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'New Ways and Means' art show to run through Dec. 10

By David Gonnerman '90
November 18, 2006

The Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College currently is exhibiting "New Ways and Means," which features the art of Chicago photographer and painter Michael Hopkins and Tennessee-based painter Christine Conley. The show, which is free and open to the public, runs through Dec. 10.

"These painters produce works that are at once abstract and representational," explains Jill Ewald, curator of the Flaten Art Museum.

HopkinsArt06
Untitled from Michael Hopkins' X-ray Series, white ink on slate, 6"x9", 2006.
Hopkins begins with x-rays and then turns them into paintings using pigment on slate. "These ethereal works engage mind and body," Ewald says. Conley takes what she refers to as the "leftovers" on her palette of oil paints to create large, multi-part oil paintings on styrene or manufactured rubber. "Her colorful works bring motion to the walls and to the viewer," observes Ewald.

Hopkins has been exhibiting his art around the country and in Canada since 1987. "Part of the success of the pieces...is in how they trigger the viewer's responses toward the human body without providing a strict representation," wrote critic Alan Artner in a recent review in the Chicago Tribune. "The way the slate takes the ink, breaking it down into a veritable mist gives a further sense of something real and familiar that, nonetheless, is barely there, and such hovering presences complement most beautifully the firmer inventions in hard-edged geometry."

Conley, who has been exhibiting her work since 1991, refers to her work as "defamiliarization." "Although this work is strictly representational, it appears to many to be abstract. That inherent antithesis interests me," writes Conley in her artist statement. "It embodies the idea that an artist's task is to make the mundane seem strange, and so cause the viewer to pause and step out of daily time."

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.