Self portraits

Self portraits

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Exhibition Announcement


TuckUnder Projects is very pleased to announce the tandem portraiture exhibition Pamela & Frank Gaard/Dual Portraits.
Dual Portraits of Sean - Frank and Pamela Gaard; photo by Pete Driessen

Pamela & Frank Gaard/Dual Portraits opens at TuckUnder Projects, Thursday, June 28, 6-9 pm. The exhibition runs June 28-July 29, 2012, with unstructured hours Wednesday through Sunday, and by appointment. Please email info@tuckunder.org to confirm open hours. TuckUnder Projects is located at 5120 York Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN, USA 55410. For further information visit www.TuckUnder.org.

The atypical dual portraits of Pamela and Frank Gaard repeatedly break the mold of traditional monarchial portraiture. Rarely are dual portraits of an artist’s model created and painted by two different artists from life in the same sitting. The unique qualities of the Gaards double portraiture move beyond conservative art historical status, power, and position by illuminating the quirky, emotive, and personal. Through odd facial expression, ill postured poses, high and low polychromatic saturation, and a range of brush stroke and color blending techniques, the tandem portraits exhibit novel sensitive and idiosyncratic qualities. In our media hyped society, these partnership portraits bring to life the meek, the frail, and the subtle hidden human conditions and delicate private characteristics that a video or digital camera cannot capture.

As working artists, the Gaards live and paint out of their home/studio in the Fulton neighborhood of Southwest Minneapolis, Minnesota. The paintings for this second TuckUnder Projects exhibition are drawn from recent artists, friends, coworkers, and Fulton neighbors. Together, the Gaards portrait partnership currently produces work that includes acrylic paintings and mixed media drawings on paper. Their visual and conceptual portraiture vocabulary explores human relationships, togetherness and community. The Pamela & Frank Gaard/Dual Portraits exhibition presents multiple vantage points for the viewer by offering a second ordered observer experience. Frank and Pam have painted dual portraits collaboratively for the past six years, and have exhibited them together at Co Exhibitions, Minneapolis; the Phipps Center for the Arts, Hudson, Wisconsin; and one was included in the recent Walker Art Center retrospective, Frank Gaard: Poison & Candy. This is the first show that focuses solely on their dual portraiture.

American artist Pamela Gaard is a self-taught visual artist and health educator who was born in Minneapolis in 1955. Ms. Gaards education is in the sciences and has a master’s degree equivalent in public health. She has primarily created visual art, sculpture and paintings from re-purposed and disparate materials. Ms. Gaard has exhibited in galleries and museums in the US, Germany, and Lithuania, including Pittsburgh Center for the Arts; Indiana University of Pennsylvania; University of Alaska Art Museum, Fairbanks, Alaska; Art in Embassies Program, Vilnius, Lithuania; and Galeri Hori, Konstanz, Germany. Ms. Gaard has exhibited locally at Co. Exhibitions, Flatland Gallery, Intermedia Arts, Rogue Buddha Gallery, the University of St. Thomas, and the Phipps Center for the Arts, Hudson, Wisconsin. Currently, she paints in acrylics on canvas, paper, and recycled objects. Gaard is working on a series of large-scale portraits of people, painted from life, some often created in tandem collaboration with her husband/artist. Pam Gaards portraits are intended, in the words of Arthur Danto, as ‘emblems through which we confer honor by preserving the likenesses of those portrayed . . . which can be channels for adoration.’

American artist Frank Gaard was born in Chicago in 1944, received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA from California College of The Arts. He worked as a fine arts professor at Minneapolis College of Art & Design from 1969-1987. His solo exhibitions include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Flanders Gallery, and most recently his 50 year retrospective at the Walker Art Center. His group exhibitions include many he organized and curated with the Art Police Collective, including LACE, Los Angeles, California with ASCO & Group Material, and the Pompidou Centre Galerie Salle, Paris, France. He has been awarded three McKnight Artist Fellowships, two Pollock/Krasner Fellowships, and a Bush Artist Fellowship. His collections include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smart Museum/University of Chicago. Frank Gaards collaborative zine publications with Art Police are numerous and known for their mix of high/low browish political cartoons and sexy imagery.

TuckUnder Projects is a temporary, independent artist exhibition space and sculpture site located within the Fulton neighborhood of Southwest Minneapolis. As an alternative, hybridic home-based contemporary gallery, TuckUnder Projects specializes in unrecognized emerging artists and curatorial collaborators, tactical institutional critique, participatory initiatives and conceptual curatorial projects. Artistic quality at TuckUnder is based upon artist’s tactical aesthetics, participatory exchange, home economics, and conceptual fortitude rather than traditionally conservative art fair and gallery criteria.

For its first season of interior and exterior art exhibit programming, TuckUnder plans six platform exhibits that engage the local community with under recognized local and regional emerging artists and curators working in visual arts, video, site specific sculpture and installation from May thru October 2012. Artists will collaborate with the unique 1950’s architectural environs, TuckUnder garage, fake butterflies & woodpecker, raspberry patch, & scenic overlook. Recent and forthcoming exhibition and curatorial projects include the artists Pamela & Frank Gaard, Ann George, Lisa Bergh & Andrew Nordin of Art House/New London, Scott Stulen, Karen Kasel, and Raspberry Patch Resident Sarah Wolbert.

TuckUnder Projects is created with the generous help of MRAC, Springboard for the Arts Incubator program, Mayan Co., Arvesen Co., Driessen Water, and many individuals. TuckUnder Projects activity is funded, in part, by a Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Community Arts Grant, and by appropriations from the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the State's general fund, and its arts and cultural heritage fund that was created by a vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

For further information please contact Pete Driessen at 612-719-7377 or info@tuckunder.org.



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