Interview with Curator Phaedra Siebert
Ben Whitehouse talks about his painting and
the evolution of The Revolution Series
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
March 15 - April 25
Revolution Still Lifes
ArtChicago
April 30 - May 3
Perimeter Gallery, Booth TBA
Grand Rapids Art Museum
June 4 - August 22
GRAM and Ox-Bow
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago September 10 - October 9
by John Vettese
Aug 15, 2007
Runs Aug. 17-Jan. 6, 2008, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, Del., 302-656-6466, www.thedcca.org
The ever-changing makeup of landscapes makes them difficult to capture visually. Artists must find themselves in the right place at the right time, accept a dull image, or kill an entire day in search of expansive clouds, delicate beams of sunlight and the perfect alignment of land and sky. Chicago painter Ben Whitehouse uses the latter approach—sort of.
The mixed-media exhibit “Revolution” takes the long-form, high-definition digital videos he shot in order to study how a swatch of scenery changes from dawn to dusk, and matches them with his paintings of selected stills. If you’re into relaxing to the sights and sounds of nature captured in the videos, pay attention for the morphing of nimbus clouds behind a row of windblown trees, the red glow of vehicle taillights driving through nocturnal Central Park, and the hours when Michigan’s North Bar Lake is so still, it casts a glassy reflection of the horizon line above.
However, Whitehouse’s videos are 24 hours long, a full revolution of Earth—hence the exhibit’s name. Factor in a gallery that doesn’t open before 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m., and we’ve got a conundrum where visitors may miss out on the color pageantry of morning skies, or the silhouetted clouds of the sunset. Thankfully, a capable watercolorist is highlighting those moments when we couldn’t be there.