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Past and Future:
Gallery 1 - Liberal Arts Building
Artist Reception: Friday, September 5, 6 - 8 PM
Contact:
The Visual Arts Center at Boise State University will open its fall season with an exhibition by Hailey, Idaho artist Robert Kantor. The Hope Series will showcase five large-scale freestanding sculptures and a site-specific installation. The artist's twelve-foot mobile, Stainless Steel 12 Hearts, will also be part of the exhibition.
The Hope Series is a relatively small body of works - most of which will be included in the exhibition - but they are by no means small in scale, ranging from 7' to 18' high. Kantor's first piece of the series, Camp Hope, features barbed wire stretched menacingly between two raw wooden posts perched on a rather massive and beautifully rusted steel plinth. The barbed wire is populated by 18 clay-colored spectral butterflies, including one pair rendered in full color using plaster, paint and bits of glass.
Kantor describes his two newest works, Line of Hope #1 and #2 as "reflecting my own belief that Good will triumph and that even warring nations and peoples can be realistic and right in hoping for a better world." Whereas Hope #2 and #3 are built around actual WWII ordinance, the newest works mobilize the forms of more contemporary weaponry such as M-16s and AK-47s. (In conjunction with the exhibition, the huge Line of Hope #1 will be on public view on Highway 75 near the Red Top cabins just south of Ketchum).
The exhibition will also feature a site-specific piece that Kantor is producing with the help of BSU Sculptors' Guild students. The installation piece brings the viewer inside prison walls: oppressively heavy work that still offers the viewer an uplifting glimmer of hope.
Robert Kantor's Hope Series is about experiencing the memories of war, of the Holocaust and of those who have been through war, atrocity or even concentration camps. The work relates to the historical past of several twentieth-century wars seen from the vantage point of the present: The apparent aged quality of the objects hints at history and the effects of time on memory - as well as the dream of contemporary combatants to see these arms in such decrepitude. Despite its clear references to violence and atrocity, Kantor presses his work to find a way to be uplifting. The series is about not only atrocity but also hope.__As catalog for the exhibition, BSU is presenting Robert Kantor: The Hope Series and Other Sculptures, a book by Daniel Kany. In the introduction to the exhibition catalog, Robert Kustra, president of Boise State University, wrote: "A university is a place where young minds learn to build the future, but it is also where they learn the lessons of the past. The Hope Series is about some very dark moments of history that must be remembered in order for such atrocities never to happen again. Bob Kantor's work handles the subject with appropriate gravity and respect."
Robert Kantor, who lives in Hailey, ID, was born in 1943 and grew up mostly in Dallas, Texas. He graduated from the University of Colorado, where he studied art history and English literature. Kantor was a graduate fellow at New York University in 1964 when he first began making mobile sculptures, although his intense focus on ambitious sculpture did not begin until the late 1990s when he opened a welding shop in Shoshone, Idaho with his primary welder, Mary Garrett. He is represented by the Daniel Kany Gallery in Portland, ME and the Ochi Gallery in Ketchum, ID. He also shows with the I. Wolk Gallery in St. Helena, CA and RVS Fine Arts Gallery in Southampton, NY.
The Hope Series by Robert Kantor will be on display at the Visual Arts Center at Boise State University from September 2 through October 17, 2008 in "gallery 1" - located on the first floor of the Liberal Arts Building. The exhibition is free and open to the public. The gallery is open Monday - Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Saturday from 12 - 4:00 p.m.
The Hope Series is sponsored in part by the Private Bank at Wells Fargo.
For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.
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