Yawnings and Dawnitecture: Celebrating Hélio Oiticica is the latest exhibit to be featured at the University Gallery at the University of Redlands. Curated by U of R Professor of Painting and Drawing Munro Galloway, and Joshua Tree-based curator, editor, and writer Trinie Dalton, the show opened on Saturday, unveiling a wide variety of mediums and energetic splashes of color.
“[Trinie and I] had the idea of creating an exhibition around the work of Hélio Oiticica, the influential Brazilian artist who is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York right now,” said Galloway. “We were particularly intrigued by Oiticica’s later work, which expands beyond painting to include sensory artworks, environments, and performance.”
Featuring nine artists from locations around the globe, including L.A., New York, and Brazil, the show’s assortment of mediums creates an eclectic harmony within the gallery. Two larger-than-life collages by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, both titled Collage Roll, dominate one wall, hanging from the ceiling and stretching halfway across the gallery floor. The collages pop with meticulously pieced-together images and vivid hues, and are held to the floor by Brook Hsu’s clay Dog Boots.
Timo Fahler’s study for the artist as court jester #1-5 hang side-by-side along one wall, staring colorfully at the viewer in their façade-like forms. Fahler’s other piece in the show, pájaro en penetráveis, features a steel, cage-like structure covered in sections of hydrocal—a type of plaster—that encloses a fountain made of hay and hyrdocal. The skinny, pointed fountain sucks up blue dye from its base to its near-top, where it dribbles back down over the white plaster.
Other artists in the show include Rebecca Morris, Sam Falls, Kristin Beinner James, Bjorn Copeland, Jim Drain, and Anna Sew Hoy.
Galloway, whose work was featured in the gallery both last spring and this fall in the Art Faculty Show, said that curating a show is the opposite of working as an artist.
“As an artist, I find it’s best to work within a loose framework, but to keep things as open as possible to let the viewer figure it out,” said Galloway. “When you’re curating, you have to make decisions for the viewer—which pieces are visible, in what sequence, and what relationships exist between works. I'm not sure which one is harder, but I’m definitely more of an artist than a curator.”
Yawnings and Dawnitecture will be at the Gallery on Colton Avenue until Sunday, December 10. It is open from 1–5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 2–5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
