Making Sense
September 27-December 12, 2014
University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida

Making Sense brings together four artists who make distinctive contributions to contemporary painting. They explore painting as a medium, a set of techniques, an historical institution and a framework for making sense. Inspired by WWII-era Enigma decoding machines, Rochelle Feinstein takes on puzzling figures of speech, inscrutable ideas and encrypted social codes as challenges for painterly representation. Using a method she calls “random select,” Deborah Grant creates imagined, non-linear narrative encounters between historical artists, interwoven with her own varied humanistic interests from literature to religion. Iva Gueorguieva adapts the visual language of modern abstraction to create tumultuous, energetic spaces on canvas; her process of building up paintings by layering torn cloth with pigment and color washes produces spontaneous, dynamic compositions rooted in personal stories. Dona Nelson’s two-sided paintings, stained and layered with strands of cheesecloth, invite viewers to encounter them as freestanding forms. Making Sense includes new works produced by Feinstein and Gueorguieva at Graphicstudio, the 45-year-old collaborative printmaking and sculpture atelier of the USF Institute for Research In Art. Curated by Margaret Miller, Director, USF Institute for Research in Art, and Megan Voeller, Associate Curator, USF Contemporary Art Museum; organized by USFCAM.