The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill presents three solo exhibitions of East End artists peter campus, Virginia Jaramillo, and John Torreano, which will be on view November 7 through February 27.
“peter campus: when the hurly burly’s done,” “Virginia Jaramillo: The Harmony between Line and Space,” and “John Torreano: Painting Outer Space/Inner Space, 1989 to Present” feature predominantly new, never-before-seen work by artists in the seventh decade of their careers and at the top of their creative powers. The exhibitions are organized by Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Parrish Art Museum.
John Torreano emerged as a painter in the late 1960s and has always charted his own course. With the universe as his muse, he combines realism infused with abstraction to create works that conflate time and space. “Painting Outer Space/Inner Space, 1989 to Present” will feature 10 large-scale paintings on plywood panels, studded with gems and wood balls. Torreano reflects on the mysteries and wonders of the cosmos in these works, which were inspired by images transmitted by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its scientific documentation of nebula and stars can also be read as pure abstraction—inspiring the artist to create imagery that contrasts the physical with the illusory.
A pioneering minimalist who has practiced for more than six decades, Virginia Jaramillo creates her work from sources that span histories and cultures. The Harmony between Line and Spacefeatures five newly created paintings, which the artist completed in her Hampton Bays studio. The exhibition will feature two monumental works, “Quantum Entanglement” (2019–2020) and “Quanta” (2021), 12-foot canvases which will be installed face-to-face. In each painting, expansive fields of color are crisscrossed by impossibly uniform, razor-thin lines — the artist’s visualization of communication between quantum particles across the vastness of space. Additional works (all created in 2021) include “Song of Amergin,” which evokes the earliest spoken Irish poem, an incantation of man’s identity with nature; “They Spoke without Talking” depicts an epic confrontation between technology and creativity; and in “Shaman’s Dream,” Jaramillo explores the world of the unconscious mind.
A pioneering new media and video artist, peter campus made his first video in 1971, using black-and-white, portable equipment. This marked the beginning of his life-long engagement with the medium. In a solitary pursuit over this past year, campus captured locations around the shores of Shinnecock Bay, stationing his video camera to maintain a static point of view. Nine of these continuous video loops — which will be presented on separate screens — invite the viewer to experience the sublime beauty of the natural and the ordinary: a hunter’s duck blind floats on the water, red plastic safety netting entwines a fence, beach grass and sparse leaves on a solitary tree blow in the wind. campus’s visual meditations underscore the gap between what the viewer perceives, what the camera records, and what the artist brings to the fore.
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