Interpret art at ‘Between Order and Chaos’

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BROOKINGS – From clean and geometric, to messy and indistinct, viewers of “Between Order and Chaos” will be forced to make their own interpretation of each piece, as their ideas about art and representation are challenged.

The exhibit premiered at the South Dakota Art Museum Jan. 26 and will be on display until May 21. Jodi Lundgren, the museum’s coordinator of exhibitions, says viewers can expect to be visually excited and challenged by the delightful mixture of pure abstraction.

“Artists are really exploring the use of materials and dealing with all these potentialities. I think that is the important and really cool thing about abstraction,” Lundgren said. “When you remove something that is a recognizable object, the artwork becomes about everything else, like the artist’s process and how they used the materials and media. It’s about composition and how forms, shapes, colors, lines and textures relate to each other. It opens up all these things for us as viewers.”

The exhibit features works by local, regional, national and historical artists, including important figures from the museum and SDSU’s earlier history as well as the 20th century’s founding father of optical art, Victor Vasarely. Among the living local artists featured in the exhibit are SDSU faculty members Diana Behl and Shannon Frewaldt.

The works date from the early 1950s to today, in an effort to show the changes and experimentation within abstraction over time. The exhibit is organized in a way that loosely separates out  different types of abstract art, so the viewer may follow the more chaotic or more orderly forms that developed within it after artists began to experiment with the style in the early 20th century.

The idea to put together an exhibit focused on pure abstraction came to Lundgren while looking through the mass of the museum’s collections.

“I was just amazed with the amount of work we have dealing with pure abstraction. We could fill every gallery in the museum and then some,” Lundgren said. “I decided to pare it down to works that were really visually exciting and that people may not be familiar with.”

Lundgren encourages both students and community members to wander in and check out this exciting exhibit as it has something to offer everyone.

“You can learn a lot about yourself from looking at abstract art. If you are drawn to the chaotic, perhaps you are more comfortable with it in your own life. If you are drawn to the more rigid works, perhaps you like extreme order in your life. It’s a great way to learn about your own attractions and how they relate to who you are,” Lundgren said. “That is how artists learn about themselves and what they like to make. They continually seek out those attractions and find their signature.”

Lundgren hopes that all people will visit the show in order to learn more about themselves and abstract art in general.

“I believe you are better able to make sense of abstraction the more time you spend looking at its different forms,” Lundgren said. “Overall, it is a pretty high-energy, high-impact show that both folks who love abstraction and are very uncomfortable with it should be able to enjoy.”