Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition

Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition is a juried exhibition featuring works in all media by 43 St. Louis regional artists from Missouri and Illinois.

Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition • October 26-December 26, 2013 • FREE opening reception Saturday, November 16, 6-9 p.m

FREE EVENT
COFFEE WITH THE ARTISTS: SATURDAY GALLERY TALKS
Join us in the Gallery on the following Saturdays when we host free one-hour Gallery talks at 11 a.m. with featured artists from the current exhibit, Art St. Louis XXIX. Guests can enjoy complimentary coffee tastings courtesy of Mississippi Mud Coffee Roasters while learning about the artists and their artworks.

Some of the artists may bring in samples of their other work or also present a demo of their media & techniques. This is a walk & talk Gallery Talk, so guests will walk with the artists as they talk about their works in the Gallery. Seating is very limited.

Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition

Juror’s Statement
 
"A long life in art affords opportunities of various sorts for a person to cultivate critical judgment. Every artist, after all, judges his or her own work during and after its making, and implicit in anyone’s studio production is the critique of those artworks by others whose premises contradict one’s own artistic values. Indeed, the transition from art student to artist is as likely to come from a rendered judgment (“That sculpture is bad art,” or “That picture has no justification for having been painted”) as from the grasp one suddenly has of the connections between one’s own use of materials and ideas. The connection I draw here is based on a simple premise: that one must be standing somewhere in order to reject standing elsewhere.
 
At different moments in my professional life I have juried artist grant applications, passed judgment on nominations for artist fellowships, and even participated in the selection of artists to represent the United States at international biennial exhibits. In each of these endeavors my judgments were by and large rejections of the works of artists of established professional standing; which means they’d probably all been rejected many times before. As a working artist, this is a long running circumstance in my own career, but this is not the case for the younger artists among those submitting work to the Art Saint Louis XXIX competition. If their experience is like mine, they may have been rejected in love, jobs, or college applications (all matters of great life consequence) but not many times before for an art exhibit. For persons aspiring to live the artist’s life, the first rejection can remain the most painful.
 
Let me recognize here first, then, the young artists whose work I did not select for this exhibit. Their work almost unanimously possessed merits that another juror than I may have preferred. For the more experienced artists I did not select I offer as well my appreciation of their endeavor. Lines well drawn and forms well-crafted are present in work you won’t see in my selection here, but I encourage all who applied to keep at their work and the project of learning how to see it better; see it for itself beyond the shadows of ambition and expectation.
 
Let me share with you my premises for accepting the art on display. First and foremost I looked for evidence of understanding of how materials and techniques work together to make the finished work. Secondly, I looked for evidence of craftsmanship appropriate to the meaning I presumed each individual work to express. I specifically DO NOT mean by this that I expected excellence of craft to be of value, in itself, as something apart from the form of the work. There is plenty of art on view before publics elsewhere that seems to invite us to ask, “How did she do that?” or else “How long did that take?” Trust me, these are not the most important questions that art is capable of raising. I would argue, in fact, that whenever the technique by which a work is fashioned becomes itself the subject of our gaze, whatever other things the work was made to say are being obscured. The best technique is an invisible armature; it operates to direct our attention through itself toward the meanings the artist wishes to share.
 
This brings me to a third selection criterion, that something of the wholeness of a life is implied in any fashioned thing. There is no absolute value implicit in any material choice for making an artwork, but even the merest quotidian material can be made to offer eloquent testimony of the meaning within its presence on view. In this regard, the individual work evokes not only a community of similar objects, but a public whose customs of appreciation are worth learning about. In this sense, then, we find another way of interpreting the “originality” of a work of art. I am not resident in the imaginary communities conjured up here and there in the works on view, but I am grateful that each brought me, at least momentarily, to places I had not been before."

— Buzz Spector

Some of the 50 artworks featured in Art St. Louis XXIX, The Exhibition: 

Davey Rocco, St. Louis, MO. "Wind Dance." 2013. Silver Gelatin Print, 16”x20”. $65.	John P. Cooper, St. Louis, MO. "Montrose, NE." 2011. Digital Photograph, 30”x36”. $350.	Katherine Nelson, Chesterfield, MO . "Snow Shift." 2011. Charcoal, Pastel on Paper, 26”x33”. Not for Sale.
Jonathan M. Reinert, St. Louis, MO. "Burrow." 2012. Cardboard, Paint, Found Objects on Canvas, 40”x30”x6”. $500.	Steve Frank, St. Louis, MO. "Knot." 2012. Wood, Painted Finish, 13”x17”x12”. $1,200.	John Dean, O’Fallon, MO. "River Crossing." 2013. Acrylic on Canvas, 12”x12”. $485.
Jeff Boshart, Charleston, IL. "Two Hand Man Saw." 2013. Repurposed Materials, 12”x18”x4”. $300.	Nicole Fry, Caseyville, IL. Night Song II." 2013. Watercolor, Gouache over Image Transfer on Paper, 12”x12”. $150.	Samuel Preston, Wood River, IL. "The First Day of Spring." 2012. Oil on Panel, 16”x26”. $900.
Ken Wood, St. Louis, MO. "Strata Series #37, State II." 2013. Collagraph, Relief Print on Paper, 32”x24”. $500.	Hwang (Bo) Kim, Lake St. Louis, MO. "Small Faith." 2013. Oil on Board, 22”x30”. $3,500. This artwork was selected for an Award of Excellence by Juror Buzz Spector	Sydnor Scholer, St. Louis, MO. "Untitled." 2013. Watercolor, Graphite, Colored Pencil on Paper, 16”x20”, Not for Sale. This artwork was selected for an Award of Excellence by Juror Buzz Spector.