Craig Subler
June 2 – July 2, 2017
Museum Encounters
Drawing and scale is always a starting point for Subler’s work. It represents that intimate moment between self, the material and ultimately the viewer. Museum Encounters has been influenced and shaped by different bodies of work, Domenico Tiepolo New Testament drawings and Mughal and Rajput paintings. What linked these two bodies of work for Subler was the clarity of line and scale. Both Tiepolo’s and the Mughal and Rajput drawings and paintings are diminutive in scale. Where Tiepolo’s drawings represent a linear narrative, the Rajput paintings combine several different narratives into a single composition. The problem, for Subler was how to bring his use of the figure together with those two very different drawing and painting traditions. The museum environment seemed to be the perfect setting.
Subler’s drawings embrace a narrative, albeit a truncated one, that the museum visitor constructs. The art museum’s fractured discontinuity is a place where visitors have to navigate an artificially constructed world in which the museum narrative is interrupted from gallery to gallery. His work present a complex accumulation of fragments and viewpoints. It is puzzling for the figures that inhabit these works, reminding us of our own museum encounters.
Craig Allen Subler was born in Dayton, Ohio. He received his BFA from the Dayton Art Institute and his M.A. and M.F. A. at the university of Iowa. He is the recipient of numerous awards and foundations grants. His works have been seen in over 70 exhibitions and he has received seven public commissions. He is the recipient of the James C. Olson Professorship at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He currently lives and works in Washington, D.C. and West Virginia.
