Tripping Over Cypress: Recent Work by Cliff Tresner

Tripping Over Cypress is an examination of how the artist Cliff Tresner places himself within the literal and cultural landscape of Louisiana. Originally a Hoosier, he is an adoptive Louisianan since 1997. At any given moment a change in weather or a passing word can create a push and pull between where he is grounded. His fluid conception of home is mirrored by the manner in which he incorporates painting and sculpture; they are inseparable but, flow from one into the other. His work is foundationally informed by his background in furniture design, a skill taught to him in Indiana by Tulane University alum Jack Gates, and his interests are as broad as natural beauty, human frailty, representation versus abstraction, improvisation, creation and destruction, and the chain of events that cause the water to rise in a bayou.

Biography

Cliff Tresner is the William D. Hammond Endowed Professor of Liberal Arts and Director of the Bry Gallery at University of Louisiana Monroe. Tresner won Best in Show in the Louisiana Contemporary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2014. He has exhibited extensively throughout the South at venues including Newcomb Gallery, Tulane University; Memphis College of Art; University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Masur Museum of Art; Southeastern Louisiana University; Alexandria Museum of Art; Arthur R. Pierce Gallery, West Virginia Institute of Technology; Maria V. Howard Imperial Arts Center; University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford; University of Arkansas at Monticello; Durango Arts Center; Louisiana State University Sculpture Garden; and Huntsville Museum of Art. Tresner’s M.F.A. was granted by the University of Mississippi, Oxford in 1994.

Exhibition Announcement