CoA+A, Art Department Co-Present Goodyear Exhibition

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

The College of Arts + Architecture and the Department of Art & Art History join Goodyear Arts to co-present Delusions of Grandeur: Big Works From Below the 39th Parallel at Goodyear Arts/Camp North End, August 10-31. The exhibition, which opens with a reception and gallery talk on August 10, is curated by Associate Professor of Art Erik Waterkotte and includes work by art faculty Maja Godlewska and Marek Ranis.

I am merely striving to make the world understand the delusion under which it labors…                                                

-Don Quixote Part 2 Cptr 1, Miguel De Cervantes

Delusions of Grandeur is inspired by a recent reading of the classic novel Don Quixote. Like artmaking, Quixote’s fantastic hallucinations and idealistic quests are not mere exercises in futility, but are instead necessary responses to an absurd world. And like the “Knight of the Woeful Countenance,” the artists in Delusions of Grandeur embrace the absurd to create truths more powerful than reason. As philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari state in the book A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “A concept is a brick.  It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” 

Delusions of Grandeur: Big Works From Below the 39th Parallel is an exhibition of recent, large-scale and monumental artworks by 12 contemporary artists who hail from the southern U.S.  That is, artists who live below the Mason Dixon Line (the 39th parallel) and east of the Mississippi river. The works in this exhibition amusingly explore scale and dimension, citing a variety of Art Historical influences from Surreal, Pop, and Conceptual Art: 

·      Travis Janssen and Marilee Salvator make the micro-cosmic monumental;

·      the collaboration Nature’s Intent create elaborate, store-like displays of fabricated packaging;

·      Melissa Harshmann and Althea Murphy-Price reconstitute the “domestic;”

·      Nick Satinover and Marek Ranis confront the socio-economic and ecological;

·       Arron Foster and Chadwick Tolley investigate the nostalgic; and

·      Koichi Yamamoto and Maja Godlewska offer fancies of travel, memory, and the imagined.

"In bringing these artists together, I hope to create a dialogue with the architecture of Goodyear's Camp North End location, manifesting a kind of fantastic scene in the space with art hanging from the rafters and on the floor, as well as on the walls.  In this landscape, I hope viewers will encounter their own windmill dragons."     
---Erik Waterkotte