Funding for this program is provided by The William Frederick Bethune Fund for the Arts of Cumberland Community Foundation, Inc.
Exhibition Dates & Hours
April 4 – May 14, 2014
Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Closed Saturdays & Sundays
Curatorial Statement
Where Are We to Disappear, a title taken from Chieko Murasugi’s painting, is the perfect title for this exhibition. It is a potent metaphor for the shapes and borders Murasugi imposes through algorithms and for how the electromagnetic waves we perceive leak across all of them.
Our perceptual relationship to color is rich, complex, ephemeral, and metaphorical. In the words of Josef Albers (an artist who spent a lifetime studying the effects of color on our perception), “If one says ‘Red’ – the name of color – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.” The point is that we cannot contain color or perception.
Culturally speaking, why are some bright colors considered exotic or even barbaric? Why are subdued colors considered sophisticated and intellectual? Especially so, considering that neither is contained by time or space. Remember, color is not a physical property of our environment. Yet, color inscribes our cultural signifiers – all the things that define and separate us. But those things cannot contain color.
For Murasugi and her viewers, the color quite literally migrates from the brush to the canvas, from the canvas and the brush to the rag, and from the studio rag to the traditional Japanese kimono into our bodies.
