February 15-17
 
Columbia College’s Goodall Gallery will present Chicago-based artist Doug Smithenry’s installation of 48 small oil on canvas paintings entitled Coming Out Online, February 15-17, with an artist’s talk at 7:00 p.m. on February 16. The show closes at 2:00 p.m. on February 17. The exhibit is sponsored by the Columbia College Diversity Committee and Spectrum, a support group for gay and lesbian students, their friends, and their classmates.

About the Exhibit
Excerpt from Jeff’s Stevenson’s article “Finding Inspiration: Doug Smithery” for the Chicago Museum Examiner :

Doug Smithenry paints beautifully textured oil paintings in unusual colorations that call to mind the paint-by-numbers popular in the 50's.  However the subjects of Smithenry's work are completely contemporary, taken from the virtual on-line world. The familiar and ubiquitous images from amateur YouTube videos have a specific look and proportion to them as the makers deliver their messages to their audiences.  Smithenry explores the idea of self made celebrities, collective cultural voice, and the addictive nature of the Internet.

In Coming Out On-line Smithenry captures individuals telling their coming out stories, announcing to the world that they are gay.  Through this unmistakably contemporary subject that is just now in our lifetimes blossoming on the larger cultural and political stage, Smithenry presents these young individuals and their brave public acts with the traditional materials of oil on canvas and within the genre of portrait painting.  This work is at once familiar and unique, traditional and contemporary, nostalgic and forward looking.

Smithenry says of his work and his process, "I've lost faith in moving paint around, i.e. being painterly. Blending, smearing, dripping or slinging paint around just feels phony to me. My painting method is very machine like. I start with an idea. Work it out to death in Photoshop and then translate it into a limited number of colors using Illustrator (in effect, creating a sort of paint-by-number type painting). Then I paint. Starting with the darkest color. Fill all those areas in. Move on to the next color...and so on, until I mix the last color and I am finished with the project. The current Distributed-Self painting of Mememolly uses 72 colors and I am currently half way toward completion.

"My mechanical working manner feels akin to some of the Pop artists reaction to the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and their reliance on mechanical means of producing art. Warhol  in particular refined the practice of devaluing identity through repetition and instead focused on the machinery that produced market goods, among them the mass-marketed celebrity. Herein lies my closest ties to Warhol's work. My paintings document how micro-celebrities are using the Internet to market themselves as a product. They all seem to be Warhol's offspring.”


From the artist’s blog: dougsmithenry.blogspot.com:
 
 “Among the hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube daily, some gay teens are doing something unique that previous generations of gay people might have considered unthinkable: they are staring into webcams and outing themselves online. I have transformed these online testimonials into an installation of paintings that literally waves the colors of gay pride as it reflects and celebrates how the Internet has provided a sense of community for isolated queer youth. It also reveals how the Internet has helped gay adolescents, regardless of geographical boundaries, to (a) discover that they are not alone, (b) label their feelings and figure out who they are, and (c) experience normative developmental milestones that gay adolescents historically repress before coming out later in life.

Coming Out Online reinforces the ideas of gay pride and community by providing a visual example of both. The installation consists of a group of 48 small paintings derived from screen shots of YouTube videos of people sharing their coming out stories. The paintings are colorized to represent the gay pride flag. They may be displayed in a long line mimicking the color spectrum or arranged in a grid depending on the location. These paintings extend and praise the voices of gay youth by pulling them from their online existence and presenting them to an off-line audience.

The idea for this installation came from a series of paintings called Real Nobodies which explored the phenomenon of Internet identities by asking the question “Are you a nobody?” The work reflected images of people lifted from vlog sites who were engaged in self-absorbed behavior before their computers. The paintings explored the notion that while we engage in a search for significance online, most of us have to live with the stark fact that neither lasting fame nor notoriety will ever find us. Coming Out Online provides a positive counterpoint to the narcissistic side of Internet behavior represented in the Real Nobodies series by focusing on the communal and educational aspects of these shared coming out stories.”
 
 
The Columbia College Goodall Gallery is located in the Spears Music and Art Center in downtown Columbia on North Main Street, 1301 Columbia College Drive.  Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.  For further information about exhibits please call (803) 786-3899.