The Visual Studies Workshop New Mexico Connection

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Since the turn of the last century, New Mexico has been a mecca for artists: a place to escape the overcrowding and social restrictions of more formal East-coast cities and to live a life apart from the mainstream. Here, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers find an accepting community of like-minded pioneers who draw inspiration from the landscape and the spiritual life of the Hispanic and Native American people. Creativity is not only tolerated but celebrated, and career typecasting is largely avoided. In Santa Fe, where one in five people is an artist, it is commonplace for doctors and lawyers to spend their free time in artmaking pursuits. This environment is a perfect complement to the philosophy and aesthetics of the Visual Studies Workshop. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In October, James Hart, who attended the school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, set aside two rooms in his commercial photography studio in Santa Fe as an exhibition venue for a group show entitled Then & Now ... the Visual Studies Workshop/New Mexico Connection, showcasing the work of a dozen workshop alumni who reside in New Mexico. Judging from the pieces on view, even three decades after graduation, workshop graduates (and, in some cases, staff and faculty) place a premium on experimentation. Rules from the conventional art world are noted but given a back seat to individual expression, which borrows from wide-ranging visual influences. The show contained almost too much visual stimulation--all manner of photographic processes, painting, mural and book art, pinhole and camera-less imagery, as well as side-by-side comparisons of old and new work. Some of the most intriguing work was presented by Jonathan Morse (VSW student 1972-1976, MFA 1977). His intricate Epson archival pigment pieces on canvas--part still-life, part collage, and part photography--consisted of three oversize images centered on a theme of redemption. One, suggestive of Catholicism, was dominated by an altar which Morse constructed of an airline vomit bag, three tomatoes, and a crucifix-shaped structure made of branches, all surrounded by a golden metallic color field. Another, of a red mesh bag and a handful of cherry tomatoes, referenced fertility. The third, and most interesting, featured floating sushi--tufts of cottony white balls with textured centers like multicolored fabric--a couple of cotton swabs, and lightning-like tendrils that called to mind a sea of molecules or an imaginative spin on DNA sequencing. …