Julie Nelson

Julie Nelson's exhibit Flora at the McLean County Arts Center was breathtakingly beautiful, in a simplistic way. Julie Nelson is an artist and retired art museum professional in Quincy, Illinois. She received both her BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Nelson is no stranger to art exhibits, as she was the Executive Director and Curator at the Quincy Art Center for twenty years.

In Flora, Nelson showcased only a selection of thirteen watercolor paintings she created based off floral arrangements she herself created. However, Nelson's technique in handling watercolor completely abstracts the subject matter. Her use of foreground/background, and highlighting which objects to overlap exist in a space only possible in the two-dimensional world.

Left to Right: Cardinal Flower and Milkweed,
Black Petunias, Roses and Sweet Potato Vine,
Roses and Delphinium 

Some areas of the paintings are highly detailed, while some are over-simplified. This balance makes her work strong and fluid. Nelson states about her work:

"I look for repeated rhythms in shapes and lines and a push and pulling positives and negatives and lines and areas of color. This begins early on with the selection of elements for the still-life. These works are not meant to be true representations of what I am seeing but spontaneous reactions to the beauty found in nature."

 Close up of Red Carnation

Overall, I think Flora was a successful exhibit. Nelson's personal style and flair is both original and tasteful to the average eye. Although some may view her work as simplistic, I think Nelson was very purposeful in how she generated her watercolors, and that the true beauty and success lies in the details.

Beatrix Reinhardt

Beatrix Reinhardt gave a lecture at University Galleries on October 27th, 2016. Reinhardt is an alumni of Illinois State University, where she received her Masters of Fine Art.

Reinhardt started the presentation by explaining how her residency in India dramatically changed her work output, and the work she shows in her presentation is work created post-India residency. She shifts to focusing her energy on creating work that revolved around the "politics of space" or the investigation of interior spaces.

Reinhardt poses some questions regarding interior spaces such as "How can decoration be an issue of demarcation?" and "can you tell
anything about the people who reside in this space?". After investigating interior spaces, Reinhardt moves to focusing on exterior spaces. Her photos covering the gas pipelines in Erdgasleitung is evidence of this. Reinhardt met with former works who built the pipeline, and received archival photographs from them. Through this experience working with the pipeline, she was able to piece together the idea that discovered exterior spaces need to be "charged places", filled with past, present, future and memory.

Reinhardt later applied for a residency in South Africa to explore battlefields. Through this experience, she created her first body of work. Reinhardt assumed she was finished with this body and returned to the States, only to realize something felt incomplete. Reinhardt later returned to South Africa, and created more work. Through her second trip, she felt more connected to the battlefields, and took on a new approach to her photos, where she documents the land in an almost scientific record keeping manner.

Overall, Reinhardt covered a lot of ground in her short presentation. While her work was impressive in the sense that she constantly changes perspectives and mediums, I would've loved to hear more information in greater depth for just one more two bodies of work, instead of barely scratching the surface on seven or eight bodies of work.

Bethany Collins

On October 26th, artist Bethany Collins gave a presentation at University Galleries in Normal, IL over the work she's created surrounding the intersection of race and language. Collins started off the lecture introducing some of the first pieces of work she created under this big idea, which she titles her "White Noise" series. Her piece "Don't You Think That's a Little Elitist" (see fig. 1) was her first attempt at addressing race through her work. Collins told of her experiences in grad school, with predominantly white colleagues attempting to understand her identity as a black woman, while not fully understanding the history of colorism. So she poses the question "don't you think that's a little elitist" by writing it hundreds of times over again on a black chalkboard with white chalk.

Figure 1: "Don't You Think That's Elitist", 48x72x2 inches,
chalk and charcoal on chalkboard, 2010.

Collins continued to create work similar to "Don't You Think That's a Little Elitist" through her white noise series, but later found her perspective had shifted. She explained "I no longer wanted to define or defend the identities of others. So instead of writing legible sentences, Collins moved to erasing them with a chalkboard erasure, and then smacking the erasures together to create a powder that fell onto the chalkboard. Her first attempt at this new style was through her piece "I Wish I Was Black Too". Collins explained by letting the rescue create a new image on the chalkboard, the words were set free, not tight and imprisoned.

After the White Noise series, Collins moved into assessing language as it relates to race and systems of oppression. She starts by explaining the idea that as we understand the world, our use of language shifts, therefore language is fluid. Collins collected old dictionaries and encyclopedias to find poetry in the language, and found that often times words will have two different meanings that starkly contrast one another. For example, the word "ravel" has two different definitions; to complicate or to make very simple. How is this possible?

Collins then shredded the pages of dictionaries with these contradicting words, and made them into piles. One example of this work is Bound (see fig. 2) which Collins explained "contains the essence of the language, but changed in form holding onto the residue".

Bound, 1968. Dimensions variable, American Masters paper
and Pink Pearl eraser, 2015.

Another connection Collins made while spending so much time analyzing the English language is that examples used in the definitions of words are often related to either violence or the criminal justice system. While Collins couldn't articulate a reason for this occurrence, she wanted it noted.

Overall, Bethany Collins was a very inspiring speaker. She was able to articulate her work very effectively, naming each step in the process for why she creates the work she does. Her rationale was easy to understand, and her perspective as a female black artist shown brilliantly through her work.