VCUarts Anderson Gallery hosts summer exhibition, “Travelogue”

VCU Communications & Public Relations

Artists’ response to place covers a wide terrain in Travelogue, a four-part summer exhibition at the VCUarts Anderson Gallery that runs through Aug. 1.

The exhibition devoted to themes of travel and tourism was organized by Ashley Kistler, director of the Anderson Gallery, and Michael Lease, gallery associate. With wit and verve, photographs by Martin Parr and a video by Olaf Breuning probe our understanding of cultural difference and dislocation in an ever-shrinking, increasingly well-traveled and consumer-driven world. A photographic journey assembled by VCU alumna Michelle Van Parys over 20 years explores our collective cultural imprint on the landscape of the American West. Selected from the gallery’s permanent collection by Traci Horne, intimate sketches by Theresa Pollak capture her immediate observations of places visited and people encountered.

Summer hours for the Anderson Gallery are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. The gallery is closed on Sunday and Monday. The gallery is located at 907 ½ W. Franklin St.

Martin Parr: “Small World & Autoportraits”
Often called the most important British photographer working today, Martin Parr is well known for his humorous, highly saturated color images that tackle the inexorable phenomena of mass consumerism and global tourism. Parr has traveled the world —frequently on assignment for the photo agency Magnum — photographing tourists (and having himself photographed) in the widest array of locations imaginable.

This exhibition will feature images from “Small World” and “Autoportraits,” along with selections from “The Last Resort,” “Think of England” and “Mexico.” The pictures of “Small World” offer an engrossing excursion to mostly familiar tourist spots made newly strange and compelling when viewed from Parr’s idiosyncratic perspective.

“Tourism is the biggest industry in the world,” he notes. “You can’t ignore it. I like to explore the problem with it, which is the difference between the myth and the reality of the place.”
                                       
Parr continues to address this subject in his series “Autoportraits,” a hilarious compilation of images initiated in the 1990s when he began having his own picture taken by a local studio or street photographer in whatever location he happened to be working.

Michelle Van Parys: “The Way Out West”
Over the last two decades, traveling west from her home in Charleston, S.C., Michelle Van Parys has trained her camera on the terrain of the American West and its changing identity.

In the toned gelatin-silver prints making up this captivating photographic journey through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and California, she suggests a range of possibilities for these interactions, from humorous and ironic to dangerous and fatalistic.

Recently published by the Center for American Places at Columbia College, Chicago, a 94-page exhibition catalogue with essays by Lucy Lippard and Geoffrey Batchen is available from the gallery for $30.00. Van Parys received her MFA in photography from VCU in 1986 and currently teaches in the School of the Arts at the College of Charleston.

Olaf Breuning: “Home 2”
Olaf Breuning, a young Swiss artist now living in New York City, creates videos, photographs, sculptures and installations that draw heavily from popular culture. Breuning’s latest video, “Home 2” — a hit at the 2008 Whitney Biennial — addresses themes of dislocation and cultural identity. The narrator of this over-the-top spoof, played by actor Brian Kerstetter, joins a tourist group traveling through Papua New Guinea and stumbles his way through assorted villages, variously charming or insulting his fellow tourists and the “natives” he encounters. As Stacey Goergen observed in the Biennial catalogue, “Contextualizing the helplessness of today’s global citizen, Breuning examines a basic human quest for commonality in an increasingly global, but ever more fragmented, world.”

Theresa Pollak: “On Location”
Theresa Pollak (1899-2002), a founder of the VCU School of the Arts, often made sketches and studies depicting the places she visited and the people she encountered. The drawings in this exhibition, selected from the gallery’s permanent collection, document Pollak‘s keen interest in the world around her. From portraits of bus passengers and landscapes from airplane windows to train stations and well-known museums, she captured her observations and experiences on paper, sometimes with notations for future paintings. Drawn with a sense of immediacy of time and place, these works are a candid account of one tourist and traveler.