Two shows currently on view at the Vero Beach Museum of Art – Deborah Butterfield: The Horse, and The View Out His Window: Photographs by Jeffery Becton – are of artists who identify intensely with their subjects.
For Butterfield, the horse – rendered in cast bronze and found scrap metal – speaks not only of animal grace and power, but also of the beauty to be found in nature’s cycle of growth and decay. Likewise, Becton’s digital photographs overlay abandoned interiors with watery details that contrast the transience of human habitation with nature’s encompassing presence.
In his introductory remarks during a recent tour of the Butterfield show, the museum’s recently installed executive director Brady Roberts remarked, “She’s spent her life around horses, riding horses, caring for horses. Sometimes I think she has greater affinity with horses than people.”
When Butterfield went to school at the University of California-Davis, she had to choose between the veterinary and art schools for her course of study. Opting for art, she received a BFA in 1972. She spent that summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine before returning to UC Davis for her MFA, which she was awarded in the following year.
Roberts says that when Butterfield was in graduate school, conceptual art was seen as a pursuit for those who wanted to be taken seriously.
“Doing the horse in art would not be a respectable thing. (Butterfield) was very aware of that,” Roberts says.
At that time Butterfield was studying ceramics with Robert Arneson, an artist who was not afraid to create playful sculptures of everything from household objects to self-portraits. Shamelessly representational, his work in ceramic displays a wry humor that often borders on the surreal.
The proximity to Arneson appears to have encouraged Butterfield to create a series of realistically detailed horse saddles in fired and glazed ceramic.
Soon afterward she sculpted her first horse in plaster over a metal armature. Butterfield subsequently began adding other materials – mud, straw and sticks – to her equine figures.
“I first used horse imagery as a metaphorical substitute for myself – it was a way of doing a self-portrait, one step removed from the specificity of Deborah Butterfield,” Butterfield is often quoted as saying.
In 1976, when she was teaching art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Butterfield was offered a solo show at the newly established Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago. Two National Endowment for the Arts Grants followed, and in 1979 her work was included in the Whitney Biennial.
The earliest sculpture in the current exhibition is an untitled pinto horse from 1978. On loan from Orchid Island residents Peter and Patricia Thompson, the 31-inch-tall, brown-and-white horse is made of mud, straw and plaster over a wood and steel armature.
Butterfield’s sculptures became more open as she began to use sticks and branches as structural elements as well as delineators of form. In the early 1990s, in response to an invitation from the Walker Art Center to create a horse for its sculpture garden, she began to work with a foundry in Walla Walla, Washington, to cast her weathered wood sculptures in bronze, which is finished in the earthy colors of her organic materials.
Butterfield’s trompe l’oeil “branch and twig” construction was used in five of the sculptures in the Holmes Gallery. A larger-than-life horse titled “Tracery” from 2010 looks as though its airy form grew naturally from the gallery’s floor, but that lightness is deceiving. The bronze sculpture weighs more than two tons. It is on loan to the VBMA from the Snite Museum of Art of the University of Notre Dame.
What seems to be a collapsed pile of rotted tree trunk and limbs in another part of the gallery turns out to be a horse reclining on its right flank. Its head, held just inches above the gallery floor, lists wearily to one side. Created in 2011 (also from the Snite Museum collection), “Many Glacier” suggests an aged horse at rest.
Three of the horses in the gallery are constructed of steel that Butterfield, who moved to Montana in 1977, finds in junkyards there. Somewhat identifiable as the scarred and bent body panels of a red-painted automobile combined with other scrap, “Rory,” was created in 1992. The sculpture is on loan from the University of Gainesville’s Harn Museum of Art.
“This one looks like a very tired horse on its last legs – it’s almost poignant,” says Roberts.
“It’s remarkable to take whatever this thing was in its useful life and turn it into something beautiful.”
The exhibition was organized in-house by Vero Beach Museum of Art’s former executive director Lucinda Gedeon and former curator Jay Williams, both of whom retired late last year. In addition to the eight sculptures in the Holmes Gallery, two Butterfield horses from the museum’s permanent collection are on display. “Untitled #2725.1” from 2003 is in the Stark Rotunda at the south end of the main hallway, and “Saltbox” from 1995 stands in the Beckwith Sculpture Park on the museum’s north side.
The windy title of the exhibition in the Schumann Gallery is “The View Out His Window (and in his mind’s eye): Photographs by Jeffery Becton.”
The traveling exhibition was organized by Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. The 11 large-scale photographs on display combine the vacant interiors of summer cottages near Becton’s home in Maine with landscape images of sky and water. The resulting montages are dreamlike and, for some, unsettling pictures.
Jeffery Becton was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1947. His father Henry Becton was the CEO of a medical supply company known as BD (Becton Dickenson) that was co-founded in 1897 by the artist’s grandfather. Like his father, Jeffrey Becton attended Yale, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1970 and an MFA in graphic design in 1976.
Two years later, Becton, a lover of the sea, established his home and studio in Deer Isle, Maine.
One of his first experiments in bringing landscape elements into the indoor environment is included in the show. “Hallowed Ground” from 2003 is a digital montage in which a fainting couch dominates a room whose other furniture consists of an armchair, an upright piano, a radiator and a stone mantelpiece. It takes a few seconds of gazing at this picture before you notice the gentle ripple of water over smooth rocks beneath the stark perspective of the room’s floorboards. The chamber’s one narrow window presents a watery expanse as seen from the Deer Isle Bridge.
“I was always interested in the patina of occupancy,” says Becton, who explained that the house in which he captured the raw image for “Hallowed Ground” was the longtime summer retreat of an artist friend’s parents. To the friend’s dismay, her parents sold the house not long after the picture was taken.
A quartet of pictures from 2014 on the north wall of the gallery present the peeling, pastel interiors of a derelict house. In “Ephemera” and “The Pilot House,” the room’s open doors reveal a foggy seascape interrupted by the humps of wooded islands; in “Low Water,” a door opens onto a room with yet other open doors. In “Watermark,” the line of a distant horizon stains the plaster walls of a bathroom.
In all of those pictures the artist has digitally montaged water that laps at the baseboards or, in the case of “Ephemera,” threatens to overwhelm the room.
“I’m sure people are going to draw parallels with global warming,” Becton says. He recalls a gallerist who told him that after Hurricane Katrina, some people “were viscerally upset” by Becton’s pictures.
“I could understand the reactions of people who had been through that flooding, but it was not my intent to upset anyone,” he says.
The View Out His Window continues through May 17; Deborah Butterfield: Horses continues through June 4.
