#BemisPainters: 1985-2015

The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, July – October, 2015.

This exhibition highlights painters who offered contemporary points of view by, for example, incorporating other disciplines and traditions like sculpture, drawing, or weaving into their artworks. Different influences and cultural responses crossed periods in time and can be seen in the wide range of content and materials such as wallpaper, sticks, textile, and encaustic wax that are used in painterly ways and reference art history. The title of the exhibition referenced hash-tagging, a form online metadata uses to assign content to specific themes. Here, the hashtag described various motifs, themes, and painterly considerations that formed a constellation of inspiration and ideas highlighting painting’s formal and conceptual possibilities. The allusion to Internet categorization and the Web’s limitless access to art research speaks to Bemis Center’s own expansive and systematized archive, where descriptive meta tags attempt to categorize and address painting’s vast pluralism. Participating artists: Samantha Bittman, Helen Brough, Richard C. Cox, Marc Dennis, Alex Lukas, Ben Murray, Hamlett Dobbins, Echo Eggebrecht, Sarah Gamble, James Holmberg, Christina Narwicz, Mary Ann Strandell, Joan Waltemath, Hyun Soo-Choi, Pierre Obando, Amanda Valdez, Ben Murray, Bob Koons, Allison Renshaw, Steve Reynolds, Leslie Shows, John Sparagana, Eric von Robertson, Jeremy Olson, Lambert Wintersberger, Pierre Obando, Aaron Storck, Quynh Vantu.