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Home for the Champion

A brief read of Jesse Owens’s biography gave me a heightened sense of the spiraling, jumbled figures in Vaughn’s work. Cut from the context of the race, Owens is tangled in a knot of his own athletic gift. An image of his famed performance caught mid-action is stripped of meanings as a display of strength and, from being cut and shifted its orientation, takes the connotation of stumbling wildly, “toppled” from the pinnacle.

But the frustration is much more complex! Two pieces of information have completely altered my view on this exhibit.

First, Jesse Owens was apparently quite a popular figure in Germany at the time of the Olympics. Despite the heavy propagandistic messages from the Nazi party, the German public found Owens to be a spectacle, showering him with cheers of “Oh-vens!” and smothering him with autograph requests. Owens himself reflected that he received his greatest reception in Germany, even having been a well-known figure in America before the Olympic year.

Perhaps the most shocking of these was the shear fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt, the acting president at the time of the games, neglected to ever publicly recognize Owens overwhelming accomplishments, particularly at the event hosted by his international political opponent! This immediately breaks the bounds of the works’ concerns of race superiority far beyond the Nazi games. Here, two political nations to battle furiously in two World Wars, were refusing to acknowledge the dominating feats of an African American.

The silence and still in these images seem to be out of commemoration, but also of shock. Almost as if these were the mental images of Hitler and Roosevelt, trying desperately to erase and frustrate the concept of a dominating African American in their modern world.

But how were others moved? What was it like to be in that stadium? On what level did the admiration and inspiration we celebrate today lie in the minds of the world of spectators in 1936?

A closer look at carborundum

Carborundum is one of the materials that Jessica Vaughn uses in her series TOPPLED.  It is a compound that consists of silicon and carbon  and that can been used as an abrasive.  In Vaughn’s prints she uses the compound as an additive element  rather than utilizing its destructive characteristic.  The areas of the prints covered in carborundum look dark from a distance, however as you get closer you can see the details concealed by the  sand-like mineral

“Illegitimi non carborundum” was a common Latin slang phrase taken to mean “don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Ironically Vaughn’s series addresses the era of the Nazi Regim which was attempting to suppress multiple groups of people; nonetheless, Jesse Owens defied the notion of race superiority at the 1936 Berlin Olympics as depicted in Vaughn’s works as well.

Toppled Series

Jessica Vaughn’s practice as an artist is grounded in the struggles that arise from the use of different materials. Knowing that there is not a predetermined end to what she can do to materials, she manipulates them, not to just make the materials her own but to subvert the conventional use or ownership of the material. She furthers the discussion of representation by using printmaking to explore the boundaries between two and three-dimensional work. Vaughn combines silkscreen, lithography, and digital printing with unconventional materials, such as carborundum, to bring to life images that are often times hidden, and culturally and politically ambiguous. In both her prints and paintings she places together materials and images that don’t conventionally belong to further push the conceptual aspects of her work. Carborundum, a material used to erase an image, Vaughn uses to build images. She also employs garbage bags and tar to provide visual tension and uncertainty. Her methods support her investigations of questionable realities, while creating a dialogue between material and image.

In her current exhibition “Toppled” Jessica Vaughn explores historical and cultural issues through the athletic performance of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. The 1936 Olympics were meant to support political myth in the promotion of a German state and the cultural myth of the inferiority of black citizens; however, with the unlikely outcomes of the athlete’s performances, these myths were challenged. In appropriating the iconic image of Jesse Owens from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film “Olympia” as well as archival still images from the Games, Vaughn critiques the sporting event as a heightened connection between euphoria and spectacle, between the body and a public space. On her prints she collages additional representations and layers of carborundum so that Owens’ initial image becomes more complicated and more of a metaphor for this political moment. A former competitive athlete herself, Vaughn witnessed the emotion spectators had for an individual within a performative moment. She uses these experiences to challenge conventional representations of public spaces, and minority bodies through material choices.

Toppled
an exhibition at the Stamp Gallery
October 14th – December 18th, 2009

Hello world!

Welcome!  We are happy to see you on our blog!  This is a dynamic space for communication about  Stamp Gallery exhibitions and any other art talk.  Feel free to share; we would love to hear from you!  Check out our “About” page to learn more about Stamp Gallery and our mission.

You can look forward to a video post coming soon of artist Jessica Vaughn speaking about her series TOPPLED, our current exhibition.  For an up close look at Vaughn’s provocative prints, come visit us at Stamp Gallery October 14- December 18, 2009.  The gallery website, http://www.thestamp.umd.edu/gallery/ provides more information about our exhibitions and featured artists.

Check back soon!