The HELMET - Garychapmanart.com

The
H E L M Project
ET
G
ARTIST
STATEMENT
At 8am on September 11, 2001, it was
easy to perceive our lives as serene; we
were safe.
Even while Bernie Madoff ’s crimes were
being exposed, most saw our economy,
our country, as prosperous; we led the
world.
And while the scientific community
embraces a vision of quantum mechanics
and string theory, shattering our
basic understanding of the observable
universe, we are left behind only capable
of viewing Newton’s world; we are blind.
We are a visually biased society, living in
a time in which we can no longer believe
in what we see.
~Gary Chapman
FOREWORD
G
Dedicated to presenting the most innovative
contemporary art in the region, the Wiregrass
Museum of Art, Dothan, AL has been
privileged to work with artists of an astounding
caliber throughout its twenty-year history.
An Alabama artist, and master painter, Gary
Chapman is a part of our history. Now, he
brings to our museum his most recent work,
The HELMET Project. Best known for his
large-scale and layered figurative paintings,
Chapman scaled down the works in The
HELMET Project for ultimate impact.
The HELMET Project is based on a series
of twelve paintings completed in 2011 by
Chapman. The paintings, oil on canvas and
mounted on wooden panels, each depict one
central figure wearing a unique helmet. It is
unclear whether the helmet is worn for fashion
or for protection, whether it is intended for
sensorial improvement or suppression. The
distinct designs of each helmet suggest an array
of functions, alluding to ambiguity and at the
same time, presenting a new identity. As unique
and provocative as each helmet is, they are all
unmistakably designed to eliminate eyesight.
Determined to prove any space is worthy of art,
Chapman chose to display The Helmet Project
in unconventional spaces, choosing abandoned
or occupied spaces. Absent, however, was the
traditional gallery setting. Chapman selected
desirable spaces that provided interesting
architectural details complimentary to the
aesthetic and conceptual framework of the
series. He contrasted those locations with
spaces that were stark and stripped bare or
thoroughly trashed with refuse, graffiti and
decayed conditions.
Installing his ambiguous portraits in
abandoned buildings, indoor pools and
churches, Chapman collaborated with other
artists who photographed his innovative
installations. These installations, and the
photographs that document them, provide
layers of meaning, similar to the works
Chapman is best known for. And like the
complexity of the series, viewers are confronted
with a multitude of questions and possible
answers as to the meaning of it all.
While working with artist Gary Chapman on
The HELMET Project, I was struck with his
collaborative spirit and enthusiasm in bringing
his work to our museum, again. The Wiregrass
Museum of Art has been honored to work
with Chapman over the years, including a 2000
exhibition of his Incident Series. It was from
this exhibition that the museum acquired Man
with a Stick, a painting of significant scale that
visitors have become acquainted with over the
years. The museum is excited to collaborate
with Chapman once again, showcasing his
newest work.
Organized by the Wiregrass Museum of Art,
this is the first exhibition of The HELMET
Project to include all twelve paintings, alongside
twelve large-scale photographs of select
installations.
~Dana-Marie Lemmer, Curator,
Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL
THP-T1, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-AC2, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-G3, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-D4, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-C5, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-P6, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
ANOTHER
VISION:
The
HE
LM
ET
Project
Twelve paintings, all uniform in scale,
composition, and palette; each emblazoned
with the title “HELMET” in red capital
letters. Twelve bust-length figures, one per
canvas, set against opaque, greenish black,
mottled backgrounds. Each figure faces
outwards, as if she or he is staring directly at
the viewer. Yet any conventional exchange
intended between viewer and subject is
resolutely denied since Gary Chapman’s
figures wear gorgeous, ornate bronze helmets
that shroud the upper portion of their faces,
including their eyes. Faces and headgear are
carefully modeled through a virtuoso display
of chiaroscuro, the play of light casting
shadows and producing glimmering highlights.
Chapman’s paintings recall the tradition of
the old master portrait, but where likeness
exists in bone structure, expression, and skin
coloring, the metal veils refuse and confound
recognition. We can see these people, but they
cannot, or will not, see us.
Chapman began The HELMET Project in
2010. Sparser in composition and smaller in
scale than his previous series of pictures, the
Helmet paintings reflect Chapman’s natural
working process, as his oeuvre varies between
large, complex mixed media paintings of
human subjects and the occasional animal in
settings often layered with floating symbolic
text and objects, and smaller, more minimal
paintings that depict his figures against sparer
backgrounds. These smaller works are often
quieter images, yet still provocative in the way
they offer up emotional encounters between
subject and viewer. In one sense, then, The
HELMET Project began as a formal and
process-based turn.
The series took shape in Chapman’s
imagination as he began to conceive the
design of a helmet. Yet, Chapman’s interest in
figuration has always been grounded in content,
and his idea soon developed into a more
elaborate scenario rooted in our contemporary
cultural landscape of terrorist attacks, new
methods of surveillance, false belief systems,
economic deception, market crashes, and failed
ideals. Here, he has shown us one response to
such a depressing turn in history: of a group of
individuals, who, frustrated with society, band
together and decisively take action. While
the result—self-imposed sightlessness—may
be ineffective in the long run, it represents
a deliberate choice that in itself deserves
recognition and consideration.
Chapman’s twelve subjects—a number rife
with biblical and cult allusions—have effected
their own blindness by donning helmets that
annihilate their vision. Such an act symbolizes
their refutation of an empirical model of
truth, predicated on visually-based knowledge,
a denial of the old adage that seeing is
believing. Certainly, Chapman’s ideas hearken
to Surrealist preoccupations with blindness
as a metaphor for the unconscious and its
importance in producing an alternative, more
truthful reality, or even to postmodern theories
of the simulacrum, which proposed that
contemporary media could never reproduce
the Real, but only a simulated, deceptive
manipulation of it that no longer exists.
The helmet’s primary purpose here is twofold:
to prevent sight and conceal identity. As such,
the helmet is more than protection—a helmet’s
conventional use—but effectively becomes a
mask, an object imbued with ritual, cultural,
and political meaning. In rituals, a mask allows
its wearer to assume a new identity and to
act outside the bounds of societal norms. It
can be a tool of liberation or solidarity, or can
preserve religious, cultural, and social belief
systems. In many recent instances, people
have donned masks—the Guy Fawkes mask
of the Occupy Movement or the balaclava of
Zapatistas, robbers, and terrorists—to conduct
acts of political protest or to commit acts of
brutality and violence. The mask protects;
it also intimidates. It serves to make the
individual invisible, and to make the group and
its position visible. Chapman’s helmets perform
similar, politically-invested acts of identity
erasure and formation. Yet their meaning
remains evocative and ambiguous.
While the employment of the mask serves
to eliminate sight and establish a collective
identity, Chapman’s helmets also distinguish
their wearers as individuals. Such a dual
marking system is echoed in the titles of the
paintings, which comprise a formula of letters
and numbers: THP for The HELMET Project,
followed by a dash, then the first letter of the
model’s name, then another number. For the
series, the artist represents twelve different
models, including himself, who vary in sex,
age, race and ethnicity: five females, seven
males; ten adults, two children; one Asian
American, eight Caucasians, and three African
Americans. On occasion, a helmet’s form may
suggest its subject’s ethnic identity such as in
THP-M8 (2011), where an Asian American
female wears a headpiece that resembles a
Qing Dynasty Mandarin cap. But, Chapman
explains, in this case, this connection occurred
more by happenstance, rather than intention.
Chapman’s helmets derive primarily from
his imagination—formal experiments—not
from any specific historical or contemporary
sources, although he admits that his first
sketch for THP-C9 (2012) was loosely based
on the Looney Tunes-Merrie Melodies
character “Marvin the Martian.” Chapman
further clarifies that he is not a science-fiction,
fantasy, or steampunk aficionado. He wanted
to make each helmet consistent but unique.
Consequently, each conforms to the shape
of the subject’s head, fitting so tightly as to
be painful or at least very uncomfortable,
and is crafted from the same material; yet,
each possesses a distinct shape and different
embellishments. P6’s helmet bestows on its
carrier a subtle regality, its sober, cylindrical
form architectural in nature and adorned with a
single protruding horn (THP-P6, 2011). Such
a helmet is reminiscent of the brass sculptures
depicting the heads of Benin Obas (kings) that
are ornamented with single ivory tusks and
are placed on ancestral altars. If the helmets
reflect their wearers’ personalities or role in the
Helmet cadre, P6 might be an introspective,
dignified counsellor or leader. M8’s helmet,
with its Chinese historical associations and
its tip crowned by three spikes, indicates that
she may hold a high aristocratic, bureaucratic,
or even theocratic rank in this band of
outsiders. In contrast, one might conceive that
the futuristic saucer of S11, topped with an
antennae-like point, transforms its owner into
a receiver (THP-S11, 2011). Or, the wheel of
spikes on AC2’s helmet and blade feature of
L10’s mark their responsibilities as combatants
(THP-AC2, 2011; THP-L10, 2011). G3 could
be a spy, his earpiece an ingenious listening
device (THP-G3, 2011). Many of the helmets’
various functional-seeming components
resemble tools and industrial parts, a natural
outcome of the fact that the artist is also an
accomplished woodworker. Chapman’s studio
is filled not only with painting materials,
but also an accoutrement of tools. As well,
his previous and current studio spaces were
and are industrial in nature, located first in a
warehouse and now in the garage area of an old
car dealership, with plumbing, electrical, and
HVAC pipes exposed.
Horns, spikes, keyholes, blades, handles,
antennae, portholes, and rings. The designs
of the helmets, while firmly sealing off sight,
possess additive flourishes often positioned in
proximity to ears and eyes, or at the peak of
the head. In so doing, the helmet becomes an
item both of sensory helmet becomes an item
of both sensory deprivation, and potentially,
of sensory enhancement. P6’s acute hearing
may compensate for his lack of eyesight; the
keyhole-like slit across C5’s forehead implies a
third eye (THP-C5, 2011). One can envision
the helmets’ many possible uses as devices or
weapons of war, intelligence gathering, sport,
play, communion, and communication.
That the subjects of the pictures and their
fictional situations are products of the artist’s
and viewers’ imaginations is suggested by the
very way that their heads and faces appear
three-dimensional, achieved through careful
modeling, while their necks and chests
flatten into two-dimensions with the use
of broad, thick, visible brushstrokes. Here,
body and background are distinguished not
through chiaroscuro, but through color. White
painted over black. In this way, Chapman
creates a tension between a kind of exacting
realism and the articulation of painting as
representation—a tension that belongs to a
long art historical tradition but that fervently
emerged in early twentieth-century modernism,
maybe most clearly in René Magritte’s
Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe, 1929),
and that has continued to be probed by such
contemporary figural painters as Mark Tansey
and David Salle. That Chapman’s project
takes as its theme the act of seeing, and in
disavowing it, calls into question its use as an
effective method of knowledge-seeking, also
casts doubt on the tradition of illusionism as an
end in itself.
In the lower third portion of each picture,
capital letters spell out “HELMET.” The use
of the color red and Kremlin font alludes
to the history of the socialist propaganda
poster and returns us to the political nature of
Chapman’s endeavor. Chapman commissioned
Birmingham-based photographers to shoot
his paintings in locations throughout the
city and its surrounding areas. The resulting
photographs suggest another type of encounter
with the images, beyond that of the whitewalled gallery or museum. Although none of
the photographs contain people, they portray
both abandoned and inhabited sites, interior
and landscape views. They also reflect a crosssection of a city’s industrial, spiritual, memorial,
athletic, and educational environments.
Stumbling upon THP-C5 and THP-G3 in
a basement smokeroom might be creepy, but
as a photograph, there is something lovely as
well about the interplay between the room’s
old gauges, rusty pipes, and helmet designs
(Liesa Cole/Omni Studio, Smokeroom). In
the churches, the paintings become like
altarpieces or icons, elevating each subject to
the status of religious intercessor ( Jon Cook/
High 5 Productions, Episcopal Church of the
Ascension and Lutheran Church), while in the
college pool and city museum the paintings
function more like portraits of important
dignitaries or benefactors (Pamela Venz,
Birmingham Southern College Pool; Jon Cook/
High 5 Productions, Montgomery Museum
of Fine Art). At the cemetery, they might be
grave markers depicting departed loved ones,
or signs foreshadowing their subjects’ demises
(Kim Riegel, Oak Hill Cemetery). In contrast,
installed underneath a freeway overpass or in
an empty furniture warehouse the images evoke
not the individuals that comprise the group,
but its uniformity and collectivity, a kind of
strength in numbers (Liesa Cole/Omni Studio,
Sloss Overpass; Jennifer Spears, Jefferson Home
Furniture). At the coke furnace, in particular,
the paintings create a kind of military
formation, its warriors readied for battle; they
also erect a protective barrier ( Jon Cook/High
5 Productions, Coke Furnace).
Chapman’s decision to transport his paintings
to such diverse locations both amplifies and
transforms their meanings, emphasizing that
The HELMET Project represents not just a
finite response to our contemporary milieu, but
also an open-ended proposition. In conjuring
multiple scenarios, Chapman’s paintings
provoke us, as viewers, to connect with his
subjects, while at the same time, deflect our
looks back onto ourselves.
~Jessica Dallow, Associate Professor of Art
History, University of Alabama at Birmingham
THP-A7, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-M8, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-C9, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-L10, Oil on Canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-S11, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
THP-C12, oil on canvas, 30”h x 22”w, 2011
Liesa Cole/Omni Studio, Sloss Overpass
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, Episcopal Church of the Ascension
Jennifer Spears, Jefferson Home Furniture
Kim Riegel, Kudzu
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, UAB Parking Deck
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, Lutheran Church
Pamela Venz, BSC Pool
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, Roundhouse
Liesa Cole/Omni Studio, Smoker
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, MMFA
Kim Riegal, Oak Hill Cemetary
Jon Cook/High 5 Productions, Coke Furnace
BIO
GARY
CHAPMAN
Gary Chapman is Professor of Painting and Drawing
at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has
exhibited extensively throughout the Southeast region
with national and international exhibitions as well. As
the end of 2013 nears there have been more than 58
solo exhibitions of his work and he has participated
in numerous group exhibitions. Thirteen paintings by
Chapman have been purchased for the collections of ten
museums of art. He has received numerous grants and
awards including grants from NEA/SAF, Alabama State
Council on the Arts and UAB.
EDUCATION:
1984-1986 MFA, Painting and Drawing, Cranbrook
Academy of Art; Bloomfield Hills, MI.
1979-1984 BA, Art; Emphasis: Painting and Drawing,
Berea College; Berea, KY.
1979-1984 BS, Industrial Arts; Woodworking and the
Graphic Arts, Berea College; Berea, KY.
SELECT AWARDS AND HONORS:
2013 CALL Legacy Artist, Joan Mitchell Foundation
and Space One Eleven.
2003 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching,
University of Alabama at Birmingham; AL.
’01, ‘94 Individual Artist Fellowship Grants, Alabama
State Council on the Arts.
1996 Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment
for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship.
SELECT SOLO AND TWO PERSON
EXHIBITIONS:
2013 CONNECTIONS: Chapman – Sherer; Huntsville
Museum of Art, AL. (Catalog)
2012 The HELMET Project, Montgomery Museum of Fine
Art; Montgomery, AL.
2011 Gary Chapman: Paintings, University of North
Florida, Jacksonville, FL.
2009 Gary Chapman: Oil Paintings, Space 204, Vanderbilt
University; Nashville, TN.
2008 Gary Chapman: Oil on Gold, BECA Gallery; New
Orleans, LA.
2006 Gary Chapman: Chiaroscuro, The Arts Center; St.
Petersburg, FL. (Catalog)
2004 Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn
University; Auburn, AL. (Brochure)
2003 Indianapolis Art Center; Indianapolis, IN.
2000 Wiregrass Museum of Art; Dothan, AL. (Brochure)
1997 University Art Museum, University of Southwestern
Louisiana; Lafayette, LA. (Brochure)
1997 University of Cincinnati, Aronoff Center DAAP
Gallery; OH.
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS:
University Museum; The University of Mississippi, MS.
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA.
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art; Auburn, AL.
Meridian Museum of Art; Meridian, MS.
Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL.
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL.
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL.
Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL.
Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL.
Florida State University Museum of Art; Tallahassee, FL.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS:
100 Southern Artists, Schiffer Publishing, pages 10 & 11
with cover image.
New American Paintings, Book 88, The Open Studios Press:
Nedham, MA. Juried by Barbara O’Brien, Curator Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art; Kansas City, MO.
Alabama Masters: Artists and Their Work, Edited by Georgine
Clarke, Produced by The Alabama State Council on The
Arts and supported by an American Masterpieces Award
from the National Endowment for the Arts.
American Paintings: From the Montgomery Museum of Fine
Arts, 2006 Book published by the museum.
Biennale Internazionale Dell’ Arte Contemporanea, Quarta
Edizione 2003, Book published by Arte Studio,
Firenze, Italia.
Catalogue Design: Michael Riddle, Push Crank Press, LLC
PCP
estd
2012
Design Boutique
Printing: American Printing Co.
This catalog made possible by
A grant from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, College of Arts and Sciences
with generous support from