MOUNT VERNON — An Iowa City artist is building an “ark” in Armstrong Gallery at Cornell College, stocking it with notebooks full of lists, sketches, doodles and other material that spawn his artwork — “the seeds for everything that will be,” says David Dunlap.
Dunlap records his life in four journal-type books: a daily notebook he’s kept since 1974, a scrapbook, a project book and a book of doodles done during telephone conversations. The notebooks will fill bookcases made into a hut that sits on top of the 16-by-24-foot ark platform.
“I keep the notebooks to have a more conscious life,” he says. “That’s true of all artists. Things come into our vision and our experience, and that’s what we work out of.”
Work by Dunlap and four artist friends will be featured in an exhibition, “We Like Each Other,” running Jan. 5 through Feb. 9 in Armstrong Gallery. An opening reception is Sunday, Jan. 14, from 2 to 4 p.m. Armstrong Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free.
“The work I do comes out of keeping these books, and other daily activities,” says Dunlap, an associate professor in the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History.
Contributing paintings, drawings and artists’ books to the exhibition are Dunlap’s former students Hamlett Dobbins and Rebecca Roberts, current student Carrie Pollack and friend Phil Meyer. The exhibition title addresses how the artists influence each other’s work. For example, Dunlap and Dobbins exchanged a notebook of conversations and photos about the installation.
Dunlap has taught at the University of Iowa since 1977. He has served as visiting artist and lecturer at other institutions including the Chicago Art Institute; Jacob Kramer College, Leeds, England; the University of Chicago; and the Kansas City Art Institute. Examples of his work can be found at www.uiowa.edu/~art/paint.draw/.
Dobbins returns to Iowa after a three-month residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb. A Tennessee native, his current work deals with personal history and memories of his father, using a gardening metaphor. “When you move into a new house and there’s a big privet hedge or a forsythia in the front, you can dig it up, let it go or plant things around it,” he says. “When you work in a garden, you add to its history. With these pieces, I feel like I am adding to the history of my father’s story.”
Roberts lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work is deeply personal yet tied inextricably to perceptions of the world around her. “My images and objects are nostalgic, sentimental and bittersweet, ugly and beautiful, shiny new and decaying, little things. They convey a sense of loss – loss of a certain presence, loss of childhood, loss of naivete,” she says.