The Wedding Dance, 2014

August 21–December 8, 2018

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 13, 2018, 6–8:00 p.m.
Evening with the Artist: Thursday, November 8, 2018, 6:00 p.m.

George Tobolowsky’s series of metal sculptures, A Long Road Back, range from abstract winding forms to representational subjects. The artist’s incorporation of bold colors and found metal scraps create delightfully unexpected outcomes that pay tribute to modernist sculpture. Tobolowsky’s works will be on display inside and around the Museum, as well as throughout Oxford and the UM campus.

The University of Mississippi Museum would like to thank Earl Dismuke for his assistance in securing site locations and installations of these outdoor works.

Map and key to sculpture locations are below or can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Follow our interactive tour on your mobile device at UMArtAroundTown.com.

1 The University of Mississippi Museum, University Avenue & 5th Street

Bending the Blue Rules, 2013
Corporate Guardian #2, 2011

On lawn of Walton-Young house:

Drawing on Paper #2, 2011
Drawing in Red, 2012

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2 The Graduate Hotel, 400 N. Lamar Blvd.

Intersecting Intersections, 2011

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3 The Inn at Ole Miss 120 Alumni Dr.

Colorful Sustainable Flowers #1, 2016–2018

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4 FNC, Inc., 1214 Office Park Dr.

Corporate Guardian #1, 2011

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5 Baptist Memorial Hospital-North, 1100 Belk Blvd.

The Long Green Road to Success, 2016

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6 Green Roof Lounge at the Courtyard by Marriott, 305 Jackson Ave. E.

The Big Daydreamer, 2014
Little Chief, 2010

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7 South Lamar Court, 101 S. Lamar Ct.

Chaos Theory, 2015

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8 Oxford Canteen, 766 N. Lamar Blvd.

Colors of the Universe, 2012–2018

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9 Rowan Oak, 915 Old Taylor Road

Inside house:

Red/Black Road to the Blue City, 2016

Moth Mother, 2017

July 24–December 1, 2018

Artist’s Lecture: Wednesday, August 22, 2018, 5:30 p.m.

with light refreshments

Opening Reception and Gallery Walkthrough with Artist: Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018, 6–8:00 p.m.

Where the roots rise, in a forest full of ecru bone, the woman of the woods awakes to a world of myth and ruination.

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Where the Roots rise, a series of tea-stained cyanotypes, serves as a reminder that the gap between nature and ourselves is smaller than we acknowledge. Decay runs rampant—seasons change—nature lies in await to stake its claim.

Jaime Aelavanthara’s work articulates humankind’s capacity to decay as a marker of our identity. Set in the swamps and woods of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, natural places where one encounters life and death, growth and decay, the series chronicles the intimate relationship of a feral woman and her surrounding nonhuman environment. The woman collects the bones, branches, and flora and treads with the animals, both dead and living. Recognizing the deaths of other creatures, this woman observes in death, she, too, will be repurposed and consumed by the earth.

The cyanotype process shifts focus from potentially colorful landscapes and figures to patterns, textures, and the relationships of forms within the images. Tea-staining the prints dulls the blue and adds warmth. Printing on Japanese Kitakata paper, which is prone to ripping, tearing, and wrinkling, reflects the deterioration of nature and gives the prints a feeling of fragility. Untamed ultimately reflects upon the forms, the impermanence, and the interconnectedness of natural life.

Somewhere South of Violet, 2008

March 13–July 7, 2018

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 19, 2018, 6–8:00 p.m.

It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place.
—Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality

My studio in downtown Memphis is in an old medicine factory at the end of a dead-end street. Last in a row of empty warehouses, the building is an outpost of long-gone industry, surrounded by empty lots, crumbling edifices and thick copses of trees. The Mississippi River flows by less than a mile away, but leaves this area untouched by its progress.

I am drawn to the forgotten, to the mysterious traces of memory in our physical world. My work references objects and places that continue their slow transformation after someone turns away: rich, charged, vibrating places. Rooted on the edges of our world, these thin spaces are quietly pulsing with a kind of murmuring remembrance: the crumbling wall with flowering vines pushing through the cracks, the drape and sway of a fence that separates nothing from nothingness, the silhouette of folding and unfolding structures. Neglected and abandoned, these mysterious sites live on in an active collapse, their old stories settling into their foundations and becoming new ones as nature reclaims them for their own.

Starting with photographic documentation of these sites, I work through an intricate and laborious process of tracing, drawing and layering of gouache that puts the painting at a remove from the original photograph. Through this method, the image is abstracted and reduced to its essence, while the inherent ephemerality of the site is echoed in the material terrain of found paper. Out of decay and isolation a poetry of resilience and new growth is revealed. The works in Ruin is a Secret Oasis mine this liminal space—the region between the bloom and the decay—and pursue the sense of place these sites inspire. In them, beauty is resilience and an acknowledgement of the ravages of nature and time. Through this imagery I explore a landscape of change and the traces of experience that remain.

—Maysey Craddock

Exhibition made possible by support from the Jane Becker Heidelberg Endowment for the Arts.