horn island – Memphis Flyer

Bill Nelson’s Walking Back to Waters Crossing With Cordie, oil on canvas, at the Horn Island exhibition at Memphis College of Art

There will be a lot of “lasts” at Memphis College of Art this coming year. The school closes for good after the next spring commencement with the remaining students graduating and going on their way, alumni to a memory.

As fall gets underway, the first of the year’s lasts begins with the 35th Horn Island Exhibition, one of MCA’s most distinctive endeavors. In the early 1980s, professor Bob Riseling liked the idea of students going on an excursion to the uninhabited barrier island off the Gulf Coast near Ocean Springs, Mississippi. There was a fitting historic resonance: Noted artist Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) spent a good deal of the last 20 years of his life going to and from Horn Island, portraying the animals and landscapes. The Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs keeps his memory alive and his art protected.

Riseling imagined students, faculty, and alumni going for several days to the island where they would observe and absorb the environment while roughing it the whole way. To this day there are no amenities on the island, so everyone camps and creates with the idea of coming back to complete artworks inspired by the experience. Riseling led the expeditions for years and then handed off the direction to MCA faculty member Don DuMont, who remembers well how it changed him.

“The first year I was adjunct here at MCA, well in my forties,” DuMont says. “That experience on Horn Island took me all the way back to when I was really young, to all the islands I had been on throughout my service years. Things just flooded back into me. And I started looking at my life and it just took a big 180.”

Jon W. Sparks

Don DuMont’s Horn Memories Spirit Box. Walnut, cedar, pewter, found objects, at the Horn Island exhibition at Memphis College of Art

For many of those who have trekked to Horn Island over the years, it is revelatory in its own way. “Some of them have never camped before,” DuMont says. “Some of them had never even been to the coast. Some of them never even been on a boat.”

DuMont went to Horn Island three times when Riseling was running the show, and the senior professor saw the effect. “He told me, ‘I think you’re the one to take this over,'” DuMont says. “And I’ve done it 14 years. It’s been just a tremendous opportunity and something that’s changed my life greatly, and then to be able to see all of this wonderful work all these years. All of these people that have participated feel that it really had big significance in their lives, too. So it’s pretty damn sweet.”

This year’s show runs through October 4th, with the reception this Saturday from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at MCA. As in the past, there will be refreshments in the form of barbecued Spam and Gatorade, the essential sustenance of the art adventurers.

Students are required to do four to six pieces for the show. They have sponsors, and the idea is to give the benefactors choices in selecting a work for themselves. The sponsors are typically art collectors and understand the value of a visit to Horn Island. Sometimes they’re happy to forego having a piece — they’d rather the student have the experience on the island and then have a chance to sell their work.

Jon W. Sparks

Scottie Wyatt’s gyotaku print Pompano, at the Horn Island exhibition at MCA

That experience, DuMont says, is different every time, whether veteran or newbie. “We step on a different island every year,” he says. “As a matter of fact, every morning when you step out of your tent, it’s a different island.” Nature does what it pleases and it presents the artists with fresh visions and not just a few lessons. He mentions Hurricane Katrina that blew through the region in 2005. “Pre-Katrina, the island was very lush. After Katrina, we witnessed a significant die-off.” The devastation came, he says, because there wasn’t significant rain for several months after the hurricane. “So that island just sat there and had salt water that killed off a lot of those trees. Over the years, we watched the island come back, and this year in particular, it seemed really, really lush. I think it had a lot to do with our wet fall and winter.”

Each artist takes away whatever they will from the excursion and then spends the summer working on their art. There is certainly no theme imposed on them, although DuMont says, “I think people really were reflecting a lot, maybe thinking about the past, and thinking about what they’ll do now.” And then when the pieces started coming in to MCA to be hung or placed, DuMont noticed a thread that ran through many of them. “Reflection literally shows up a lot in work,” he says. He points to a symmetrical work made of cut paper. “It’s almost like a mirror,” he says, speculating that perhaps it being the last show spurred thoughts about past, present, and future, which then emerged as balance, reflection, and symmetry in the artworks.

Peyton LaBauve’s porcelain Don DuMonster (Smoking Pipe) at this year’s Horn Island exhibition

There is also much diversity in the show, DuMont says. “It’s all like-minded people there, so you would think they’re all going to be doing the same thing. But that’s so far from the truth. We have beautiful jewelry, we have ceramic work that’s phenomenal. The other thing is that it’s not just traditional style work, but there are all kinds of mediums here.” Painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, animation, fabric. “New technologies, old methods, just a wonderful blend,” he says.

Currently on view are two exhibitions inspired by Horn Island, the tiny Mississippi Gulf atoll made famous by Walter Anderson’s visionary watercolors and woodprints.

In “Horn Island 23” at the Memphis College of Art, a storm rages on the wall in the form of Trice Patterson’s mixed-media work Some Early Morn. A long piece of frayed canvas fastened with twine to weathered wood looks like a battered tent onto which the artist has scumbled and scrawled charcoal dust, ink, and black Conté crayon. At bottom right of the storm, we can just make out two delicately drawn pines — Patterson’s haunting tribute to Horn Island’s trees, many of which were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Don DuMont, the MCA adjunct instructor who led 30-plus colleagues, students, and alumni during the eight-day stay on Horn Island in June, contributes a well-crafted piece of whimsy to the show. A large raven, mouth open and cawing, strides across the top of DuMont’s Box of Squalling Riches. Crows carved into the sides appear to fly around the box in all directions. Instead of a golden ark, these squawking, intelligent keepers of the covenant guard a freshly hewn cedar/cypress container that could be a coffin for a small animal or a Pandora’s box full of Horn Island mosquitoes, blistering temperatures, high winds, freedom, and excitement.

Much of the artwork in “Horn Island 23” is a microcosm of the island. The sleek, steel seabird torpedoing in for the kill in Bill Price’s Cooling Wind is backdropped by Lance Turner’s large acrylic abstraction of ebb tide in Map of Horn Island Sand. Close by, Richard Prillaman’s copper Toad simulates the glossy slime covering the creature and the iron-rich mud in which it wallows. Matt Wening’s stark digital prints line the gallery’s right wall with dead trees that stand like sentinels on deserted beaches.

Untouched paper becomes a large sand dune in Jason William Cole’s accomplished watercolor Palms. At the crest of the dune, Cole gestures tufts of dead grass and a knee-high cluster of scrub and dwarf trees. Above deep-green palm blades, blue and purple washes create the impression of windswept sky.

Black lines of acrylic, twisting furiously in all directions, record the fight for life, the futile attempts to fly, and the death throes of Lisa Tribo’s Broken Wing Crow. A Spiral in the Sand, Lance Turner’s large acrylic on canvas covered with hundreds of hand-painted, near-white concentric whorls, creates the sensation of being sucked into and spit out of swirling sand and water.

Several of Tessera Phipps’ giclée prints look like pure geometry. Look closer. Puckers in the material of her white triangles and pointed arches, her brown “Xs,” and her titles (Inner Sanctum, Temple Door) suggest the artist was flat on her back looking up at securely fastened tent flaps when she conceived these images.

To photograph his unsettlingly existential Night Sky Over Main Camp, James Carey stood close to shoreline. With a wide-angle lens and a 30-second exposure time, Carey captured a band of artists under thousands of tiny points of light at the edge of civilization and infinity.

“Horn Island 23” at Memphis College of Art through September 21st

In “Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688, Willie Bearden, using infrared filters, lens flares, and Photoshop manipulations, transforms Horn Island’s already exotic landscape into post-apocalyptic visions of Eden. A horizon lined with leafless black trees stands in stark contrast to the luminous white scrub bushes, sand, and clouds in Bearden’s giclée print, Horn Island Reflection.

Robin Salant’s archival prints of shell and bone floating in black space bring to mind Edward Weston’s images of nautilus shells. But, instead of pure form, polished surface, and the graceful curve of Weston’s shells, Salant’s shells and bones, all broken and scarred on Horn Island, are more idiosyncratic and provocative.

The back of a catfish skull, picked clean by predators and bleached by the sun in Bone Study #1, looks like a pig snout, a satanic icon, the face of a wolf, and/or webbed wings wrapped around the body of an albino bat. Salant’s image of the orange-red incisors and pitted skull of a rodent, Bone Study #3: Nutria, brings to mind talismans that tribal people believe can channel the forces of the universe.

“Eight Days in Exile” at Studio 1688 through September 20th