Artists Michael Schall and Timea Tihanyi Lead Off a New Semester of Kittredge Gallery Exhibitions
Jan. 20–Feb. 21, 2015
TACOMA, Wash. – Two new exhibitions open at Kittredge Gallery on January 20 that center on drawing, the creation of imagined or ideal spaces, and the act of perception.
The Large Gallery features an exhibition of graphite drawings by Michael Schall selected from several different bodies of work. Formerly based in Seattle, and now living and working in Brooklyn, Schall often has used his tightly controlled, graphite drawing style to analyze and comment on the intersection of the natural and man-made, and the human desire to control the natural world in collision with the forces and realities of nature. The result can be a haunted, even bleak world captured with Schall’s masterful use of graphite’s range of darks and lights. The exhibition includes a tour-de-force example of this work in a 38-foot-long graphite drawing titled Remote Production Outposts. The exhibition also includes a number of smaller works, representational drawings of objects that are subtly off-kilter in some way that shifts and questions our perceptions.
Schall received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.
He has had solo shows at Platform Gallery, Seattle, as well as Pierogi and Dam Stuhltrager Gallery, both in Brooklyn. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in New York, New England, Los Angeles, and the Northwest, as well as internationally in Germany, the Netherlands, and Tokyo. Schall has been artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center and Dieu Donne, New York; the McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, N.C.; and Santa Fe Art Institute. He received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2007, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2008. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, Contemporary Drawing Magazine, The Seattle Times, and Art Review, among others.
The exhibition in the Small Gallery, Parlor Games: Parallax, is a new participatory installation by Timea Tihanyi created for Kittredge Gallery. It explores the nature of the creative process by drawing together ideas from art, science, and philosophy. For the exhibition Tihanyi asked artists and scientists from around the world to submit snapshots of their workspaces. During the course of the exhibition, selected details from the photos will be drawn on the walls of the gallery by participating Puget Sound students and the public in order to create a kaleidoscopic view of the ultimate creative space. The word “parallax” in the title refers to relative perception, specifically the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. The installation plays with these ideas of presence, absence, movement, transformation, and discovery. It also includes sculptures and videos by Tihanyi and a work station where visitors can sculpt with clay, transforming the gallery itself into a workspace.
Timea Tihanyi is a Hungarian-born interdisciplinary visual artist living and working in Seattle, Wash. She holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary; a B.F.A. in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston; and an M.F.A. in ceramics from University of Washington, where she is currently a member of the Interdisciplinary Visual Arts program faculty.
Tihanyi’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Australia, Denmark, Spain, and the Netherlands, including Shepparton Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Bellevue Art Museum, Mint Museum of Art and Design, Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Foundry Art Center, and International Museum of Surgical Science. In Seattle her work has been part of numerous solo and group exhibitions at Gallery 4Culture, CoCA, Consolidated Works, Seattle Art Museum (SAM) Gallery, Davidson Contemporary, SOIL Gallery, and Linda Hodges Gallery. Tihanyi will be on campus at intervals throughout the run of the exhibition doing workshops and critiques with students and will be part of a panel discussion in the gallery as part of the university’s Art+Sci series on Jan. 27.
Kittredge Gallery serves as a teaching tool for the art department and a cultural resource for both the university and the community at large, exhibiting work by noted regional and national artists. Exhibits and talks are free and open to the public.
Gallery Location: University of Puget Sound, N. 15th St. at N. Lawrence St., Tacoma, WA
Directions and Map: pugetsound.edu/directions
Regular Hours: 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Mon.–Fri.; noon–5 p.m., Saturday
Website: pugetsound.edu/kittredge
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kittredge-Gallery-University-of-Puget-Sound/196528434086?ref=hl