The Good War
Opening Reception: Friday, June 4th, 2010: 6-9pm
Closing/Artist Reception: Saturday, June 26th 4-8pm
Exhibition Dates: June 4th – June 26th, 2010
Hatch Gallery is pleased to announce The Good War, presenting new paintings, drawings and sculpture in the first solo exhibition by artist Rebecca Whipple.
The Good War is in reference to World War II, and particularly, how our understanding of history becomes a knowledge only partially complete, where the voids act as points of interpretation negotiating a shared cognitive space. Whipple approaches this situation by accessing ideas of photojournalism and the Modernist interest in geometry and abstraction. Through the use of this seemingly opposing visual syntax, Whipple evokes images both dreamlike and rational, encouraging the viewer to understand loss as more than an absence of representation but also as a lapse in understanding and recollection.
The subjects of her work for this exhibition are both the anonymous soldiers sent to their fate, and her grandparents, whom experienced the war first-hand and as such operated as a repository of information and experience. The passing of her ancestors, leave a space to be filled by their legacy, a space open to reinterpretation and to a certain extent, uncertainty. Her focus is not the act of dying or war, but what absence means for individuals, generations, and humanity as a whole. The portraits of her ancestors are juxtaposed with the WWII paintings not only in that these men and women participated in and were affected by that period, but in order to empathically link the anonymity of death in war to its opposite, to its intimate and highly personal character in the lives of individuals.
Scholar Mark Bartlett, at a recent Tate Modern Lecture, has recently described her work in this way:
“Rather than using visual strategies to erase indexical realism, Rebecca Whipple’s paintings preserve it only to subvert it in the aesthetic conflicts between illustration, craft, pop culture, war, animation, and cartoons. They may be interpreted as a kind of discrepant vernacular that uses a gendered color palette, delicious in its hues, simultaneously comic and ominous, familiar and alien. We are caught at the front as her paratroopers are, between two warring armies, between the realities of war and the abstraction of death.”
Rebecca Whipple was born in Philadelphia, PA. After attending New York University, where she studied art history and political science, Whipple completed her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Sarah Lawrence College, Pharmaka Gallery in Los Angeles and widely throughout the Bay Area. Her current body of work was recently discussed as part of the Abstract Connections Symposium at the Tate Modern in London.
