, the creation of imagined or ideal spaces, and the act of perception.
The Large Gallery features an exhibition of graphite drawings by Michael Schall selected from several different work bodies. Formerly based in Seattle, and now living and working in Brooklyn, Schall often has used his tightly controlled, graphite drawing style to analyze and comment on the intersection of the natural and human-made, and the human desire to control the natural world in collision with the forces and realities of nature. The result can be a haunted, even bleak world captured with Schall’s masterful use of graphite’s range of darks and lights.
The exhibition includes a tour-de-force example of this work in a 38-foot-long graphite drawing titled Remote Production Outposts. The exhibition also includes several smaller works, representational drawings of subtly off-kilter objects in some way that shifts and questions our perceptions.
Michael Schall received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. He has had solo shows at Platform Gallery, Seattle, and Pierogi and Dam Stuhltrager Gallery, both in Brooklyn. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in New York, New England, Los Angeles, and the Northwest and internationally in Germany, the Netherlands, and Tokyo. Schall has been an artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center and Dieu Donne, New York; the McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, N.C.; and Santa Fe Art Institute. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2007 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2008. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, Contemporary Drawing Magazine, The Seattle Times, and Art Review.
The Small Gallery, Parlor Games: Parallax, is a new participatory installation by Timea Tihanyi created for Kittredge Gallery. It explores the creative process's nature by drawing together ideas from art, science, and philosophy. For the exhibition, Tihanyi asked artists and scientists worldwide to submit snapshots of their workspaces.
During the exhibition, selected details from the photos will be drawn on the walls of the gallery by participating Puget Sound students and the public to create a kaleidoscopic view of the ultimate creative space. The word “parallax” in the title refers to relative perception, specifically the effect whereby an object's position or direction appears to differ when viewed from different positions. The installation plays with these ideas of presence, absence, movement, transformation, and discovery. It also includes sculptures and videos by Tihanyi and a work station where visitors can sculpt with clay, transforming the gallery itself into a workspace.
Timea Tihanyi is a Hungarian-born interdisciplinary visual artist living and working in Seattle, Wash. She holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary; a B.F.A. in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston; and an M.F.A ceramics from the University of Washington, where she is currently a member of the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts program faculty.
Tihanyi’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Spain, and the Netherlands, including Shepparton Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Mint Museum of Art and Design, Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Foundry Art Center, and International Museum of Surgical Science. In Seattle, her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions at Gallery 4Culture, CoCA, Consolidated Works, Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, SOIL Gallery, and Linda Hodges Gallery.
Tihanyi will be on campus at intervals throughout the run of the exhibition doing workshops and critiques with students and will be part of a panel discussion in the gallery as part of the university’s Art+Sci series on Jan. 27.
Kittredge Gallery serves as a teaching tool for the art department and a cultural resource for both the university and the community, exhibiting work by noted regional and national artists. Exhibits and talks are free and open to the public.
Gallery Location: the University of Puget Sound, N. 15th St. at N. Lawrence St., Tacoma, WA
Directions and Map: pugetsound.edu/directions
Regular Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Mon.–Fri.; noon–5 p.m., Saturday
Website: pugetsound.edu/kittredge
Facebook: facebook.com/pages/Kittredge-Gallery-University-of-Puget-Sound/196528434086?ref=hl
PRESS PHOTOS are available at pugetsound.edu/pressphotos
Photos on page: Top right: House on Fire, by Michael Schall; Above left: Parlor Games: Parallax, by Timea Tihanyi