Past Exhibitions
Past Forward
Sin-ying HoLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
If Chinese ceramic art has a heart, it beats in Jingdezhen. For centuries, artisans there have made vessels that traveled far and wide. Their fluid forms and recognizable decorations have inspired celebratory prose and devoted followers around the world. Today, Sin-ying Ho works in these same ceramics factories. Though Jingdezhen potters have long defined tradition, Sin-ying has expanded both their forms and their imagery in contemporary ceramics that are thoroughly of the twenty-first century. She makes her works—whether they are monumental vases or smaller, more clearly assembled sculptures—from multiple parts. She emphasizes the many parts by glazing each of the pieces differently. Together they form a whole that maintains the legacy of being created from myriad fragments.
Sin-ying’s process of building is an essential metaphor for her artistic practice. With it, she implies an optimism for our society’s continued ability to construct a unified world. As reflected in her technique, and in the themes addressed by her surface imagery, this world will necessarily be an amalgam of new and old, here and there, greed and generosity, men and women, faith and despair. Through these combinations, Sin-ying shares a worldview that acknowledges the inherent contradictions and challenges of global culture while also anticipating the uncanny beauty emerging all around us.
Reason’s Oxymorons
Kader AttiaLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
Reason’s Oxymorons, by internationally acclaimed artist Kader Attia, is a recent museum acquisition. The research-driven video installation, which will occupy the entire space at Hood Downtown in winter 2018, consists of a range of interviews by Attia with philosophers, psychiatrists, anthropologists, traditional healers, historians, musicologists, patients, and immigrants. The conversations are organized around several themes centered on the ways in which non-Western and Western cultures approach psychiatric conditions and emotional breakdowns. Composed of eighteen computer monitors, each set on a workman-like table in a secluded office cubicle with a chair, earphones, and loudspeakers, this ambitious installation evokes an ascetic modern office environment.
Sound Art at Dartmouth
Resonant SpacesIn the first-ever installation of sound art on Dartmouth's campus, produced in collaboration with guest-curator faculty member Spencer Topel, the Hood Museum of Art will showcase the work of emerging and established international artists with diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds. Seven site-specific and sound-based commissions will guide visitors across the Dartmouth campus and into the town of Hanover. Hood Downtown will feature a multimedia display introducing the exhibition and artists, as well as selected works from conceptual artist Terry Adkins (1953-2014). Artists creating new installations for the show include Bill Fontana, Christine Sun Kim, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Laura Maes, Julianne Swartz, and Jess Rowland.
As diverse a medium as bronze or oil paint, sound can be recorded from the environment or produced from an object, sculpture, instrument, or living being. It can be responsive to installed spaces or autonomous, continuous or intermittent, loud or soft. Artists were invited in part for the compelling ways they use sound through conceptual, visual, and architectural contexts. Resonant Spaces alters locations in Hanover by encouraging visitors to experience the world transformed through sound.
The Everyday Fantastic
Julie BlackmonLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic features work from this major American photographer's most recent, and ongoing, series, titled Homegrown. Blackmon was raised in Springfield, Missouri, and has decided to remain there and make that world the setting for her work. She approaches Middle America with a poetic combination of wonder and worry as she explores the perpetual mysteries of daily life in a particular place.
In Homegrown, her third series, Blackmon evokes a domestic world gone just slightly awry. There is nothing disastrous in her mise-en-scenes--yet. But each image suggests potential intrigues that percolate just below the level of the obvious. The artist's brilliance lies in allowing viewers the sense that they are making their own discoveries rather than entering into a world that has been carefully constructed by the artist.
World Processor
Ingo GüntherLocation: Hood Downtown, 53 Main Street, Hanover, NH
Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and a subject of their work. Ingo Günther, who studied ethnology and cultural anthropology at Frankfurt University and sculpture and media at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has been mapping data onto a sea of illuminated globes in his World Processor series for twenty-five years. The series is now internationally renowned and numbers over one thousand objects, a selection of which will be available to Hood Downtown visitors for the first time. The artist’s envisioning of complex data on physically identical but content-specific illuminated globes foregrounds scientific, economic, and historical information to create multilayered accounts of the relationship between humans and the planet.
This exhibition is paired with Mining Big Data: Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough on view in the Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, from March 24 through April 30. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.
Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough
Mining Big DataLocation: Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center
Art encompasses all things, so it is not surprising that artists have embraced big data as both a tool and subject of their work. In very different ways, Amy Balkin and Luis Delgado-Qualtrough use data-driven research to grapple visually with such topics as climate change, the demands on global natural resources, carbon emissions, solar energy, and the effects of various human activities on a global scale. Amy Balkin’s poster titled The Atmosphere: A Guide explores the influence of history and politics on the Earth’s atmosphere. Luis Delgado-Qualtrough tackles the problem of carbon accumulation with 10 Carbon Conundrums, a word-and-image essay that recombines historical events, dates, and GPS coordinates. This exhibition is paired with Ingo Günther: World Processor on view at Hood Downtown from March 24 through May 28. Both exhibitions reveal how artists use information to create new forms and ways of understanding global issues.