Art Exhibition: Grounds
Monday, May 20 , 9:30 am – Tuesday, August 6 , 5:00 pm CDT
University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present the exhibition Grounds from May 20 through August 6, 2024. All events are free and open to the public.
The 18 artworks in Grounds were selected from the permanent collection of University Galleries. With dates ranging from the early 18th century to the early 21st, these prints, paintings, photographs, and sculptures inform viewers about the multiple meanings of the term “ground” with respect to works of visual art. Artists include Terry Adkins, Nicolas Africano, Walter Bock, Robert Colescott, Mike Disfarmer, Jeanne Dunning, John Himmelfarb, Tom Hoadley, William Hogarth, Richard Hunt, Suzanne Jackson, Anita Jung, Dennis Kowalski, Henri Matisse, Deborah Muirhead, and Ann Purcell.
Among the most famous quotes by the 17th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the Latin phrase “nihil est sine ratione.” It can be translated several ways. Most commonly, it is rendered as “there is nothing without a reason.” This asserts that anything that happens—anything that is—is explicable and with some sort of cause. This principle is known as the principle of sufficient reason and has been in use among philosophers since before Plato’s time. An alternative translation connects this philosophical tenet to problems that are central to what artists do, why they do it, and how we experience the things they create. This alternative translation is: “Nothing is without ground.”
In artistic terms, “ground” can mean several different things, often all at once. It refers to the aspects of a picture that are subsidiary to its main subject and make up the fictitious space within which that subject appears to exist (that is, background). It refers to the surface on which an image has been made, such as canvas, paper, stone, or wood. It refers to the physical space in which an artwork (especially a three-dimensional one) exists and is encountered by a viewer. In each instance, a “ground” is a thing which some component of an artwork is set against in a way that appears to give that component particular meaning. For any given artwork, multiple grounds coexist and often contradict or compete with one another.
In the etching What Reason Could I Give? by Terry Adkins, for instance, a consuming black constitutes most of the picture’s surface, out of which a skein of ceiling fans and odds and ends seems to be emerging. All at once, this black is a background to the print’s network of nebulous figures, a figure itself against the non-figural white of its border, a flat plane that emphasizes the flatness of the paper on which this image has been printed, and a cipher for broader social meanings that may or may not be germane to our understanding of Adkins’ work of art. In each case, this single formal element serves as the basis for an array of possible associations and ways of looking at Adkins’ print. Paying attention to what such “grounds” are and how they work is crucial for making the experiences we have with works of art coherent and meaningful.
The objects in this exhibition were selected to encourage viewers to pay close attention to some dimension of their form that might, in another context, disappear into the background. Empty space, white paper, raw canvas, and other subordinate formal elements are emphatic makers of meaning in these works. By foregrounding what are traditionally the passive causes of meaning in art, Grounds emphasizes one of art’s primary functions: to train our comprehension of the aspects of experience that, though vanishing, make meaning possible in the first place. These aspects are grounds, without which there would be nothing.
Grounds is organized by Troy Sherman, curator at University Galleries.
