Lyles Gallery features 'Visitations'

"Visitations" by Trude McDermott will be on display in the Lyles Gallery in the Speech Arts Building Feb. 2-28, from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

The artist's statement on "Visitations" is as follows:

The mixed media paintings comprising this group of works titled "Visitations" have resulted from a search for visual language to express realms outside ordinary apprehension.

"Visitations" refers to the idea of something intangible or supernatural, passing influences which enlarge the human perception of the mysterious. The repeated use of wing imagery, a symbol evoking the transcendent, is a link to the belief in the existence of an indwelling presence, an energy permeating physical reality. The images of angels, a symbol from archaic and mythological cultures, give a cosmological vision which reinvests the world with mystery, and refuses to cast aside the voices of the past as the modern world's momentum accelerates.

My formal training in art occurred during the 1970's when modernist practices of art were being heavily questioned by the movements of conceptualism, pop art, feminist and performance art. Opposition to the modernist taboos against narrative, representation and historical allusion became in the 1970's a new framework for art practice. The use of photographic elements as a means of painterly expression was freely used by many artists at this time.

The camera became for me a drawing and compositional tool in structuring my work. I discovered a light sensitive substance, photoemulsion , which could be used in a painterly manner on the surface of the canvas. I began photographing in black-and-white any image which seemed relevant to my own inner dialogues and visual interests.

The hundreds of negatives I began to accumulate began to reveal associations and connections that could be used to create a pictorial surface. Some of the photographic elements are drawn from art history and others are images I have gathered which seem to speak to the flux of contemporary life.

The figure which is central to most of the paintings is recorded by the camera in a "snapshot" manner rather than portraiture, a frozen moment or slice of time. I develop these images on the pictorial surface in the darkroom using the realism of the photographs to create an imaginary space, sometimes a cosmic space that is fragmented, where the axis of heaven and earth is ambiguous, creating a horizonless milieu. In this space the figure dominates, but is juxtaposed to other elements to create a space of interacting forces reflecting the complexity of modern life. This method of working is for me a synthesis of the traditional and modern. Mixing representational and abstract elements gives me a freedom to manipulate signs and symbols to create new meaning.