Department of Art _ CVA Gallery
Transitions & Journeys_
October 11 - November 22, 2009
Con Dos Manos Holzwege 26
Arturo Rodriguez Deborah Orloff"Transitions and Journeys" is a two-person exhibition of artwork created by UT Art Department Faculty members Arturo Rodriguez and Deborah Orloff while they were on sabbatical during the 2008-2009 school year.
Opening Reception_ Friday, October 16, 2009 6-9 p.m.
Orloff is a professor of art and teaches and coordinates photography in the new media area. Rodriguez is an associate professor of art in printmaking and director of the printmaking area.
For this exhibition, the artists utilize the CVA Gallery and extend the show into the public space of the first floor. The gallery will be transformed into a dramatic darkened space to create a unique visual experience in which the works themselves provide the only light in the gallery.
Deborah Orloff’s life-size scaled projection situates the viewer in her elusively shifting landscapes. In the auxiliary space adjacent to the gallery, viewers can see Orloff’s large-scale photomontages from her Holzwege series as well as recent mixed media prints by Rodriguez.
In describing her work, Orloff says, “I create ambiguous landscapes through the layering of multiple photographs. I combine the images digitally to create surreal, new spaces where one photograph disappears into the next. These invented landscapes function as metaphors for the universal experience we all have inevitably, when our lives suddenly change; just when you think you know where you’re going, unexpected circumstances dictate a change of plans.
Holzwege 20, 2009 Holzwege 17,2009
In the gallery, Rodriguez’s hand cast shadow puppets are reminiscent of childhood games while his video installation evokes dream imagery projected in water. He says his work is rooted in himself and the fact that he is a unique and uneven mixture of elements from Cuban and American cultures—not really a blend, but not fully one or the other either.
Con Dos Manos, 2009 The Floating World
“In my mixed media prints, I like to take images that one might find on the walls of an ‘average American home,’ and combine them with some of my earliest visual memories about the United States: cartoons. For me this way of working is akin to culture in Cuba itself and to a lesser degree Cuban-American life in Miami. In working with this disparate visual imagery, I become aware of compositional problems that are inherent when working with two distinct visual realities. As a result my aim is to ‘morph’ the works into a symbiotic whole. Scarcity and imported imagery are part of the motivation in the work. For me this way of working constitutes an accurate metaphor for Cuban aesthetics.”
