Art Lies, Volume 28, Fall 2000 Page: 90
112 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Ann Stautberg
Texas Coast: A Decade of Images
THE JONES CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
TEXAS FINE ARTS ASSOCIATION
AUSTIN
by Stephanie HanorPhotography began as a docu-
mentary medium, and it still
serves mainly as a record: visual
proof of a specific time, place,
or action. Yet Ann Stautberg's
luscious hand-painted, black-
and-white images go beyond
literal documentation to pres-
ent memories.
Organized by Clint
Willour, Executive Director at
the Galveston Arts Center, this
traveling exhibition focuses on a
ten-year span of Stautberg's
work, featuring the artist's
impressions of her Galveston
home and surroundings. Willour
uses the term "visual diary" to
describe her work and this is an
apt metaphor for images in
which the specifics of the past
take precedence. Stautberg's titles also
emphasize this by introducing subjects in
classic diary fashion, indicating date,
time, and place.
Characteristic of all the works is the
distinct absence of people. In their place
are the intimate details of Stautberg's life.
We become voyeurs into interior scenes
from the artist's own home; grouped in
one area of the exhibition, these pictures
allow a virtual tour of her private rooms. In
these photographs her camera captures
and magnifies the normally inconsequen-
tial circumstances of daily life: the wrin-
kles in the bedsheets, the Mexican calen-
dar in the bathroom, the old-fashioned
Formica countertop. By amplifying these
elements Stautberg manipulates our read-
ing of these domestic images. The gener-
ic and the specific become entwined; we
are left with impressions rather than
evidentiary records.
3.22.95, Art Bonfire (1995) docu-
ments the dramatic semi-annual,
evening ritual in which Stautberg and her
husband, artist Frank X. Tolbert2, dispose
of their unwanted and unworkable cre-
ations. The unnaturally intense yellowsand oranges of the raging fire are indica-
tions of remembered color. Stautberg
applies translucent oils to black and white
photographs, working from memory
when choosing color. Rather than utiliz-
ing a palette of naturalistic tones, for this
piece she deliberately chose hyperrealistic
colors. As a result, Stautberg successfully
evokes the memory of a mood.
Given the decade-long parameter of
the exhibition, I expected to see a more
pronounced evolution in her work. While
Stautberg's colors have become more vivid
over the years, she has maintained her ini-
tial interest in looking both inward to her
own home and outward into the environs
of Galveston. This brings a certain
thoughtful consistency to the show, so
that what becomes most noticeable is the
artist's manipulation of scale. Stautberg
approaches the arena of installation with a
long, vertical piece that unfurls itself gen-
tly onto the gallery floor like a scroll.
In fact, Stautberg's most successful
pieces are freed from their frames, large in
scale, and minimalist in their imagery and
color. Well over seven feet wide and
pinned directly to the wall, echoing theway the artist actually works in
her studio, 6.2.99, A.M., Texas
Coast, #1 (2000) offers a visual
experience akin to viewing a
painting. Actually, it is when she
addresses her art's relationship to
painting that the images become
both more complicated and more
resonant. This dramatic photo-
graph of the gulf coast morning
sky bears the evidence of
Stautberg's carefully worked sur-
faces, so that the physical texture
of the hand-applied oils mingles
with the photographic texture of
the abstract cloudscape. While
the imagery may recall the
romantic paintings of Caspar
David Friedrich or J. M. W.
Turner, there's certainly no alle-
gorical, moralizing intent.
Instead Stautberg appears to have an
intuitive understanding of how to realize
the pictorial in photography, and any
romanticism in her work comes from her
hand-coloration.
In 6.30.97, A.M. (1998) the grainy
texture of weather-beaten steps and a
moody accumulation of storm clouds give
the illusion of a stairway into an infinite
sky. Stautberg's simplification of forms
and subtlety in coloration contribute to
the work's overall painterly quality, so
much so that even the woodgrain show-
ing through peeling paint reads like a
brushstroke. Abstract and seemingly
unspecific on the surface, the work
nonetheless maintains those particular
elements crucial to Stautberg's work: date,
time, and place. Her photographs become
visual documentation of a specific, yet at
the same time, universal memory. O
Ann Stautberg
6.30.97 A.M., Texas Coast, 1998
gelatin silver photograph with translucent oils
39.5" x 31.5" (image 24" X 24")
Courtesy Barry Whistler Gallery90 ARTL!ES Fall 2000
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Angelini, Surpik & Hernández, Abdel. Art Lies, Volume 28, Fall 2000, periodical, 2000; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228058/m1/92/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .