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IN MEMORIAM
Remembering Gretchen
Hupfel, 1963-2002
by CATHY BYRD
As whimsical as she was
contemplative, Gretchen Hupfel had an acute sense of paradox and
a gift for wryly exposing its intricacies in her photography,
sculpture and installation.
I first discovered her artistic
talent when curating the ãdigital.imageä exhibition for the
Agnes Scott College Dalton Gallery in 1999. We met in her
studio, surrounded by the wit and beauty of her works in
progress. Hupfelâs photographs and minimal sculptural
dioramas-tiny people in miniature landscapes, a small model
plane appearing to fly into the wall-captivated me. So did her
artistâs statement. ãThe sky is not empty,ä she wrote,
explaining the unseen presence of the satellite microwaves that
she pictured in her photographs. With digital overlays, she
visualized that invisible geometry, pictured a plane about to
intersect a fine white grid, imagined a network of lines
hovering over an otherwise empty highway, found a lone surveyor
unknowingly dwarfed by the sound waves in the air above him.
Fascinated with disaster, sheâd photographed a whole series of
imploding buildings, documenting the surreality in their doom.
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Gretchen
Hupfel, Spacial Disorientation Pilot Error Induced, black
and white photograph, 2000, 12 by 12 inches (courtesy Marcia
Wood Gallery). |
Hupfel kept looking at the sky.
And sometimes she seemed to see the future. A series of
photographs that she took at the Atlanta airport documented her
unexpectedly prescient observations. She captured images of
commercial planes apparently flying into massive buildings a
year before the September 11 tragedy. In spring 2001, she
exhibited her äHorizon Stabilizerä series at the Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center (then Nexus Contemporary Art Center).
About this work she wrote, ã·Airplanes are something like
angels. As passengers, we are closer to heaven than weâll ever
get. This might explain why itâs particularly devastating when
they crash to the ground.ä
The sculptural anomalies that
Hupfel created were just as uncanny as her photographs. In the
1999 Nexus Biennial, and in a subsequent exhibition at Agnes
Scott College, her 3-D dramas in miniature provoked laughter and
thought. She giganticized her viewer, offered lessons in physics
that made us feel like philosophers or prophets. The artistâs
Scale Problems (1999-2000) compelled our close consideration.
She used 3/4-inch tall model railroad figures, overwhelming them
with dilemmas propelled by the forces of nature. In each
scenario, her characters seemed unaware of their calamity and
the impossibility of their future.
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Gretchen
Hupfel, Mechanics, 2001, pliers, 2 by 1 by 10 inches
(courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery). |
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Against a backdrop of seamless
white paper, one little man stood innocently beneath a huge mass
of falling stone, a single spotlight fixed on his peril. Another
pint-sized character sat perched atop the rim of suspended
gimbals. (A relative of the gyroscope, gimbals are a contrivance
of metal rings and pivots known to keep compasses and cocktails
horizontal at sea.) As he sat blithely at the brink of his
existence, we were left to predict his outcome-would he manage
to hang on and spin or plunge to his death?
It turned out that the sly tension caught in those installations
was a window into the increasing sense of vulnerability that
accompanied Hupfelâs mental illness. But the work also mirrored
our own fragility, a shared contemporary angst. As her treatment
for schizophrenia became the subject of her inquiry and art, she
effectively stripped the disorder of its secret shame.
Investigating, manipulating and re-envisioning the chemical
compounds that her brain was absorbing, she transformed her
personal experience with drugs into ironic sculpture. The artist
set her handmade models of the molecules of Prozac, caffeine and
nicotine on spinning turntables, as if to mock their
mind-altering power.
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Gretchen
Hupfel, from Molecules, 2002, plastic, three by 3 by 5
inches (courtesy Marcia Wood Gallery) |
Last summer, Hupfel was
selected to participate in ShedSpace, a series of exhibitions in
local backyard sheds. Her single work, The Negative Space of My
Fist, was cast from the empty area inside the artistâs tightly
clenched hand. The diminutive shape evoked the poignancy of her
psychological struggles while her statement explained how the
work gave ãform to a tenuous grip on reality. I myself have been
absent,ä she wrote. ãI reemerge with this relic that both was
the end of my making and is now the beginning of my making
again.ä
Objects and photographs in last
yearâs group exhibition ãOut Thereä recalled the artistâs skill
at re-inventing the familiar. Viewers remembered her through the
airborne photographs, early Polaroid narratives and a
photo-portrait of her wounded thumb titled What It Means to Be
Human. That was the Gretchen Hupfel I knew. It was a pair of
quiet new sculptures that took me by surprise-two gorgeous
hand-sized works that appeared to be cast in resin or carved
from a waxy stone. On closer inspection of Time Spent (2002), I
discovered that the perfect forms were carved out of blocks made
from winding transparent cellophane tape over and over upon
itself. Exquisite. Deceptively simple. And smart. Gretchen Hupfel still had me looking twice and thinking deeply about the
complex beauty in the simplest paradox. I wonder what she would
have amazed us with next.
Gretchen Hupfel was born in
Wilmington, Delaware, in 1963, and took her life on December 14,
2002. The artist graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA from Brown
University before going on to earn an MFA from the University of
Delaware in 1993. Hupfel taught at the Kansas City Art Institute
and later at the University of Georgia in Athens. From 1989 to
late 2002, her work was shown in over 30 exhibitions in
galleries and alternative spaces from New York to Atlanta. Her
photographs are in collections including those of the Delaware
Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, American Century, Citibank,
Phillip Morris and Sprint.
The Marcia Wood Gallery, which
represented Hupfel in Atlanta and organized a brief posthumous
exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in January,
will present an in-depth exhibition of Hupfelâs work April
11-May 17, 2003.
CATHY BYRD is Director of the
School of Art and Design Gallery at Georgia State University in
Atlanta.
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