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Current Exhibitions Future Exhibitions Back to Exhibitions ) .jpg')) Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches, Tyler Museum of Art, Gift of Michael G. Grainger, Daingerfield, Texas |
 Sydney Philen Yeager: Little Mysteries May 22–July 27, 2003  Ordered Suspension, 2001, oil on canvas, 66 x 66 inches This exhibition, comprising approximately 20 paintings and other works on paper produced over the past 10 years, was a mid-career retrospective of a well-established Austin artist. Sydney Yeager began her professional career 15 years ago at age 40 after earning her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin in 1987.Yeager's paintings consist of multiple layering of forms and colors to produce an abstract surface upon which figurative images of natural and everyday objects—including human body parts—are drawn, sometimes distinctly but other times so unobtrusively as to escape notice at first glance. This overlaying of figurative forms over abstraction has been the hallmark of this artist's work for nearly a decade.Beginning with the series in which she deals with the difficult-to-accept fact of bodily death, her work has evolved through a number of different series. As her interest shifts from the finality of the body to the formalizing function of language, her artistic expression changes correspondingly. From the figuration of the body, the expressive concerns that define the different series of her work progress more or less chronologically to, what the artist calls, the "visual naming of the ordinary," and then to the representation of "language as a formal structure." As expressions they take the form of figurative objects and symbols drawn upon the underlying abstract patterns. All five paintings in the Museum's permanent collection, gifted last year by the late Michael G. Grainger of Daingerfield, Texas, belong to one of these series, in which the surface figures give counterpoint, if not meaning, to the underlying abstraction. Some of these paintings were included in this exhibit. In recent years the artist has done away with the surface representational figures to bring forward the abstraction, which has been her forte all along. In the new body of work the abstract surface is still meticulously, if not heavily, worked with gestural as well as careful brushwork. What emerges from the dense collision of strong organic forms and bold colors is a sense of harnessed chaos teeming with primordial force of a vital kind. Titles of her works, such as Ordered Suspension or Degree of Constraint, point in this direction. In visual terms, the former shows "little golden, glowing squiggly forms [that] cover the canvas in an organic mesh—and are a cross between punctuation marks—commas and apostrophes—and baby caterpillars," in the words of a critic for The Austin Chronicle. The latter likewise shows similar forms in a different configuration and color scheme. What we make of these works in themselves and in light of the artist's past series was one important purpose of this exhibition. Yeager is a recipient of the 1996 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in Painting, Printmaking, Drawing and Artist's Books. She has been featured in one-person exhibitions at Women and Their Work in Austin, Texas; the Amarillo Museum of Art; and the Austin Museum of Art among others. This exhibition was curated by Clint Willour of Galveston Arts Center, and in addition to the Center and TMA, it will travel to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; Austin Museum of Art; and the Gallery of the University of Texas at Arlington. |