So Near, So Far
Recent work by Daniel White
September 8 - November 16
Reception: Thursday, September 18, 5-7 p.m.
ARTIST BIO
His earliest influences were illustration artists' works and later his ceramics background
played an important role. This created the DNA for the work that was to come much
later. The approach is a complex simplicity and rendering down to its most essential
elements. Doing this on the formal structure of oil on canvas is a way to bring playfulness
to an often otherwise serious medium.
Daniel White lives and works in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area. He is a seasoned arts
professional by day as the Director of the Paul R. Jones Museum and The University
of Alabama Gallery. He holds an MFA from The School for American Crafts at RIT (2002)
and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Montevallo (2000). His artwork, embracing
playful informality and often self-reflective, can be found in private collections
across the United States.
ARTIST STATEMENT
So Near, So Far brings together bodies of work by Daniel White over the last several years. Layered between coats of oil paint, White infuses remnants of memory, truths, and half-truths to ask vulnerable questions: Does memory create its own landscape, or does it just make those events more bearable? In the end, does it all work out? What is real between us? What isn't real? There is just something tragic about growing up, and no one is spared the harsh truths. Before you know it, you cannot remember what it was like wandering down trails that led to nothing or holding your breath underwater. Memory is a push/pull and so is painting alongside art history. Often, it is stories begun in hard circumstance, turning into an adventure, and sometimes end well. The weight of art history is far heavier load on the brush than the paint. The weight of memory can be even heavier, and painting is always present with the past. What one has to do with both art history and memory is to turn a mirror onto both and ask questions. Make both accountable for what happened. These are the questions exploring: Where, through paint, does the trail end, do they survive the boat wreck, are we going to make it through?
Transience: Trace and Erasure in Lost Landscapes
Recent Work by Angel Fernandez & Winter Rusiloski
September 18 - November 14
Reception: September 18, 5-7 p.m.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Fernandez and Rusiloski have developed practices that spring from the mythological
landscape of the West, grappling with border issues of immigration, movement, power
and struggle. Although their work has always been hyperlocal, the themes and questions
they pull forward are essential: What memory does the landscape hold? How do we move
through it, what limits us? What gets erased? and What mark can we make on sites that
are forgotten/abandoned/unseen? In September of 2025, they are bringing those methodologies
to Alabama, to intervene on sites and contexts in the Deep South.
The stories we tell about places determine not only how we hold them, but what they
can become. In an exhibition of all new work created during a residency at Troy University,
Fernandez creates performative sculpture and video work exploring struggle and journey
within the landscape. Rusiloski, with a practice grounded in landscape painting, collages
fragments of photographs from their travels and integrates her surfaces back into
the landscape. Both practices document the passage of time in the elements, grapple
with affect and effect, and address all the narratives embedded underfoot.
This exhibition was curated by elizabet elliott, originated by Alabama Contemporary
in partnership with Troy University.
Through a residency at Troy University, Winter and Angel have mounted a temporary
public art installation in a vacant plot at 204 E Walnut St. in collaboration with
Caleb Dawson at Roscoe Jackson. This site activation is a preview of a culminating
exhibition planned at the Huo Bao Zhu Gallery, International Arts Center in Troy,
AL opening this September.
This project is supported by generous grant funding by The Andy Warhol Foundation,
Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal
agency.