Scarfone/Hartley Gallery

Electronics Alive III
Miriam Schapiro
Tanja Softic
Jane Calvin
Posoon Park Sung
Hoang Van-Bui
John Walker

Jane Calvin In fall 2003, Jane Calvin brought her exhibition, Discontinuum, to the University. Her photographs explored mystery, menace, love and desire, female identity, gender and sexuality, and childhood experiences. She purposefully weaved layers of meaning into ambiguous, deliberately enigmatic narratives which reflected the complexity of contemporary life.

Her photographs evoke the play of veracity and falsehood, reality and fiction as recorded by the camera. She constructed her images by montaging projected imagery and found objects into room-sized assemblages, which she then photographed.

Calvin used text to discover how language and text either blend or compete as communication. She said that she was interested in the disjunction between the visual and the verbal.

Electronics Alive III In spring 2005, Lew Harris, Doug Sutherland, and Dorothy Cowden curated Electronics Alive III, an exhibition of new experimental and interactive computer animations and graphics.

The show featured work from the United States, Canada, France, United Kingdom, Japan and China. Many of the creations were first shown at the Annual Animators Conference in California in the 2004 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery (international animation conference) with the theme See, Hear, Touch, which demonstrated how artists can excite the senses using technology.

Lectures presented in the Scarfone/Hartley Gallery in conjunction with Electronics Alive III included: Bruce Wands, New York School of Visual Arts; Anthony LaMolinara, Oscar winner for special effects for Spider-Man 2; and Chris Landreth, Oscar winner for the animated short film Ryan. Lew Harris and Terry Mohn presented Light Traces, a performance piece that integrated live and recorded sound and visuals.

New animations shown included: Sweet Emma, Out of Our Minds Animation Studios Inc., John M. Cernak, director; The Painter, Andy Power, director; Stephen Hinde, Rycharde Hawkes, producers; Otsu and Parenthese, One Plus One; Commingled Spirits Intertwined & Separated, Mary Ann Trujillo; PGi-13, Beom Sik Shim; 33 Vertebrae, Matt Burge; and Not Available, Wei He.

Other artists exhibiting multimedia computer graphics and installations included Alain Bittler, Quintin Gonzalez, Jack Reilly, Mark Stock, Doug Sutherland, Michael Laughlin, and Barbara Lattanzi.

Miriam Schapiro In fall 2004, Miriam Schapiro brought a collection of 20 major works to Scarfone/Hartley Gallery for its inaugural exhibition, Miriam Schapiro in Tampa, at a new space on campus in R.K. Bailey Art Studios.

Miriam Schapiro is a leading figure in the feminist art movement. She is recognized internationally as a leader in two art movements: the Feminist Art Movement and the Pattern and Decoration Movement. She has developed her own style of “femmage,” a type of collage that uses lace, doilies, ribbons, and floral fabrics to celebrate the traditional domestic work of anonymous women.

During her exhibition, her paintings with collage and works on paper showed her development as an artist and her creative exploration in the use of materials and ideas. While on campus, Schapiro created original screen prints for the UT visiting artists’ project at STUDIO-f.

Posoon Park Sung With her fall 2002 exhibition, Passage, Park Sung presented an emotional series of paintings reflecting her personal battles with breast cancer. She has used her art to transcend setbacks and visually communicate her experiences by demonstrating the importance of both life and death.

Park Sung used the juxtaposition of darkness and light as a universal theme in this series. The paintings capture the frustration of her daily physical and emotional struggles, while also expressing her faith and spirituality as represented by the light shining through.

“I have learned that light is only really meaningful when there is darkness,” said Park Sung. “While difficult and frustrating, the darkness is also necessary and welcome. My long spiritual journey is evident in the work I have created.”

Tanja Softic In spring 2004, Tanja Softic presented the exhibition, Bloom and Bomb, at the University. Softic’s work reflected the human condition by sharing a view of the world drawn from her personal experiences and memories of Sarajevo.

Her technique presents a richness of surface with illusive layers of detail, including visual images representing emotional ideas. An overview of opulence challenged the viewer to pay close attention to details. Closer inspection revealed subtle and mysterious images.

The objects in her prints and paintings were derived from observations of plants, botanical drawings, illustrations of human and animal anatomy and medical instruments. Softic said that she was fascinated by the precision and order of scientific illustration and by the fecund beauty of natural forms.

Hoang Van-Bui Hoang Van-Bui, a UT graduate, brought his exhibition, Being Human Being, to his alma mater in fall 2000. Van-Bui used items such as steel, oak, denim, tar, rubber and rice along with other fabricated objects. By using a mixture of materials, his intention was to mimic the daily human arena absent of human form.

Born in Vietnam, he immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1987. The artist has created an impressive body of work with mixed media installations, small bronze studies and wall-mounted constructions. Van-Bui has said that he uses art to bridge values from East and West.

His work has enlivened several extraordinary projects, including the landmark exchange exhibition, “An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art from the United States and Vietnam,” organized in 1995 by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and circulated throughout the United States.

John Walker Walker’s spring 1999 exhibition, A Theater of Recollection, focused on themes from his father’s experiences in World War I. The imagery developed from stories his father shared with him, and he described the paintings as “a series of conversations with my father.”

Walker expresses his spontaneous and energetic character through painterly organic forms, and he creates dimension through shapes and rich textures indicative of his experiences in Australia, where he has frequently visited.

John Walker was born in Birmingham, England in 1939. He studied at the academie la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. After teaching for a number of years in England he was awarded the Harkness Fellowship to the United States.