Digging Through, Seeing In
By Tom Wachunas
“I feel a strong parallel between the making
of a painting and the building of a wall, or a structure, an edifice. Each
involves construction and deconstruction, and provides refuge, a haven. In the
case of my interest in religious architecture, there is the element of
sanctuary and sacred geometry.” -
Carol Diamond
“What does the artist do? He draws
connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into
history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the
beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.”
– Anselm Kiefer
EXHIBIT: Kent State
University at Stark is pleased to begin the 2018-19 exhibition season in our
new gallery space – The Lemmon Gallery -
with a solo exhibit, Threshold: Selected Works by Carol Diamond / on view
through September 21st, 2018.
A reception will be held on Tuesday, September 11th, from 3:30-5:00pm. Located
inside the Kent Stark Fine Arts Building, 6000 Frank Avenue, North Canton, Ohio
/ Contact: Professor Jack McWhorter, jmcwhort@kent.edu
/ Office: 330 244-3356
[Excerpt from the Kent State
University at Stark announcement: Originally
from Cleveland, Diamond received a BFA in painting from Cornell University and
continued her studies at the New York Studio School in Manhattan. Settling in
Brooklyn in the late 1980’s, Diamond became active in the vibrant
Williamsburg-Bushwick art scene. She continues to exhibit in group and solo
shows in New York City, Upstate New York and nationally... Since 2000 Diamond
has taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where she is an Associate Professor.]
There are several
methodologies or modalities present in this impressive collection of works
spanning (I’m guessing) at least several years: Large-scale abstract paintings,
mixed media works on paper, relief collages, plein-air drawings of architectural
sites, and sculptural assemblages of found debris.
Radiating from most of this formal diversity
is an aura of vintage Modernism. It’s a visceral kind of tenor - alternately
gritty and refined, delicately ornamental and muscular, literal and symbolic - which
binds all these works together into a collective embodiment of a distinctly
urban sensibility. These are fascinating explorations of facades, spaces,
structures, and metropolitan detritus, comprising something the artist knows
intimately - something you could call big city zeitgeist.
Some of Carol
Diamond’s most compelling pieces, such as “Fences” (digital photo, pastel and
charcoal) and “Abonica” (oil on canvas) are complex integrations of bold lines
and color rhythms with textures (illusory and actual) and shapes (both organic
and geometric) configured in multiple perspectives, converging and dispersing
in various spatial vectors. There’s a sense of suspended kinesis, as if these
elements are simultaneously being disrupted, worn away or broken down, and then
reconstituted. The low-relief elements of real concrete and a bit of metal
trash in “Factory” bring to mind an interesting question: What thriving city isn’t indeed a factory in the perpetual
business of making, or unmaking, itself? What gets built, what gets thrown
away?
The tactile materiality of Diamond’s many
small mixed media collages on wood panels, her found-object sculptures (grouped
on three pedestals), and the fossilized look of her plaster mosaic plaques, all
suggest the contemplative notion of artist as archaeologist, unearthing and
preserving industrial artifacts and/or seemingly whimsical shards of city
bric-a-brac. But these aren’t so much a display of a specific, ancient history.
Think of them perhaps as personal, poetic remembrances of a metropolitan now.
It’s a poeticism that infuses the entire
exhibit with tangible spirituality, particularly evident in two drawings - her
crayon and pastel “Fire Escape,” and her graphite drawing, “125th
Street Arches.” Both drawings exude real
reverence for traditional linear perspective while at the same time
transforming otherwise common structures into something soaring and
cathedral-like. Static form becomes a fibrous matrix, a gossamer network of
conjoined lines and shadows, seeming to breathe as a single organic entity. Architecture
with a pulse.
At its most cryptic
or dense, Diamond’s imagery certainly can present the city as a complex,
intricate space, to be sure. That said, her city is not depicted as a dark,
menacing bastion of sociological chaos or mind-numbing worldly excess. Her artist
statement (click on her web site link above) is a useful inroad to appreciating her
aesthetic, wherein she refers to her interest in “sanctuary and sacred
geometry,” and further: “…A synthesis of layered meanings and connections is
occurring, including metaphors of introspection and the relationship between
the conscious and the unconscious mind.”
Here metropolis is
an engaging metaphor for meditation, and urban architecture becomes an
intriguingly ruminative redoubt.
PHOTOS, from top: Abonica / Fences / Factory / Fire Escape /
125th Street Arches
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