Bradley's Heuser Art center Hosts National Exhibition that Explores Perceptions of Women
February 8, 2004
By MATT BUEDEL of the Journal Star
PEORIA - When viewers ask Brian Sullivan what his art means, he shoots the question right back at them.
And the Champaign artist isn't trying to be sarcastic.
"A lot of times, I don't really know what I do," he says unapologetically. "It's something that just comes from me."
A 13-foot collage composed of 112 separate canvas pieces that he has worked on for several years will be on display in its entirety for the first time at Bradley University starting this week.
Part of "The Feminine Eye" exhibition at Heuser Art center, 1400 W. Bradley Ave., which opens Wednesday and runs through March 10, the piece is titled "True Love."
It shows a seated nude female, her back turned to the viewer, mechanical innards exposed. She looks on an eclectic array of objects and images: wooden letter blocks, a ballerina, flowers and a bottle of perfume.
Sullivan clipped the images from sketches and paintings he created over a lifetime. Other icons come from magazine pages. He arranged the items and used a labor-intensive photo transfer technique to imprint the pictures on canvas.
The overwhelming display evokes memories and metaphors. The biological clock ticks as a woman relives her life or projects another. Her face eternally turned away, no one knows exactly what she thinks.
"Is she looking at a collage of her life or her thoughts about love?" Sullivan asks.
"The Feminine Eye" aims to ask just those questions, to explore how women perceive the world and how they, in turn, are perceived. The exhibition intends also to illustrate how women create and are portrayed in art.
Eleven artists from across the country will be featured in the show, their mediums ranging from paint and print to sculpture and performance. Bradley University archival works of Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz and Joyce Tennison also will be on display.
Perhaps the underlying desire of each medium, however, is the same.
"I just want to make a piece that's so emotionally charged, people look at it and relate, no matter what, " Sullivan says of his creations.
His collage for "Feminine Eye" also features other aspects that may go unnoticed in the shadow of it's unrelenting representations and immensity. Here's where the work gets even more complicated.
The dimensions of the 112 separate canvas pieces are each one of three rectangular sizes, so the transfer is not simply blown up to a bigger grid, but to an intricate puzzle of rectangles. Sullivan says only one configuration of all the pieces allows the overall shape to form a rectangle, and rotating one, and the rest accordingly, disfigures the entire image and shape.
Hanging 112 canvas prints in that configuration is another problem all together.
Sullivan had planned on using the traditional wire on the back of each frame but predicted too many impossibilities with mapping out 112 nail holes each time he hung the collage. So he designed a frame for all the frames. Made of foam, the lightweight material adds yet another dimension to his work, literally. Viewed straight on, only the slightest hint of this secret is revealed.
From the side, the topography of the pictures is markedly different, anything but level. Moving from side to side while viewing it breaks the whole image apart. "It's really pushing the envelope of what these different materials can do," Sullivan says.