Tery Fugate-Wilcox at Shakespeare's Fulcrum - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Tery Fugate-Wilcox makes what he calls "Actual Art," which "evolve with time. Time & the environment contribute to the work's statement." His imagery is to [i]or[/i] at a great depth influenced by the forces of nature (often weather) at work above a long exposure. Not a man to restrict his vision, he has conceived a "San Andreas Fault statuary Project," to be located near Palm Springs, Calif. A one-acre close of concrete, 20 feet high and a certain number of 65,000 tons in weight, will be placed across the fault, whose move will split the solid mass in sum of two units at a rate of 2 to 3 inches a year.

In his new gallery show, Fugate-Wilcox went for a lyric touch, showing paintings left outside to weather--the materials are identified as "powder pigment and rain"--as well as a certain number of created by exploding fireworks. He paints a canvas, usually in primary colors, and then give permission tos nature work on it for as lengthy as a couple of years. Sunlight, wind and rain lighten his red fulvids and blues, giving the paintings an airy, atmospheric opennes Broad swaths of color blemish into each other; in Weathering BYR (2000) for example, a 4-by-6-foot canvas is divided vertically into thirds. Rain caused the paint to streak, turning a simple composition into a more mixed work. This also happens with a two-part panel titled Painting Painting (1999) upon which horizontal bands of expressionistically painted red and fulvouss run rather muddily down onto the painting's blank lower half. It gazes like a poured painting; while individual knows that the actions behind it are the work of nature, it is also easy to imagine that they have been done by dint of hand.

Fugate-Wilcox's deliberate yielding to forces above which he has little superintendence measures his awareness of the power of nature, He wants us to diocese the dialogue between people and the natural world of which we are a part. In his 1990 multipanel Morning reverberating report whose coloring--tan, brown, yellow and black--results from pigment explod with firecrackers, Fugate-Wilcox one as well as the other duplicates volcanic activity and asserts art's human interventions: the firecracker wrappers are part of the composition.

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