DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD F36 12:B98 Digitized by Tine Internet Archive

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD F36 12:B98 Digitized by tine Internet Archive

in 2015

https://archive.org/details/deborahbutterfieOObutt

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD

Wake Forest University • Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art North Carolina School of the Arts Artist-in-residence Program Sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation

25 February— 17 April 1983

Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Winston-Salem, North Carolina Catalog compiled by Vicki Kopf Catalog design by Lee Hansley Printing by Wooten Printing Company, Inc.

The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art 750 Marguerite Drive Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27106 Foreword

This exhibition of work by Deborah Butterfield marks the fifth year of a major artist-in-residence program cosponsored by Wake Forest University, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the North Carolina School of the Arts. We are tremendously indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation for making this program possible.

Throughout the five years of this program, the A.I.R. Steering Committee has recognized the importance of flexibility, so that the unique contributions of each artist would be maximized as fully as possible. Because of this, each residency has taken on a certain character due to the specific energy and input of the visiting artist.

In each of the Butterfield horse forms in this exhibition, movement is imminent. We see the pent-up energy and find ourselves waiting for its release. We find that same sense of excited expectancy — volatile in a positive way — when we consider Deborah Butterfield. She will bring sensitivity and perception to this residency.

Laura Carpenter Coordinator Artist-in-residence Program By Kay Larson

Horses are making a comeback. Francis Ford adolescence? Primitivist art most often is emotionally

Coppola has resurrected my adolescent escape recidivist; it borrows its construction methods from fantasy, Walter Farley's The Black Stallion; cultures which live closer to the dirt than we do, in Broadway has picked up Strider, Tolstoy's meditation the hope that the flight from "adult" technologies on the horse in everyman. "Equus" strained hard to will help awaken memories of instincts smothered equate freedom with a wild gallop on a dark beach. since childhood. In such company, Deborah Butterfield's free-standing, full-scale horse sculptures come to seem tentatively Butterfield took a while to perfect her recidivism. A like what they are — archetypes. few years ago the horses' psychic charge was not as intense. They were too literally horses: frames of chicken wire coated heavily with papier-mache until a Jung defined "archetype" as an unconscious image skin formed, shaping the eyeless, sexless body. of the instincts. Butterfield's horses are intensely Butterfield is now using an archaic open-work wattle- instinctual creatures, both in their native horseness, and-daub construction method. One horse is woven and in their obvious fascination for the artist, who entirely from bleached, bonelike sticks; one is of apparently finds in them some deeper kinship than sticks entwined with openwork wire. A third uses metaphor can provide. I couldn't shake the feeling mostly chicken wire and steel, while the fourth that the four horses in O.K. Harris' central room were plasters the armature with bits of dirt and still-green somehow self-portraits; I later found that their proto- grass. As they have grown less artful their roughened types from several years back were in fact based on postures have acquired an uncanny animistic vitality, the proportions of Butterfield's body — the measure- as though personality had somehow begun to accrue ment of forefinger to thumb, for instance, becoming in them. The mud-daubed horse braces head down, the width of the horse's forehead. This identification buffeted by invisible winds; the image somehow of artist's body and a horse's body reminds me of draws up a sense of precarious survival, calm in the Freud's classic case of sleuthery in which he diag- face of gargantuan struggle. nosed the physical deterioration of a young woman by drawing a parallel to the rampaging white stallion The horses are not telling stories though. Naturalism in her dreams. is neither Butterfield's goal nor her strength. The feelings her horses give shape to are too deep to Horses were such a fevered part of my teenage articulate; these "images of the instincts" make no yearnings that I found myself a little shocked when attempt to pin a label on the archetype. Butterfield first began showing them — how many of us would dare reveal now what we thought about in Reprinted from The Village Voice, Nov. 26, 1979. HORSE #8, 1982, 96" x 102" x 5", Steel, Sheet Metal and Tar PALOMINO, 1981, 76" x 97" x 50", Metal and Wood CHESTNUT, 1981, 70" x 94" x 28", Metal and Wood HORSE #7, 1982, 76" x 96" x 30", Metal and Tar / / I first used the horse images as a metaphorical substitute for myself— it was a way of doing a self-portrait one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield. These first horses were huge plaster mares whose presence was extremely gentle and calm. They were at rest, and in complete opposition to the raging warhorse (stallion) that represents most equine sculpture.

The next series of horses was made of mud and sticks and suggested that its forms were left clotted together after a river flooded and subsided. The pieces

were dark and almost sinister, reflecting the realization that I was perhaps more like the warhorse than the quiet mares. For me they represented the process of attitudes and feelings taking shape after a flood of experiences. The materials and images were also meant to suggest that the horses were both figure and ground, merging external world with the subject.

The more recent horses incorporate found materials, all having their own history and diverse visual qualities. Often finding the right material when you

need it is next to impossible and fate tends to determine what you will find and when.

I always work to make the personality of each horse dominate and overrule the identity of its sum parts. These horses are rarely hollow shells, but are built-up from within and reveal the interior space. The gesture is contained and internalized while the posture is quiet and still. Action becomes anticipated rather than captured. Each horse represents a framework or presence which defines a specific energy at a precise moment.

I ride and school my own horses (and am schooled with them!) and feel that my art relies heavily upon, and often parallels, my continuing dialogue with

them. I am more and more interested in how each horse thinks, and hope that my work begins to feel more like horses than even to look like them. / /

— Deborah Butterfield Deborah Butterfield

Born: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, Texas,

1 949, San Diego, California 1982 Education: O.K. Harris Gallery, New York, 1982 MFA, University of California at Davis, Arco Center for Visual Arts, Los Angeles, 1972-73 California, Traveling Exhibition, Catalogue, 1 98 1 BA, University of California at Davis, with Traveling Itinerary, Arco Exhibition: Honors, 1970—72 St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Skowhegan, Maine, 1972 The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Galerie Swirner, Cologne, German Federal Teaching Experience: Republic, 1981 Assistant Professor, Montana State University, Bozeman, 1979— present Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, 1981

Visiting artist, Montana State University, O.K. Harris Gallery, New York, 1979 Bozeman, Fall/Winter, 1977 — 79 Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1979 University Assistant Professor, of Wisconsin, Hanson Fuller Gallery, San Francisco, California, Madison, Sculpture, 1975 — 77 1978 Grants and Awards: O.K. Harris Gallen/, New York, 1978 Member, Selection Committee for Sculpture, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1977 National Endowment for the Arts, 1 982 Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 1976 National Endowment for the Arts individual Artist Fellowship, 1980 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Selected Exhibitions: 1980 "Sculptors at the University of California at Davis: Past and Present," Richard L. Nelson National Endowment for the Arts, Individual Gallery, University of California at Davis, 1 982 Artist Fellowship, 1977 "100 Years of California Sculpture," The Selected Solo Exhibitions: Oakland Museum, California, 1 982 The Oakland Museum, California, 1983 "1st Annual Wild West Show," Alberta College Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, of Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, 1 982 Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1 983 "The West As Art," Palm Springs Desert Mayor Gallery, London, England, 1 982 Museum, Palm Springs, California, 1 982 "The Animal Image: Contemporary Objects and the Beast," Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1981 "Painting and Sculpture Today 1980," Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, 1 980

"Eight Sculptors," Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 1979

"The Decade in Review: Selections from the 1970's," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1 979

"1979 Whitney Biennial," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1979 "The Presence of Nature," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1 978

"Seventy-sixth Exhibition of Chicago and Vicinity," Art Institute of Chicago, 1977

"Two Sculptors: Deborah Butterfield and Rudy Serva," University Museum, Berkeley, California, 1974 "Statements," Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, 1973 Selected Collections: Atlantic Richfield Company, Los Angeles

Mrs. Vera List, New York

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York San Francisco Museum of Art Milwaukee Art Center Mr. and Mrs. Edward Bergman, Chicago Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota The photographs of works reproduced in this catalog are of previous pieces and are not included in the exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. The pieces at SECCA were executed on site just prior to the exhibition's opening and are not reproduced in this catalog.

STATE LIBRARY OF NORTH CAROLINA

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