Visual Arts Professor Chris Duncan’s vibrant, playful abstractions – drawings and sculptures that evoke movement, emotion and memory – will be on display at this year’s faculty exhibition. The show opens Thursday, March 18 and runs through Sunday, May 9 in the Mandeville Gallery.
For Duncan, the process of creating these pieces is central to the final form they take. Adding and subtracting material, Duncan works until the perfect moment of tension exists between line and volume, solid and void, gravity and balance.
Artist Mario Naves, an artist writing in a catalogue essay, points to "Grand Canal” as evidence that Duncan is “a sculptor of no small gifts… What’s remarkable about ‘Grand Canal’ is less it’s crafting – though that is essential, of course, to the work’s realization – but the fact that it pirouettes,” Naves writes. “Here is a sculpture that moves.”
Duncan has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions throughout the Northeast as well as Nanjing Normal University in China. His work is included in private and public collections, including many colleges and universities, the Hyde Collection and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art.
He will give a talk at an opening reception in the Nott Memorial on Thursday, April 8 5-7 p.m.