THIRD STREET GALLERY ARCHIVE: 2017 EXHIBITIONS: The Water Seekers: Paintings by Teresa Stanley

Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery presents, The Water Seekers, a solo exhibition of paintings by Teresa Stanley. The show runs October 3 through November 5. Stanley, an abstract painter based in Northern California, is a studio arts professor with a focus on painting and drawing, who has taught at Humboldt State University since 1991. This collection, painted during the winter and spring of this current year, draws inspiration from the subject of water, its symbolism, and the power it wields over our collective consciousness.   

The paintings in this exhibition were conceived during the record rainfall of the El Niño storms of last winter and spring, preceded by a long and severe drought in California. Stanley worked in her studio with the daily sound and climate of steady rainfall all around her. She began to imagine a narrative, “where the search for water was paramount. The search was not only necessary for survival, it was also important because water represented an affirmation of some sort of truth.”

Clusters of information populate her canvases, distilled and interpreted in her painted forms and abstract compositions. They reflect her imaginative narrative and her personal influences, which Stanley states include, “the national political drama, her late father’s electronic schematic designs, the music of Alice Coltrane, the photographs of Bernd and Hila Becher, the color in Matisse's paintings and most importantly, my daily walks with my dog at the marsh near my home . . . the paintings are bulwarks of a personal nature, constructed from a collection of experiences, a hedge made to contain certain privately gathered truths.”

Stanley continues, “I was highly influenced by feminist artists of the 1970s who made the return to narrative forms of artmaking as a way of documenting their largely unexamined experience.  It was through the influence of artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Philip Guston, Susan Rothenberg, among others, that I found a way to combine my interest in process and formalism informed by personal narrative.  Joseph Beuys was also a powerful influence on many artists of my generation and his famous dictum, “Art is life, life is Art.” was a message to make work about the reality of daily concerns/existence. Many artists, myself included, combine a largely abstract sensibility with the interest in making shapes/objects look like tangible “things” or environments.  Some artists that come to mind in this regard are Martin Puryear working in sculpture and Anish Kapoor also in sculpture.” 

The Water Seekers: Paintings by Teresa Stanley, is produced by students enrolled in the Museum and Gallery Practices Program at Humboldt State University. These students participate in the planning and production of exhibitions at HSU Third Street Gallery.  The gallery provides real-life opportunities for the students to develop their gallery and museum skills, which in turn provides them with experience that will help them to enter the job market. Many students who have participated in the program have gone on to careers in museums and galleries throughout the nation.

Exhibition Schedule and Location 
The exhibition will run from October 3 through November 5. The gallery is open daily from noon to 5 p.m.  A reception for the artist will be held at HSU Third Street Gallery Saturday, October 7, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during Eureka's monthly Arts Alive event. Humboldt State University Third Street Gallery is located at 416 Third Street Eureka, California.  For more information, call (707) 443-6363

The paintings in this exhibit are from a series called The Water Seekers.  I completed these paintings in a very concentrated period over the winter and spring of 2017, a period that also happened to mark the end of a severe drought in California.  The heavy rains during that winter created a steady rhythm in my studio.

As I worked, I began to imagine an environment where the search for water was paramount. The search was not only necessary for survival, it was also important because water represented an affirmation of some sort of truth.  In constructing this imagined environment, I created images that direct, contain, extract, traverse and conduct water.  Taking the form of blueprints, pipes, bridges, factories, escarpments and towers, the images that emerge in these painting seem to be constructed resourcefully, if precariously, from random scraps and remnants of instructions, blueprints, ephemera, thoughts, memories and historical evidence.  They are bulwarks of a personal nature, constructed from a collection of experiences, a hedge made to contain certain truths.

My work is abstract but I am guided by a strong narrative impulse. My process is intuitive and I prefer to puzzle out the painting through the process of making rather than starting with a concrete plan or image.  My work courts uncertainty and chaos while also desiring control, analysis and rationality. I am drawn to the natural world but feel a strong affinity for architectural spaces. My paintings are humorous but come from a sincere and heartfelt place.  I feel comfortable working within these contradictions.

The use of personal narrative in abstraction is in part a reaction to the austerity of pure abstraction (i.e. minimalism) and seeks instead to infuse the work with content. As the Guggenheim Museum stated in its notes for the exhibition titled Storylines,

During the 1990s, a generation of younger artists embraced the concept of storytelling to articulate the politics of identity and difference, investing both abstract and representational forms with narrative content.

I was highly influenced by feminist artists of the 1970s who made the return to narrative forms of art making as a way of documenting their largely unexamined experience.  It was through the influence of artists such as Elizabeth Murray, Philip Guston, Susan Rothenberg, among others, that I found a way to combine my interest in process and formalism informed by personal narrative.  Joseph Beuys was also a powerful influence on many artists of my generation and his famous dictum, “Art is life, life is Art.” was a message to make work about the reality of daily concerns/existence. Many artists, myself included, combine a largely abstract sensibility with the interest in making shapes/objects look like tangible “things” or environments.  Some artists that come to mind in this regard are Martin Puryear, working in sculpture and Anish Kapoor also in sculpture.

Although inspired by the idea of water or lack thereof, I do not view these paintings as commenting on environmental issues. Certainly, environmental issues are a pressing concern for me and that concern (and its attendant anxiety) hovers in the background. However, in this work, I use the metaphor of water as symbolic of the search for truth – perhaps the truth of one’s existence.

I have been always very interested in how differently we map and organize our truthful, authentic experience of the world.  If you were to ask different people to describe their life experience with sincerity, there were would be countless and astounding numbers of different responses. This is most elegantly and articulated in Rebecca Solnit’s book, Infinite City.

In her book, Solnit sees maps not as merely directions on paper or a screen, but also as evidence of the many different ways one could map a specific and personal experience of geography. She invites different people to create maps of San Francisco that describe spaces that contain and plot such disparate subjects as shipyards, butterflies, cinemas, Native American tribes and queer spaces, creating distinctly different and revealing ways of mapping one’s experience. This is what I hope to do with my life and work and hence, the multitude of influences that I include as inspiration for my work.

Random events, people and objects informed this series. The national political drama, my late father's electronic schematic drawings, the music of Alice Coltrane, the photographs of Bernd and Hila Becher, the color in Matisse's paintings and most importantly, my daily walks with my dog at the marsh near my home.  I take it all in and let the experience of it wash over me in all its wonderful confusion.

Teresa Stanley
Autumn, 2017