Art Show: Honorificabilitudinitatibus

From September 4-October 18, 2013, The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland (UMD) presents Honorificabilitudinitatibus, an exhibition of paintings by Bill Dunlap. This is Dunlap’s first solo exhibition at The Art Gallery.

The genesis of the title, Honorificabilitudinitatibus, comes from one of William Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost. The title, according to Dunlap, seems to imply “being in a position worthy of receiving honors.” The artist—who received his BA in English from UMD in 1989 and is profoundly influenced by the work of Shakespeare—insists that the exhibition should not be interpreted as a direct homage to the Elizabethan-era playwright per se, but, rather, a manipulation of various literary references and visual flourishes that yield a diluted form of humor.

At first glance, much of the work in this exhibition appears to be dark, black, and sinister in nature. A painting of a grotesque melting face, inspired by a Melville novella, replaces the formal descriptive function of a meticulously fashioned sentence. In contrast, other works in the exhibition are reduced to giant, brightly colored geometric shapes that are quilt-like in composition—another means of conveying, albeit abstractly, expression and storytelling.

A key work on view—a hybrid painting-sculpture titled, “I’ll Talk to Anyone About Shakespeare”—allows the viewer to circumnavigate the object. “From the back it [the painting] recedes like a vanishing point, while from the front, it suggests the dwindling of life energy down to an eternal invisible spot,” says Dunlap. The viewer interacts with the object as if she/he were an actor improvising or adlibbing onstage. This, according to Dunlap, makes it very Shakespearean to him and thus makes it fitting for the show. The paintings also follow a storied artistic custom of fusing text with image, all the while presenting the viewer with a kind of anti-canonical satire and anti-hierarchical lyricism, which tend to be reoccurring elements in the artist’s oeuvre.

A few years ago, The Art Gallery commissioned Bill Dunlap, as part of its Poetry and Art in Rural Maryland project in 2010, to travel throughout the state of Maryland and transform outlying barns into works of art by painting murals and poems onto them. In this recent iteration, visitors to the gallery will be able to further examine Dunlap’s work as it relates to the relationship between artist and author, illustration and the written (or spoken) word.