strong emotion

This exhibition featured video and audio winners and honorable mentions from the Kress Project, a two-year initiative celebrating the 50th anniversary of the museum’s Samuel H. Kress Study Collection. The exhibit includes an international juried art competition and an online exhibition of creative responses inspired by the museum’s Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings.

The Kress Project solicited responses to the 12 Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings in the museum’s Kress Collection from around the globe, with a total of 403 submissions coming from as far away as Turkey and Iran. Submissions included visual art in many media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, video, photography and new media such as Twitter and Facebook; works of fiction, poetry, original songs and music; recipes; dance; as well as interactive works. Participants ranged from children to the elderly and from those with great familiarity with the works of art to many who had never seen them before. There was no fee to submit a response.

Didi Dunphy, Kate Pierson and Jed Rasula served as the judges, selecting 24 winners, who each received a $500 prize, and 26 honorable mentions. All were published in a multimedia book.(opens in new tab)

“Victory Lap: Time-Based Winners of the Kress Project” includes four works of video art, a recorded song and a taped dance piece. Charlie Hartness contributed the original song with banjo accompaniment titled “The Lynching.” In describing his entry, Hartness said, “As a Southerner who grew up with stories of the Depression and the constant presence of the church, I was moved by three of the paintings in the room: ‘Christ, Man of Sorrows,’ ‘Crucifixion’ and ‘Madonna and Child’.”

Mark Starling’s “The Saints, The Saints” investigates the notion of sainthood in relation to current conditions in his video made from photographs taken in New York City. Katherine Hammond and Lee Smith, a team who have worked together for more than 30 years in a variety of media, created their video submission “To the God of Your Choice” in response to Simone dei Crocefissi’s “Madonna and Child with Saints.” They describe it as “represent[ing] stories of a life of an adventurer, who believes in perhaps another God” and point out that it addresses the artist’s “outstanding attention to genre and decorative detail, innovative imagery and exaggerated facial expressions.”

Ted Kuhn, a local artist, submitted a video titled “Cross Check,” which addresses, in the artist’s words, “repetition and self-involvement.” Peter Russell’s “Prägnanz” takes its title from a concept in Gestalt philosophy that focuses on objects being seen in as simple a manner as possible. Kelly Ozust’s submission “In/En Vision” is a “work of choreography for the camera,” incorporating a length of bright pink fabric that wraps around and envelops the dancer’s body. Ozust said, “My work seeks to tell the stories of those who might otherwise not be heard. I want dance to feel inclusive…. I know that dance can simultaneously reflect, create and react to history, so by intertwining personal events, public histories and strong emotion, I attempt to create work that resonates with the past and the present.”