You can come home again: Two passionately different artists featured in UICA exhibition
The annual “Coming Home” show at the Urban Institute for Arts this year includes Rick Beerhorst and Nathan Heuer.
Each year, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (UICA) brings a suite of exhibitions featuring works by emerging and established Michigan artists to Grand Rapids with its “Coming Home” series. The show celebrates Michigan’s role as “a platform for inspiration, exploration, and creative development by highlighting working artists who have spent a significant amount of time in Michigan.” It’s the foundation for UICA’s effective and important support of the regions’ talent.
This year, “Coming Home” includes two artists: Rick Beerhorst and Nathan Heuer. Their work presents two distinctly different styles and subjects.
Entering Rick Beerhorst’s show of paintings, you immediately feel the presence of the large volume of women, their portraits looking back intensely at the audience. Some have a stare that seems to look right through the viewer, in what may be to others perceived as a more suggestive erotic gaze.
In his artist gallery talk, Beerhorst told of a bipolar condition that has led to obsessive behaviors, including some positive results in working hard and long at the craft of painting. This new work, inspired in part by his experience with depression and mental illness, is a departure from the folk iconography style for which he has become better known.
Some of these portraits, like the representations of his daughters, are small to medium in scale. Three installed together of his daughter Pearl are beautifully controlled and intimate examinations of his family subjects. In two of the series, her closed eyes seem to hold back from letting her emotions free for the viewer’s interpretation. These works are more tightly controlled in terms of brushstrokes, which are commanding in their confidence. The abstracted modular sections that break the portraits into vibrantly colored grids are a visual tool for exploring the surface techniques of the paintings themselves, as well as a way to breakdown physical characteristics of the subject. Although these paintings seem to have their origins in photography, they are certainly free of being held to the confinement of realism. Surfaces shift within the gridded areas from a soft focus to brightly detailed blocks of color and brushwork.
The greater portion of the installation gives way to a series of large scale canvases of other women Beerhorst has invited to model for his work. In these there is an uneasy feeling that the viewer’s gaze is greater than the painted subjects, as they have a less assertive visual connection. In “Morgan #4,” Beerhorst explained an excitement over meeting her and asking her to model. Rick candidly confesses that painting the woman as subject helps him in an attempt to interact and relate in real life. It’s interesting to see the differences that his relationship to his daughters convey as opposed to his invited models. Scale also plays a role in content. Beerhorst seems more at home with paint and subject at the smaller scale. Surface, color, and especially a confidence in brushwork are more evident in the smaller works.
In a completely different take on personal and cultural references, Nathan Heuer maintains that his work is “largely concerned with the role of architecture in society as a symbol of cultural values and history.” Heuer, who now lives in Pennsylvania, received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University (KCAD).
Heuer decontextualizes the subject of each drawing by removing the structure from its surroundings and isolating it on a white background. He asks his audience to reconsider the deeper cultural significance of abandoned structures.
In “Motel,” an abandoned motel is juxtaposed to the idea that left to decay, “this structure can be replaced by any prefab construction.” Architecture as grand design plays out in the deafening whiteness of the deleted landscape in these otherwise detailed drawings. I have not observed a better compositional use of a void of information employed to such profound magnitude. A landscape that would have surrounded the architecture could have been an additional signifier to wastefulness that the architecture spells out without any reinforcement of placing these structures in any literal landscape. In Heuer’s vision, architectural destruction and decay is a natural symbol an outgrowth of capitalism.
In one of the most powerful drawings in the exhibition, “Two Approaches to Port Lavaca Bay,” one boardwalk looks directly across to another in ruin. One in decline becomes the landscape of history, a scenic tourist-like view of the discarded artifact of a throwaway boardwalk structure, a vulgar planned improvidence.
In the most politicized of Heuer’s works, “The New Rural Economy” presents a neglected barn structure from a (any) rural landscape with an advertisement painted on its side, “Guns! EXIT 215.” What the signage says to us in this meticulous drawing, and that such messages have been painted on the side of numerous dilapidated barns, points to the fact that rural economies may have been co-opted from farming communities by an overwhelming gun culture. In yet another example of rural decay, the freeway implied by the exit information in this signage messages a drive-by culture to abandon the agricultural history of the small family farm in its choking exhaust fueled wake.
See each body of work in this year’s “Coming Home” at UICA through January 28.
