Exhibitions 2008:

Delaware Center
for the Contemporary Arts
Solo Show
Wilmington, Delaware
August 17, 2007 - January 6, 2008

Eastern Illinois University
Solo Show
Charleston, Illinois
January 12 - February 24, 2008

Chicago Cultural Center
Group Show
HereThereEverywhere
Curated by Gregory Knight, Sophia Zutautas
January 19 - April 6, 2008

The Los Angeles Art Show
Barker Hangar, Santa Monica
January 23 - 27, 2008

The Alfedena Gallery
Group Show
Chicago, IL
February 8 - March 8, 2008

Catalogue Essays

The Memory of Place

Curatorial Statement from John Brunetti (exerpts)

Lochindorb (Early Morning) | 1999 | Oil on Canvas

Evanston Art Center
January 7 - February 28, 2001

The Memory of Place features the work of three mid-career, Chicago-based painters - Ben Whitehouse, Dan Gamble, Brian Ritchard -who use the genre of landscape to investigate the perceptual and psychological complexities of painting's ability to record the "truth" of the physical world and the "reality" of experience. Though working within the venerable tradition of painting, their work is unusually subversive. It works from inside a framework of images that audiences frequently accept without ever questioning the process of looking. While their subjects may appear familiar, Whitehouse, Gamble and Ritchard are nonetheless committed to provocation. Unifying their varied approaches to landscape is the need to challenge the viewer's ingrained habits of seeing, interpreting and comprehending nature that have been irrevocably preconditioned by easily digestible labels such as nostalgic, romantic and classical.

Lagoon (Autumn) | 72"X 92" | 1999 | Oil on Canvas

For Whitehouse, Gamble and Ritchard, the relationship between sight and knowledge is not a simple linear progression. By itself, sight is a suspect tool for transmitting the comprehensive information necessary to reveal the complex relationships - physical, optical, cultural - between the viewer and the landscape. As a result, while their paintings may initially appear to be solely the result of direct observation, they are in actuality more complex amalgams. Their works are a distillation of travels, observations and, most importantly, their responses to the visual language of landscape painting and its cultural influences. Consequently, memory is a facilitator to the artists' processes. They use memory not for poignant reminiscing, but instead as a means of mixing together and then filtering multiple layers of information that shape the interpretation of painted images. The works of Whitehouse, Gamble and Ritchard are compelling because they reveal that our own active engagement with the landscape, both its terrain and symbolism, is ultimately necessary to define the meaning of place for each individual.

Making the unseen atmospheric qualities of water and landscape - quiet physical rhythms or unnerving stillness, evaporating wetness or disintegrating dryness - palpable is one of the most difficult challenges for a painter. For the English-born artist Ben Whitehouse, intense mental and physical immersion in outdoor study is only one key to ultimately enveloping the viewer in the ineffable presence of a landscape that is continually evolving. Working on site in the wet lands of the Midwest and in the landscape surrounding the lochs of Scotland, Whitehouse completes numerous oil studies and sketches as he studies light's transforming affect on water, land and sky. He then returns to the studio to create his large-scale, panoramic canvases in which the distinction between pigment and light is slowly dissolved until a transcendental evocation of a fleeting moment is captured. In trying to paint his perceptions as directly as possible without falling into the clichés of Impressionism or Romanticism, Whitehouse uses these studies to access Episodic, or Autobiographical memory, which retains one's experiences. Whitehouse articulates the role of memory in his work: "Memory is very important and rapidly becoming an experience of the past. In the contemporary world of computers and cameras, people are relying less and less on memory and more and more upon machines to do the remembering for them ... visual memory ... is better at recording experience, but it needs practice and time to commune with its subject."

If the viewer's initial response to these artists' reinterpretations of the landscape is one of resistance, that is to be expected. Challenging the status quo of one of our most important images for defining our sense of reality should initiate a dialogue. Whitehouse, Gamble and Ritchard prompt us to delve into our own memories to understand the places we inhabit.

John Brunetti
Curator, "The Memory of Place"

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