Spectral Landscape with viewingstations/Color and Contemporary Art
Curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff
Opening April 27, 2012
Gallery 400 at Uneversity of Illinois at Chicago

Exhibition Description: An exhibition-cum-installation, Spectral Landscape with Viewing Stations will array a number of artworks around the gallery according to a loosely organized color spectrum. The project will be an environment-a landscape- created not only from works using spectral hues, but also from instances of achromatic, invisible (infared, thermal, supernatural) and variable (metallic, iridescent, florescent) color in art. The guiding metaphor of a spectral landscape, and the inclusion of atmospheric or immaterial color phenomena, allows the exhibition to go beyond simple ideas of color as being composed of individual colors- as in conventional color charts. Instead, the exhibition will concentrate on zones where colors, disciplines and concepts blend and/or overlap...and will imagine “charting” in the navigational sense: as an ongoing process of locating oneself by measuring perception against place. This is where the “viewing stations” of the show's title come into play. Rather than outlining a grand theory of color (expressed through consistent wall didactics), Spectral Landscape surveys available theories and ideas of color in a non-hierachical way (with multiple “viewing stations”) i.e.; interpretive texts and images-dispersed throughout the environment of the exhibit).

In the last regard, Spectral Landscape with Viewing Stations operates from and against the starting point of the 2008 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950-Today. Curator Ann Tempkin's focus was on Modernist uses of color as readymade: color as store-bought rather than hand mixed, and color as found-object. Spectral Landscape proposes a wide range of contemporary concerns around and about color outside of the tight historical narrative that Color Chart proposed.

David Batchelor's 2000 text Chromophobia, a short book of meditations on color in contemporary Western culture, also influenced our thinking about Spectral Landscape. The book, which focuses on the social coding of color has been enormously influential amongst contemporary critics and theorists. It's also been popular with artists, including many of the artists included in Spectral Landscape, who investigate color as both a formal and social force.

The artists included in Spectral Landscape represent a wide variety of working methodologies and processes. What they share in common is a curious, probing, non-doctrinaire approach to the use of color; and a willingness to mix emotional, formal, political, and semiotic approaches to color, within single works. The 'shared differences' of these artists return us to the metaphor and material reality of the spectrum: it is a way of organizing experience that recognizes indeterminacy rather than imposing discreet categories on fundamentally unstable phenomena. Spectral Landscape will address and enact some of the methods that these artists have adopted in order to navigate-to chart- the complex interactions between colors, histories, references, and sensations; and to locate their work within that landscape of relations.

Artists:
Polly Apfelbaum
Ali Bailey
John Baldessari
Madison Brookshire
Zach Buchner
Suzanne Caporeal
C.L.U.E. (A.L. Stiener and robbinschild)
Jacob Dahlgren
José Davila
William Eggelston
Spencer Finch
Gaylen Gerber
Sam Gilliam
Gary Hill
Roger Hions
Doug Ischar
Rashid Johnson
Bob Law
Judy Ledgerwood
Pierre Leguillon
Jose Lerma
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
Steven Parrino
Anne Truitt