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the 2020-21 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow
Eleanor Conover
Jewett Art Gallery
Sept. 8 - Nov. 5, 2021
Eleanor Conover is a contemporary artist whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. Also employing elements of drawing, language, and history, the works imply spaces and states of excavation and accumulation.
Glass Half Moon brought a suite of 13 new paintings by Conover to the Jewett Art Gallery at Wellesley College. At first glance many appear abstract, but look closer, and with time images begin to emerge and recurring motifs may be recognized. The title is a collision of the phrase 'glass half full (or empty)' with reference to the phases of the moon, and suggests that dichotomies of optimism and pessimism, plenitude and lack were very much on the artist's mind as she worked on this series through the intensely unusual prior year.
Drawing from multiple sources, the paintings together form a landscape where geologic time and the present collapse into a single moment, simultaneously outside of time itself and deeply embedded in the histories of art, science, archaeology, and personal narrative. Their surfaces are a palimpsest of references and materials both. A number of the paintings in this exhibition include pieces of marble, resting against the frames or attached to the surface of the canvas. Marble is a metamorphic stone. Limestone—itself a sedimentary rock, made up of the fossilized remains of what came before—is subjected to unimaginably intense pressures and heat, deep within the earth. Over time, a transformation occurs, and the limestone metamorphoses into marble. All the works in this show undergo this same sort of metamorphic change.
The paintings grow outwards from the canvas in both directions: up, in overlapping layers of dye, paint, charcoal, and graphite on top of the canvas; and down, in bleach that cuts through staining on the canvas surface to reveal lines made by the wooden support structures that lie below. These support structures, which typically remain unseen in a rectangular painting, are elaborate, as they must be in order to keep the irregularly shaped canvases in steady tension. These formal complexities complicate our ability to site these works within the histories of a more typical, surface-up mode of painting, and mimic the complex webs of allusions made by the imagery, while curious formal tensions (as of carefully bent and braced pieces of wood, or precariously balanced pieces of stone) mimic the tension that exists in these works between representation and abstraction.
Conover is the recipient of the 2020-21 Alice C. Cole ’42 Fellowship, which provides funds to support one year of unimpeded time and space to experiment, develop a body of work, and focus on future artistic goals. Glass Half Moon features artwork created during Conover’s fellowship year. The Alice C. Cole '42 Fellowship is awarded to an outstanding early-career artist, based on nominations from prominent members of the national arts community. The fellowship is made possible by the generous bequest of Wellesley alumna Alice C. Cole, class of 1942. Aware of the burdens that recent graduates of art school face, Ms. Cole makes it possible for an artist to have 'a limited time free of economic necessity'-- an immensely valuable gift.
The exhibition was on view in the Jewett Art Gallery from Sept. 8 through Nov. 5, 2021.
A House is to Build and Untitled (Trochee), 12 x 9" each, oil on paper with dyed pine artist frames, 2020
Blackberry-Picking, 67 x 49", dye, bleach, acrylic, charcoal, and oil on linen with beveled pine, 2021
F/old, 54 x 40", dye, bleach, acrylic, oil, and graphite on linen with beveled pine, 2020
Glass Half Moon, 67 x 49", dye, bleach, acrylic, oil, and graphite on linen with beveled pine and marble insert, 2020-21
Understudy, 70 x 50", dye, bleach, acrylic, graphite, oil, and marble on linen, 2021
Self Portrait with Marble, 72 x 52", dye, bleach, acrylic, oil, and graphite on linen with beveled pine and marble base, 2021
Born in Hartford, CT in 1988, Eleanor Conover received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and her BA from Harvard College. Recent past exhibitions include Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, ME), Bad Water (Knoxville, TN), and Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY). Her practice has been supported through artist residencies including Vermont Studio Center, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and the environment, she has additionally been involved in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK. She received a post-MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and relocated to Carlisle, PA, where at the time of this exhibition she was an Assistant Professor of Art at Dickinson College.
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