Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Danville Chadbourne

DANVILLE CHADBOURNE
Opening Reception: Friday, October 22, 5:30-8:30 pm


Dear Friends of Bihl Haus Arts,

Sacred ritual, space and time, ancestor worship, consecrated rites of passage . . . Explore these themes and more at the opening reception for sculptor DANVILLE CHADBOURNE at Bihl Haus Arts, this Friday, October 22, 5:30-8:30 pm.

Danville’s fetishized, ritualized objects stir a collective memory and connect us as human beings to a primordial past. At once universal truth and private fiction, his sculptures are the constructs of an erudite artist with broad experience in and of the world. They spring from deep within the artist’s fecund imagination and are inspired by his appreciation for the material culture and ancient traditions of indigenous peoples, about which our knowledge is only fragmentary. The artist deconstructs archetypes and reassembles their parts into paradoxical and enigmatic imagery open to individual interpretation. “It is my intention,” says Chadbourne, “to provoke questions, suggest possibilities, and ultimately elicit responses that are more than just intellectual. I want the viewer to feel something.”

In this selection of the sculptor’s work, muted warm sepia tones of worn woods bathed in brown paints predominate. They contrast with passages of subdued complimentary colors: red and green, blue and orange, black and white. Decoration is restricted to incised channels and grooves, shallow pecked recesses, and natural nodes and knots accentuated by hand carving. Typical shapes include long narrow flat planks and shallow rectangular boxes constructed from recovered wood, sometimes joined by staples and brads made of recycled copper wire. Danville deliberately weathers and unites the surfaces of these disparate recovered materials, often already weather beaten, with paint applied in layers and scrubbed by hand between coats with rough sandpaper, a process that visually ages the work. “All things are in constant flux, acted upon by the process of aging and deterioration,” Danville avers, “a process that is observable and that dictates the passage of time”; the artist’s work not only suggests but becomes part of a continuum.

Danville Chadbourne was born in Bryan, Texas in 1949. He received a BFA in 1971 from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and an MFA in 1973 from Texas Tech University in Lubbock. After teaching studio art and art history at the college level for 17 years at various institutions, Danville left teaching in 1989 to devote himself full-time to his art. He has exhibited extensively at both state and national levels, including more than 60 one-person exhibitions. His work is found in numerous private and public collections. He has lived in San Antonio since 1979.

We hope to see you Friday night!

Kellen

P.S. Please save the date: Saturday, December 11, 2 pm: a Bihl Haus Dialog with Anthropologist Megan Biesele, PhD, and Sculptor Danville Chadbourne. Megan Biesele, who received her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1975, has spent the past 40 years working in the areas of language development and human rights of the peoples of Botswana and Namibia, southern Africa. In 2000 she received the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. Biesele is the author of numerous books, including Shaken Roots: Bushmen of Namibia Today (1990), “Women Like Meat”: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’hoan (1993), and Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination (2000).

P.S. S. As always, please feel free to forward this email to friends and family. For more on the exhibit, please go to our website at www.bihlhausarts.org. These programs, which are free and open to the public, are funded in part by the Texas Commission for the Arts through the San Antonio Office of Cultural Affairs. Bihl Haus Arts is a not-for-profit contemporary art gallery located at 2803 Fredericksburg Rd., on the premises of Primrose at Monticello Park Senior Apartments. Bihl Haus Arts is the only professional nonprofit art gallery on the premises of 100% senior affordable housing in the U.S. The gallery, open Fridays and Saturdays, 1-4 pm, is made possible with the generous support of The Potashnik Family Foundation and Primrose. For more information, (210) 383-9723, or information@bihlhausarts.org


Kellen Kee McIntyre, PhD
Executive Director
Bihl Haus Arts
P.O. Box 100806
2803 Fredericksburg Rd.
San Antonio, TX 78201
(210) 383-9723 (cell)
(210) 732-3502 (off)
kellenkee@swbell.net
www.bihlhausarts.org
www.RxArtSA.org
www.OnAndOffFred.org