Poetry in 3D
By Tom Wachunas
Art never responds to the wish to make it
democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to
undergo the effort needed to understand it.
― Flannery O'Connor
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is
understood. –T.S. Eliot
EXHIBIT: Palpable/Sensory/Tactile – Sculpture by
Isabel Farnsworth & Shannon Hines – THROUGH MAY 6 at MAIN HALL ART
GALLERY, Kent State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton,
Ohio / Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 11 A.M. to 5 P.M.
What makes Main
Hall Art Gallery such a singularly edifying venue, and more so, I feel, than
any other gallery in the greater Canton area, is the challenging breadth of
contemporary aesthetic visions and ideologies that it consistently embraces.
More often than not, the exhibits aren’t “art shows” in the ordinary or
provincial sense. The artists featured in this space are very often from
outside the Canton area, and regularly offer works that require something more
from viewers beyond passive glancing. So I recommend coming here not looking to
be merely entertained by the niceties of traditional wall and pedestal art.
Instead, be willing to be engaged by and immersed in what one could rightly
call experiential installations.
Associate Professor Isabel Farnsworth and
adjunct faculty member Shannon Hines are studio fine arts instructors at Kent’s
main campus. Here, each offers three sculptural works that speak to the idea of
memory and its associative processes. Both artists have provided written
material very useful in grasping the contents and contexts of their respective
pieces.
Farnsworth’s
mixed-media Tide combines wall and
floor elements in a way that situates the viewer as if standing on a shore when
the tide washes in, suggested by parallel rows of metal ribbons mounted on
wooden frames along the floor. The repetitive pattern of these ornate, curled
configurations echo and complement the look of flowing, long-hand script on the
wall. There, like a blackboard “sky” overlaid with plaster water droplets, the
text is a litany of references to bodies of water in English and Latin – Lakus Doloris, Lake of Sorrow, Sinus Amoris,
Bay of Love, Mare Marginis, Sea of the Edge… It’s a mesmerizing chant about the alluring
mysteries and beauties of the sea, personal and universal. There’s a similarly
hypnotic lyricism at work in the mandala-like floor piece, Halo, wherein painted cast forms bring to mind floating petals,
simple boats, or ponds dotting a landscape seen from the air.
Shannon Hines explains that her works
are born from childhood memories. Though there might seem to be a kinship with
the Minimalist aesthetic of industrial surfaces and forms stripped down to
their geometric essentials, Hines’ tactile ingredients are quite effective in
how they conjure multiple emotional associations belying their pared-down look.
Stacked/memories is a cubical form made from multiple, variably
colored velvety pillows compacted like so many over-sized Lego pieces. And the
haunting simplicity of Blue Moon Rising, with
its large blue plane of back-lighted cloth, is rich with suggestions of
children playing in a homemade fort, or the night time glow of a lantern in a
tent.
I’m reminded that
in making really compelling art of the sort on view here, artists are not
unlike tightrope walkers – daring performers gingerly teetering between matter
and spirit. Or we could think of them as the technicians and engineers of
life’s more ineffable and ephemeral energies, giving tangible form to
sensations embedded in the deepest recesses of our psyches. Synthesizers of the
lyric and the practical, they distill and manipulate common raw materials into
the uncommon stuff of poetry.
PHOTOS (from top): Tide, by Isabel Farnsworth; Tide detail; Halo, by Isabel Farnsworth; Stacked/memories
(foreground) and Blue Moon Rising (on wall in background), by Shannon Hines
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