Coming up @ The new VAC

Losing Faith

Losing Faith is an exhibition of recent work by TJ Hunt and Landon O’Brien investigating artistic identity through recontextualization.

October 22, 2010 - November 13, 2010

Opening Reception: October 29, 6–9 pm

Losing Faith, an exhibition of recent work by TJ Hunt and Landon O’Brien, will examine what it means to self-identify as an artist in the current pluralistic artistic climate, questioning notions of originality and cultural value in a social economy that has largely lost confidence in the power of art as a vehicle to promote a message or enact change. In steadily increasing numbers, artists are emerging from studio art degree programs onto the overpopulated art scene, struggling to extract innovative solutions to a creative crisis from recycled ideas and gestures. Rather than attempting to preserve the idealism of a romanticized past, Losing Faith will address the status quo by embracing the cynical vocabulary of academia. Far from didactic, the works in the exhibition employ humor through appropriation and recontextualization of earlier modes of representation, visually and conceptually establishing a critical dialogue between past and present. The works question the sustainability of their own practice, even as their existence attests to the enduring nature of the creative process.

TJ Hunt will receive a B.F.A. in Studio Art and a B.A. in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin in fall 2010. Landon O’Brien received his B.F.A. in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin in spring 2010.

John Kingerlee: A Painter’s Passage

John Kingerlee: A Painter’s Passage is a solo exhibition of works by Anglo-Irish painter John Kingerlee, curated by UT alumnus and former art critic William Zimmer.

October 29, 2010 - December 18, 2010

Closing Reception: December 3, 6:30–9 pm

The Visual Arts Center is proud to present a solo exhibition of abstract, narrative and figurative paintings and mixed-media works by Anglo-Irish painter John Kingerlee, curated by UT alumnus William Zimmer. This survey of Kingerlee’s work includes paintings the artist executed after moving to the remote Beara Peninsula in southwest Ireland in the early 1980s. Kingerlee paints in a number of modes that, despite their singularity, are strongly connected. Among the highlights of the exhibition is work from the Grid Series, in which each panel consists of a grid of opaque color squares, built up over time, to create surfaces evocative of the rugged Irish landscape. Kingerlee’s works are deeply imbued by his lifestyle to live part-time in a remote locale, at one with the landscape and bearing the hardships of daily life in order to paint.

In conjunction with the U.S. tour of this exhibition, undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and art history are invited to participate in the William Zimmer Prize in Art Criticism. Open to students currently enrolled in a fine arts program at any college or university in the U.S., or recent graduates (within one year), the Zimmer Prize will be awarded for the best essay on the work of John Kingerlee. Students may pick up an application at the front desk of the Visual Arts Center, or visit www.zimmerprize.org for more information.