TELFAIR 2022 low res

TULA TELFAIR Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself

TULA TELFAIR

Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself

October 29 – December 24, 2022

Essay by Lauren Piemont

625 South Sharon Amity Road Charlotte, NC 28211 704.365.3000 gallery@jeraldmelberg.com www.jeraldmelberg.com

Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself

There comes a point in the process of painting when the painting takes on a life of its own, regardless of its subject matter or style. Even representational painters stop observing the landscape, object or figure at this phase. The painting shifts into its own territory, becoming an independent entity to be shaped and resolved. Every painting, and arguably anything else born of the creative process, reaches this stage and ascends to something greater than the sum of its parts. Tula Telfair makes use of this phenomenon but pushes her work to venture even further beyond it. Her monumental, imagined landscapes, fully rendered in a style akin to photorealism, feel and function like real locations on the map. Telfair, an avid traveler who spent her childhood in Africa, Asia and Europe before returning to the United States, certainly has a large memory bank of locales to draw from when she is developing her compositions. Although memory plays a prominent role, it is not the whole story. The landscapes have been liberated to fulfill a purpose beyond mere documentation. Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself articulates a particular purpose: the wild mystery of nature does not willingly reveal itself. It is and will always remain a great unknown. Telfair’s most recent group of paintings help us begin to sense what we can only surmise. A variety of moods are on display in Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself — from the idyllic, verdant and expansive to the foreboding, threatening and obstructive. The Image Repertoire (2022) depicts the view at the top of a mountain. The mountainside is covered in lush greenery and the sky is an electric blue, dashed with a line of cumulus clouds. Viewers are instantly transported to this fictional place and perhaps even reminded of the mountains they have scaled to take in a view. A Fragile Equilibrium (2022), on the other hand, offers

stormy skies that hang over a river bend surrounded by thick forest and green clearings. Mountains appear in the distance, but so do hints of human-made structures, placing viewers squarely within the reaches of the picture plane. A more balanced and familiar version of life is illustrated here. The Place Where We Strayed (2022) is one of the more disquieting scenes in the exhibition. Viewers find a snowy hilltop dotted with trees or scrubby bushes up to its crest. The white snow is cast in warm shadow by the dark, red-streaked sky behind it. It is not clear if the sunset or something more calamitous is at cause, but it is clear that the situation is inescapable. What are viewers to make of the varied group of environments presented in Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself ? Telfair proclaims that her career-long purpose is to create something like a composite portrait of the natural world, but a greater effect is realized. Through her near-religious reverence for nature and her technical skill in painting, she captures nature’s agency in the process, too. Swept Away and Replaced by Another (2022) is an especially stirring work. It portrays a crater ringed in fire. Glowing coals surround and fill the crater, while the horizon line is delineated by a swipe of paint that appears white hot. The title certainly implies catastrophe but nothing in the image indicates what may have prompted it. Only the fiery aftermath is visually evident. The Question of Ownership (2022) functions as a reminder that the constructed world has been left behind. An unkempt thicket that spills over the canvas’s edges is an apt rebuttal to human attempts at laying claim to land. A Utopian Gesture (2022) sends a message of benevolence on nature’s terms. A river snakes through a sweeping vista and wispy clouds sit just above a sky as blue as crystal clear Caribbean waters.

In today’s political landscape, Telfair’s work might stir associations with climate change, but this is not her explicit intent. She believes in responsible stewardship of the earth and is intimately familiar with the myriad of ways in which human activity ripples through and alters the natural world, but she chooses nature as her subject simply out of deep admiration and an inexhaustible sense of wonder. The viewer is left to bring their own associations into her imagined environments and take from them whatever it is they most need. Boundlessness is the strongest force at work in all of Telfair’s paintings. It is tempting to solely read them as warnings against human-driven climate change. It is equally tempting to see them as dream-like ideals or try to tease out the elements of reality they contain. While none of these readings are wholly untrue, they do not describe the totality of the result. Wilderness is that way— as hard as we may try to categorize, catalogue, map or conquer it, it will always be bigger than us and too unwieldy for our language and systems to contain. Art is that way, too. Taken with the artist’s biography and the pressing issues of the day, we might believe we can analyze and trace the image before us, but of course there is always more. This dance between what we think we know and what we never truly will is precisely what makes Telfair’s work so endlessly alluring.

The Place Where We Strayed

Lauren Piemont

THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP 2022 Oil on Canvas 50 x 50 inches

THE IMAGE REPERTOIRE 2022 Oil on Canvas 67 x 100 inches

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

- John Muir

DECONSTRUCTING ITS OWN AESTHETICS 2022 Oil on Canvas 48 x 72 inches

A FRAGILE EQUILIBRIUM 2022 Oil on Canvas 50 x 70 inches

LANDSCAPE IS THE ANTHESIS OF WILDERNESS 2022 Oil on Canvas 68 x 90 inches

SWEPT AWAY AND REPLACED BY ANOTHER 2022 Oil on Canvas 48 x 72 inches

A UTOPIAN GESTURE 2022 Oil on Canvas 55 x 82 inches

AN OPPOSITIONAL SITUATION 2022 Oil on Canvas 72 x 100 inches

CONSTRUCTING A NEW HISTORY 2022 Oil on Canvas 55 x 76 inches

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF EXPRESSION 2022 Oil on Canvas 68 x 90 inches

CONTRADICTING OUR ORIGINAL READING 2022 Oil on Canvas 50 x 70 inches

THE PLACE WHERE WE STRAYED 2022 Oil on Canvas 50 x 50 inches

GAPS AND RIFTS 2022 Oil on Canvas 55 x 78 inches

Tula Telfair b. 1961, Broxville, NY EDUCATION

1998 Distinguished Honorary Artists Committee, MacDowell Colony 1994 MacDowell Fellow, Peterborough, NH 1989- Wesleyan University Supplementary Grant in Support of Scholarship (1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003) 1984- Syracuse University Graduate Fellow 1986 1984 Marion Locks Award for Excellence in Painting 1980- Moore College of Art Traveling Fellowship 1984 1983 W.W. Smith Foundation Grant 1980 Pennsylvania State Women’s Caucus Art Award 1978 Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts Fellowship

2015 Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Baton Rouge, LA 2014 Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan, University, Middletown, CT 2012 Forum Gallery, New York, NY 2011 Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, CT 2010 The Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT 2008 Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2006 Forum Gallery, New York, NY 2005 Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 2004 Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2002 Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA 2001 Marquard Bank, Hamburg, Germany DFN Gallery, New York, NY Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1999 DFN Gallery, New York, NY Arsenal, New York, NY Conde Nast Building, New York, NY The Durst Corporation, New York, NY

1998 Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA DFN Gallery, New York, NY 1996 Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

2001 M.A.A., Wesleyan University 1986 M.F.A., Syracuse University 1984 B.F.A., Moore College of Art

Tremaine Gallery, The Hotchkiss School, CT 1995 Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1994 Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL Xerox Building, Chicago, IL 1993 Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT 1992 Kirkland Fine Art Gallery, Millikin University, Decatur, IL Sampson Art Gallery, Thiel College, Greenville, PA 1991 Five Points Gallery, East Chatham, NY 1990 Blue Hill Gallery, Hudson, NY

TEACHING 1989- Professor of Art, Chair of the Department of Art and Art History, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT AWARDS AND HONORS 2018 Djerassi Resident Artists, Woodside, California Thomas and Johanna Baruch Fellowship Wesleyan University Project Grant 2016 Wesleyan University Project Grant 2015 Walter Gropius Master Artist, Huntington Museum of Art Wesleyan University Project Grant

1989 Paula Allen Gallery, New York, NY 1988 Paula Allen Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC 2019 Forum Gallery, New York, NY 2017 Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, CT 2016 Forum Gallery, New York, NY

2014 Wesleyan University Project Grant 2013 Wesleyan University Project Grant 2012 Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching Wesleyan University Project Grant 2011 Wesleyan University Project Grant

Michael Rockefeller Gallery, SUNY at Fredonia, NY 1986 Mid-Hudson Science and Arts Center, Poughkeepsie, NY Smith Gallery, Syracuse, NY 1984 Smith Gallery, Syracuse, NY

Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA New York Life Building, New York, NY

In this body of work, I explore Wilderness in the form of recalled and imagined landscape in order to acknowledge both its inherent power and remarkable fragility. Statistics indicate that only one quarter of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is covered by wilderness or land areas not significantly modified by human activity. Today, we know that all our activities impact even the most distant regions of this planet, so perhaps Wilderness only exists in our memories or on a canvas. My recent work is informed by visits to active volcanoes, locations where tectonic plates meet and earthquakes occur daily, the solitary Arctic and Antarctic regions, and isolated areas in Africa. I am currently doing research on shifting rivers and coastlines and their impact on the edges of the lands they border. Ultimately, I am fascinated by the subjectivity of perception and the power of memory to anchor our place in the world.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC Barclay’s Beck’s Beer Brauerei Beck & Company Cablevision The Chubb Group City of Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office Deloitte Touche Epoch Investment Partners, Inc. The Federal Reserve Bank General Electric Corporation The Grand America Hotel Hudson River Museum The Huntington Museum of Art Invenergy Katten Muchin Rosenman L.L.P. Marquard Bank Mastercard Corporation Medicis Corporation Metropolitan Life

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

TULA TELFAIR Wildnerness Does Not Locate Itself October 29 – December 24, 2022

Jerald Melberg Gallery Inc. 625 South Sharon Amity Road Charlotte, NC 28211 704.365.3000 gallery@jeraldmelberg.com www.jeraldmelberg.com

Photography by Tula Telfair and Paul Horton Graphic Design by Gaybe Johnson

The Millbrook School Moore College of Art NBC Universal The New Orleans Museum of Art Omni Hotels Redding Art Museum

Printed by Boingo Graphics Publication Copyright © 2022 Jerald Melberg Gallery Inc. All Rights Reserved ISBN: 979-8-88796-383-9

-Tula Telfair

Ruth Chenvin Foundation Seven Bridges Foundation Syracuse University Trenton State College U.S. Department of State Vlasic Corporation Wesleyan University

625 South Sharon Amity Road Charlotte, NC 28211 704.365.3000 gallery@jeraldmelberg.com www.jeraldmelberg.com