Art Exhibition: Repetitions
The 23 artworks in Repetitions were selected from the permanent collection of University Galleries. With dates ranging from the 19th century to the early 21st, these paintings, prints, photographs, textiles, and sculptures each depict repetitions or were created through repetitious processes. Taken altogether, they present an opportunity to consider the ways art can be a tool for identifying difference within sameness and sameness within difference. Artists include Edith Altman, Dmitri Baltermants, Ilse Bing, John Clem Clarke, Alan Cohen, Adam Farcus (B.F.A. 2006), Leonard Freed, John Himmelfarb, Ken Holder, Jasper Johns, Fay Lee (B.F.A. 1986), Jacques Lowe, Sister Meg Majewski, Rodney Ripps, Brandon Siscoe (B.F.A. 2012), Jack Solomon, and Joan Sterrenburg. Also included are works by unknown Panamanian and Tibetan artists.A repetition is a form or an object that has been exactly reproduced. It is the same thing twice (or more). A repetition is also an action done over and over: some movement, a certain flourish repeated. Repetitions are flocks of birds and the chores we do; they are patterns and habits; they can be irksome or comforting. But strictly speaking, repetitions do not exist. The second occurrence of a thing is always a new thing, distinct in substance from the first no matter how close they are in appearance. Repetition is an impossibility that nevertheless seems to happen all the time. This contradiction has fascinated artists for as long as there has been art.Some of the earliest known artworks are repetitions: in the Cueva de las Manos in Patagonia, prehistoric humans spent centuries layering stencil upon stencil of their palmprints on the walls of a cave. As though they were frightened by the realization that an image of a hand is different from the hand itself, the artists repeated their failed attempt at repetition until the failure seemed absurd. Such a back-and-forth between terror of repetition and indulgence in it has recurred in many artistic traditions. For instance, Islamic artists have long deployed repetition in the form of complex patterns to symbolize divine principles without representing the divine, which is unrepresentable.In some cases, the repetitions on view in this exhibition are strict and regular, like the artists were trying to cast order upon something unwieldy. In others, they appear chaotic: sloppy gestures or proliferating masses that bring into relief the differences between iterating forms.In Jasper Johns’ lithograph Corpse and Mirror, terse black and gray diagonals build up to a grid of diamond and triangular forms. There is repetition not only in the profusion of similar marks and the similar shapes they create, but also in the left-right symmetrical organization of the print overall (hence the titular “mirror”). However, in the top right corner there is a haze of gray overlaying the design. This haze could be external to the image (like a fog breathed onto the “mirror” of the lithograph’s surface) or it could be seeping up from out of it (it is the same color as the gray that makes up half of the grid beneath). Either way, it interrupts one’s appreciation of the regularity that characterizes the rest of the design, and it pushes one to notice other ways in which repetition is not quite able to sustain itself throughout this print. Some lines are thicker or shorter than other lines, for instance. In some places the gray seems dominant, in other places the black. Plenty of marks that are present on the right side of the print are missing on the left, and vice versa. Repetition figures as something that cannot keep from collapsing in on itself, an ideal that manifests as a system of missteps and feints.Repetitions is organized by Troy Sherman, Curator at University Galleries.
