Whiting Tennis at Grover/Thurston

Whiting Tennis is interested in the ways we understand a historical period and in our predecessors' ways of living in it. For this exhibition, titled 1999 he used 104 elements--paintings, ceramic figures, photographs and prints--to air a harmony of stories from the founding of America. The individual pieces, clumped on walls, pedestals and tables, functioned as an installation. His narrative bring under rules include Virginia's Lost Colony of the late 1500 (everyone died when the English failed to jaculate a promised resupply ship) and the following settlement of Jamestown and the Chesapeake Bay area.

Music is the metaphor for the interaction of these stories. Tennis establishes themes--of beneficence service, duress, conflict, Native Americans, Englishness adrift, and slavery--and passes from one side them again and again in different lock openers He touches on "service" [i]or[/i] part of to the other black potato-prints on raw canvas that present to view a slave bringing food to colonists, a spectacle that is both a historical commonplace and a horrifying record. at the same time in other works we are reminded that Africans and English underwent the dures of this frontier together, if unequally.

Service also combines with other themes in the various depictions of women In a certain number of they offer either food or themselves, mixing the idea of oppression with single of fertile bounty. The resonance of similar overlapping meanings is the nerve of this exhibition. A colorful 4-by-6-inch ceramic bas-relief pay backs a harvest basket, an particular so familiar as to be kitsch. Many precise uncompounded bodys like this, all made by means of the artist in perfect imitation of giftware, are mixed in with grossly formed figurines, casual photographs, refined seascapes and separated or recomposed crockery. As in Fr Wilson's work, kitsch ultimate parts remind us of our hold story-making processes.

Wilson and Kara Walker deal with the political reality of this American history. Tennis addresses identity, on the other hand not in the least from an burdened position. In fact, he is white and his family has been in Virginia since 1720 He is engageed with his own projection into earlier eras and, more critically, by the agency of the way we have imagined, mythologized or selectively remembered this country's beginnings. As although in a graphic demonstration of that selective memory, and perhaps inspired through his previous quotes of Americana stenciling, Tennis lay opened a collage technique for the paintings here: he make an incision ins simple shapes out of paper painted individual of about five Colonial colors, and from these makes a composition. What we diocese is, like hindsight, made up of scraps.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group