SONRISE
Sonrise, by Tom Wachunas, 2021
To you, all my artist friends, and all my
beloved readers, may the everlasting Peace of Christ - his way and his truth
and his life - be upon you in this Holy season.
Arise, shine,
for your light
has come,
and the glory of the Lord
rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1
When Paint Dances
Moon River Bright Landscape III Full Moon on a Quiet Field Spring X Red Hat
By Tom Wachunas
“Exactitude is not Truth.” - Henri Matisse
“I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a
set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same
time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by
the impact with the original idea. —Milton
Avery
“A dance between the intense and the subtle,
the strong and the fragile, and between control and spontaneity… I want to
create paintings which are both familiar yet unknown and I hope the work
attracts the viewer with beauty and simultaneously prompts curiosity.” - Katharine Dufault
EXHIBIT: BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY - new paintings by Katharine
Dufault. Dufault’s work reflects her deep love of nature and landscape,
nurtured by a childhood spent in the English countryside and, more recently, by
her current home at the edge of an estuarial nature reserve in Westchester, New
York. On view through November 30th, 2021, in The Lemmon Visiting
Artist Gallery, located in the Fine Arts Building at Kent University at Stark /
6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, OH /
Gallery Hours Monday – Friday 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (not open Nov. 25, 26)
One efficacious way to see a Katharine Dufault
painting, as suggested in her statement excerpted above, is as a dance. Think
of painting as a performative act in time and, in that sense, a form of
choreography.
Dufault constructs pas de deux, i.e.,
duets. She organizes partnerships wherein her deft manipulations of paint become
engaging pairings of things opaque and translucent, solid and liquid, weighty
and atmospheric, permanent and ephemeral.
Her landscapes
aren’t ostentatious illustrations brandishing trompe l’oeil illusions. The brushwork
is never so forced or fussy, but rather quietly gestural, like poised
arabesques, or balletic glissades gliding across, or floating in undulating
pools of luscious color. These are elegant, reductive abstractions, yet
nonetheless loaded with emotional and psychological affect. Memories of the
past made eminently present.
A vigorous
expressivity is also abundantly evident in Dufault’s figurative works. Of her
portraits, she writes: “The abstract faces appear to be calmly resting or
deep in thought yet, there is a deliberate emotional ambiguity to the work: the
serene expressions may conceal an inner world of strong emotions. I move
swiftly, with almost calligraphic brush strokes, to capture the essence of my
subjects. Wide brushes loaded with paint in my quest for simplification of form
and smaller brushes for necessary detail. The process is part of the finished
painting…”
Altogether, Dufault’s painterly actions exude an immersive,
poetic lyricism. Alluring dances indeed.
Eloquent Countenances
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| Veiled Radiant Joy |
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| The Gardener |
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| Wind in the Flowers |
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| Gilded Hope Rising |
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| Wisdom of Silence |
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| The Ancestor |
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| The Phoenix Rising |
By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: Facing
Humanity – work by Jonathan Kipp Becker / at Vital Arts Gallery Through December
18, 2021 / 324 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton, Ohio / Gallery hours: Wednesday
4 – 8p.m., Thursday-Saturday 6 – 10p.m., Sunday 10a.m. – 2p.m.
https://www.facebook.com/VitalArtsGallery/
https://theater-masks.com/about-the-artist/
https://www.facebook.com/Theater.Masks
“Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each
other who we are.” ― Christopher
Barzak, from The Love We Share Without Knowing
"I would say masks are stories, they're the story of
their maker, they're the story of the person who encounters them, and they're
the story of the universal human condition…” – Jonathan Kipp Becker
It’s certainly interesting that this exhibit opened
on Halloween, our culture’s season of the mask. In our ritualized annual parade
of peculiar personae, which witch were you? What ghoul, goblin, ghost? What
hero, villain, savior, or scoundrel? A Disney damsel or a Marvel mutant? Angel
or alien? And so we go our merry if not mischievous way.
For the moment
though, let’s flip this street theater paradigm over. Let’s step away from silly
disguises, and into revelations. What if masks can be more than false faces,
more than ornamented mendacities? What if masks can be visions of our active
truths, our authentic identities, our genuine personhood?
This consideration forms
the contemplative heart of Jonathan Kipp Becker’s stunning works. To better
appreciate his background and remarkable accomplishments as a master of his
craft, a teaching artist, and a performer, I strongly recommend clicking on the
hyperlinks posted above, which include an interview with Ed Balint, arts and
entertainment journalist for The Canton Repository.
Working in painted
gypsum plaster or neoprene (a synthetic polymer resembling rubber), Becker
sculpts exquisite simulacra of countenances, many of them drawn from ancient
cultures. At once archetypal and specifically personal, his objects speak of human
connectivity throughout history as well as in the artist’s immediate present.
For each piece, the artist provides a written
narrative about his inspiration. Wisdom of Silence, for example, recalls
the idyllic times he spent camping on the forested land owned by his Uncle, who
could speak to owls, and ends with this poem by Edward Hersey Richards: A
wise old owl sat upon an oak. The more he saw the less he spoke. The less he
spoke the more he heard. Why aren't we like that wise old bird?
Poetic, too,
is the bold, bright dragon in The Ancestor. Becker, himself born in the
year of the dragon, remembers a gift given by his grandfather to his
father - an embroidery of a dragon that
his father hung in his office. “…I have felt an affinity for them my entire
life,” Becker writes, “…For me… the dragon is…Courage Strength
Hope Stubborn resolve Explosive anger Rage Wrath Chaos Wisdom Knowledge A Shape
Shifterrrr…
Shape shifting – as
both a visual and conceptual encounter - is an especially important component
of Becker’s haunting Veiled Radiant Joy. His candid, at times searing words
about the work constitute a moving meditation on the deep spirituality resonant,
to varying degrees, in all of his pieces in this exhibit. He begins with, “This
piece is a commentary on how it is, at times, as difficult to come out as
having deep spiritual convictions as a gay man as it is to come out as gay.” He
concludes his assessment with, “I often hide my spiritual convictions and
that which brings me profound inner peace and joy out of a fear that it might
be judged or simply pushed away as invalid. I find that rather than communicate
the foundations of my convictions through words I instead create works intended
to inspire and celebrate the humanity of others.”
Reading Beneath, Behind, and Between
Ursa Minor, Facing North / Jack McWhorter Lunch with Picasso / Patricia Zinsmeister Parker Partially Buried 3 / Earl Iselin
By Tom Wachunas
EXHIBIT: JACK
MCWHORTER: VISIBLE UNIVERSE / PATRICIA ZINSMEISTER PARKER: LUNCH WITH PICASSO /
EARL ISELIN: STACKED
November 4 – 27, 2021
/ The Painting Center, 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, New York, NY
10001, (212) 343-1060
https://www.thepaintingcenter.org/
I was especially honored to write the
catalogue essay for this exhibit.
Here’s a link for seeing artists bios and their exhibited
works:
“If good art illustrates anything at all, it’s likely to be a story you didn’t even know needed telling.” - David Salle
In the
introduction to his 2016 book, How to See, painter and critic David
Salle wrote, “Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both
direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human
communication.”
This analogy, while
complex and expandable, is useful in “reading” contemporary painting. Think,
then, of the three painters in this exhibit – Jack McWhorter, Patricia
Zinsmeister Parker, and Earl Iselin - as writing in dialects. Each of their
respective dialects is in its way a discreet synchronicity, or a dialogue,
transpiring in unique terrains wherein the painter straddles the fluctuating
boundaries between representation and abstraction.
In the past, Jack
McWcWhorter has characterized his process and product as “personal
archaeology.” For this group of recent paintings on paper, that description
remains potently apropos. Equally potent is the wide arc of his subject matter,
born from his question, “How can one give form to one’s connection with the cosmos
whether it be lost or hidden?” He adds this consideration: “Contemporary
cosmology challenges us to look at nature in new ways and to see the inorganic
world from broad areas; art, astronomy, chemistry, earth sciences and physics.”
At the core of his aesthetic
is a persistent navigation of tensions and harmonies within symbiotic
dualities. His compositions, which he calls “live surfaces,” are clusters or
matrixes of lines, shapes, and patterns that juxtapose accumulations and
singularities, gatherings and dispersals. Like an explorer’s field notes on
remembered sights and sites, places and spaces, his pictures often entwine a
then with a now, as if remembering their own beginnings even as they are
transformed by his imagination into new visual moments.
Live surfaces to
be sure, they’re drawn with a vigorous, gestural immediacy, combining marks
made in broad and loose ways with more concentrated movements of the hand that
we might associate with calligraphy.
Additionally,
McWhorter’s exuberant palette imbues his imagery with a numinous energy,
bringing to their spatial dimensionality a sensation of rhythmic pulsing.
Rising from evanesced fields of personal history and the memories held there,
his transfixing configurations have a heartbeat.
Similarly, visceral
gesture, remarkable chromatic dynamics, and personal history are prominent in
Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s works. Recently she wrote “I have always believed
that abstract art and representational art are one and the same. It’s just a matter
of scale and particularity.” Her pictures are invigorating records of
spontaneous actions – an immersion in the primacy of painterly impulse and
intuition.
In a spirit of
equanimity, Parker presents her canvases here in pairs, suggesting a continuum,
or conversation, between a non-objective work and one of a relatively more
representational nature. For example, Girl in White Tutu sits beside My Leaky
Fawcet, while Wallflower attends Lunch With Picasso. Two pictures reading as a
single entity, these pairings are unified by one or more formal commonalities,
such as a recurring color, shape, or pattern motif.
There was a period
in Parker’s career when she deliberately painted with her “untrained” left
hand. Consequently, the representational elements in her works regularly
possessed a distinctive awkwardness. She has recently commented that her
leftist approach, if you will, is a thing of the past. Her current paintings
signal a re-emergence of her trained right hand - what she calls her “… return
to figurative work and draughtsmanship skills - those skills being undermined
and buried for decades by the use of my left hand.”
Parker’s drawing
acuity is especially evident in her renderings of female forms. They seem to
emerge from under surrounding scruffy veils or rough layers of paint in a
fluid, even graceful manner, deftly capturing the subtlest of bodily attitudes.
Insightful and
inciteful, Parker makes art that wags a sassy finger in your face and rattles
your sense of “finished” aesthetic decorum. As the sardonic titles of her
paintings suggest, such as Caught in the Act of Painting, she’s a painter
seriously engaged in mindful play, and generous enough to provide us refreshing
cause to chuckle.
Meanwhile, for Earl
Iselin, the act of painting is in many ways an ongoing inquiry into the very
motives and meanings of creativity. Metaphor is certainly an active force in
his iconography. “In five of the paintings I have offered,” he writes, “I’ve
used isometric perspective, which has the penchant to lift, in essence to ‘sky’
the painting, as if to give flight to imagination.”
Those five
paintings share a title, Partially Buried, named after Robert Smithson’s 1970
land art installation, Partially Buried Woodshed. Made on the grounds of Ohio’s
Kent State University when Iselin was living there, it was a site he visited,
occasionally sitting inside, and which he remembers as greatly obscuring his
view of the blue sky, itself a symbol of pure, limitless possibility.
That sensation has
prompted some intriguing philosophizing about history and existence itself.
What he calls ‘skying the painting’ is his way “…of defying the past and
escaping its definition.” Thus his paintings present the shed not as something
dead, collapsed by gravity and entropy, but as a bright-colored geometric
structure, maybe a house, free-floating in an open field dotted with
suggestions of dirt piles or bodies of water.
Meanwhile, his
series of paintings under the collective title of Stack, is a further probing
of history. These smaller individual pieces, some executed in lavishly-hued
impasto, are attached to each other to make large modular grids, evoking a
variety of modernist painting genres such as Color Field, Minimalism,
Expressionism. The Stacks are intended by Iselin to symbolize and encourage
imagination – his, and ours – and to create an energy for really seeing our
present.
And again, Iselin’s
words describe that energy best: “It is…a creative force… to move me beyond the
limitations of my own gravity, beyond myself, that gives purpose to the
painting, a purpose that has everything to do with you. Your sky is as blue as
mine.”
Jack McWhorter.
Patricia Zinsmeister Parker. Earl Iselin. To you, the viewer…enjoy the flight.
Mindful Moments Well Met
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| Gerhardt Zimmermann |
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| Jenny Robinson |
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| Margaret Brouwer |
By Tom Wachunas
“…But as the sun rises above the horizon, a little breeze picks up and the boat begins to move more steadily…” - Margaret Brouwer
Please forgive my
extreme tardiness in posting these comments, but…drum roll, please. Live, from
Umstaddt Hall in the Zimmermann Symphony Center, The Canton Symphony Orchestra
(CSO), with Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann conducting, commenced the 2021-2022
concert season on Sunday, October 10.
https://www.cantonsymphony.org/the-season-overture/
In lieu of a detailed piece-by-piece review of
the concert, I simply want to share with you a few “moments” from that evening
that filled me with especially deep gratitude as well as a renewed
sense of anticipation.
The October 10
concert opened with Northeast Ohio composer Margaret Brouwer’s The Art of
Sailing at Dawn. Written during the pandemic, the optimistic and
exhilarating work depicts a morning sail, through the tranquility of smooth
water and the exuberance of crashing waves, the sails filling with brisk winds.
Here are Brouwer’s program notes:
“Imagine
preparing to board a sailboat at dawn.
The water is completely calm.
There is hardly a sound except the occasional early morning birdcall and
sound of a ripple breaking on the shore.
Leaving the dock, you are barely moving on the calm water. But as the
sun rises above the horizon, a little breeze picks up and the boat begins to
move more steadily. As the day arrives,
the breeze becomes a steady wind, and occasional big waves smash into the boat
before everything is calm again. The
technical requirements and knowledge it takes to sail a big boat, are
exhilarating, but are outweighed by the feeling of the peace and the emotional
response to the beauty and power of the water and open space. It reminds me of the popular 1974 book, Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which demonstrates that rational
expertise and Zen-like “being in the moment” can harmoniously coexist.”
In many ways,
Brouwer’s words aren’t only a superbly concise description of her engaging and
beautiful music, wondrously rendered here by the orchestra, but also a timely reminder
of what could best be called the CSO’s promising dawn after a long night of
pandemic-induced absence from our midst.
And then there was an
equally enticing performance of Jacques Ibert’s 1932-33 work, Flute Concerto,
here featuring the electrifying solo debut of CSO Principal Flute, Jenny
Robinson. Ibert’s work is a veritable romp through complex rhythm changes,
aural colors and orchestral textures that pose dizzying technical challenges
for the soloist. Robinson navigated all of them with flawless, truly robust
virtuosity. She was wholly mesmerizing in the way she embraced the music’s
constantly shifting energies between jaunty frivolity, tender lyricism, and
poignant introspection.
Altogether, the concert
was a refreshing burst of light and an enlivening gust of fresh air – an
inspired announcement of the CSO’s steady return to the space of our lives. And
so in the aforementioned spirit of gratitude and anticipation, I’ll leave you
with this link to info on the next CSO concert on November 14 at 7:30 p.m..
Consider it an invitation to experience the illuminating and healing power of
live orchestral music for yourself.
Metascores (rhymes with…)
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| Chorus: 34 Drag Chute |
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| Chorus: Little Nova Rocker |
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| Chorus: Singing Through a Hole |
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| Chorus: Singing Through the Fence |
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| Chorus: Singing on President's Day |
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| Chorus: Gold Finch Song |
By Tom Wachunas
“A painter… in his longing to express his inner life,
cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts
today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to
his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting,
for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for
setting colour in motion.”
― Wassily Kandinsky, from Concerning the Spiritual in Art
EXHIBIT: Chorus and Understudy, An Invitation to Look –
29 paintings by Earl Iselin / at The William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting
Artist Gallery, located in the Fine Arts Building at Kent University at Stark /
6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, OH / THROUGH OCTOBER 29, 2021 /
Gallery Hours Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. (NOT OPEN on Friday, Oct. 15)
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT JACK MCWHORTER AT 330-244-3356
OR JMCWHORT@KENT.EDU.
Artist Reception and Gallery Talk – THURSDAY OCTOBER 21 - 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
In a recent
statement about his work, Earl Iselin wrote about a seminal encounter from his
days as an undergrad at Kent State University. While there, he often visited
Robert Smithson’s land art installation, Partially Buried Woodshed, made
on the University grounds in 1970. Sitting inside the entropic structure (i.e.,
designed by Smithson to disintegrate over time) induced a sensation of being
buried alive. In that setting, Iselin’s view of the sky – a signifier of
possibility for fully experiencing a present moment – was obstructed.
That memory
resonates in his poetic philosophizing about painting. What he has called
“skying the painting” speaks to the purpose of his pictures. “To be at home
in painting means to defy the past,” he tells us, adding, “Every
generation has to come to painting for itself. Every generation must go through
the labor of off-loading in order to find what is appropriate for them, to
unemcumber their work. We have to decide what we will take with us into the
present, and what we will leave behind. Our inspiration must find lift.”
Looking at these paintings brings to mind the
phenomenon of synesthesia, from the Greek syn, meaning
"together", and aisthesis, meaning "sensation."
Synesthesia happens when one sensory or cognitive process is stimulated enough
to cause a simultaneous perception or experience in another sense or cognitive
pathway.
A recurring pathway in Iselin’s paintings is
the grid. It’s a motif apparent in much of modernist painting history, and one
that can codify any number of contexts, including architectural constructions,
urban landscapes, maps, measured units of time, or the very idea of repeated patterns
found in nature.
Iselin’s grids vary widely in terms of their
rigidity and clarity. There are painterly, tactile actions – both representational
and purely gestural or abstract – resting under, intertwined through, or placed
directly on top of the grids. Faces, places, or objects – faded or fading,
softly in the past, or loudly in the present. Balance and counterbalance. Seen
and… heard?
The titles of these
paintings are intriguing. Most of them suggest a musicality, beginning with the
word ‘Chorus’ followed by a reference to a specific subject. Voices singing and
continuously interwoven. Iselin’s use of the grid as a delineated system for containing
his marks and shapes is not so far removed from how a composer scores a musical
work via a staff - the horizontal, 5-lined configuration for attaching or
mapping the various signs and symbols that articulate melodies and harmonies,
pace and rhythms, or durations in time.
So here’s an
invitation to not only look, but perhaps to listen as well. Iselin’s paintings
are, on one fascinating level, scores written for the instrument of his
imagination and yours. To look at this impressive collection is to join a
choir and…find lift.
Unto Dust?
Homecoming (2018) 
Precedent (detail) 
detail 
detail 
Precedent (2021)
By Tom Wachunas
“…for he knows
how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” - Psalm 103:14
“…We know that
the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to
the present time.” - Romans 8:22
“Be anxious for
nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present
your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers,
whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or
praiseworthy—think on these things.…” Phillipians
4:6-8
“I have told you
these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have
trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” - John 16:33
The inveterate Word
nerd strikes again. On one level, this most recent work of mine - titled
“Precedent” – began in a spirit of disdain. Actually, hate would be more
accurate. I’ve come to hate the attachment of the word unprecedented to just
about every report and opinion on this protracted pandemic season of ours. As
it is now, too much of humanity is floundering in a merciless vortex of anxiety
and anger, confusion and conflict, medical mayhem and moral malaise. And no measure
of political poppycock and prattle can alleviate our pain.
But,…unprecedented? A rarely mentioned,
much less researched, COVID side-effect is its power to turn us into blithering
amnesiacs when it comes to remembering our plagued history as a species on
earth. Call it an Anthropocene nightmare. Britannica.com defines the
Anthropocene epoch as the “… unofficial interval of geologic time, making up
the third worldwide division of the Quaternary Period (2.6 million years ago to
the present), characterized as the time in which the collective activities of
human beings (Homo sapiens) began to substantially alter Earth’s surface,
atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling ...”
These days, I’m
thinking that the Anthropocene should be renamed the Entropocene, as in entropy
– our collective, ongoing decline into profound disorder in virtually every
aspect of existence. There is indeed a precedent for my newest painting. I
think of it as a topography of a tautology. I / we have been here before,
again. And so I repainted a work from nearly four years ago. I wrote about that
painting (shown here above) in a post from early 2018, titled, ironically
enough, “Can the past have a future in the present?”
http://artwach.blogspot.com/2018/01/can-past-have-future-in-present_89.html
The old painting
exists now only as a digital image, a memory. Meanwhile, traces of it are still
present in the new work. It isn’t an alteration so much as an altaration
– a performative, sacrificial prayer to reach for the promised peace of God
while living in a troubled world. I fully believe that it is that peace alone which
will overturn our entropy.
Sublime Symbiosis
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| Old Delhi - Jama Masjd |
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| Others in their World |
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| A Synnoetic System (detail) |
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| A Synnoetic System |
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| Synnoetic Systems - 7 |
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| Synnoetic Systems - 6 |
By Tom Wachunas
“In creating
these works I combine our most advanced digital tools and processes with
ancient traditions of making. This series represents a world within our world;
an unseen world at the edge of our perception, at the edge of what our most
advanced tools are able to measure…The driving force behind the work for me is
always to make the work as beautiful, sensual, felt, and sometimes whimsical as
possible, regardless of media.” -
Gregory Little
EXHIBIT: Parallel Worlds – Mixed Reality Artwork by Gregory
Little / at The William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery,
located in the Fine Arts Building at Kent University at Stark / 6000 Frank
Avenue NW, North Canton, OH / THROUGH SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 / Gallery Hours
Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT JACK MCWHORTER AT 330-244-3356
OR JMCWHORT@KENT.EDU.
Reception and Gallery Talk – THURSDAY September 23 - 5:30 p.m.
From Merriam-Webster/ Symbiosis (sim-bē-ˈō-səs- ) = the living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms; a cooperative relationship
I am agape. Agog. Amazed
and awestruck. Flabbergasted and gobsmacked. Did I mention impressed?
So this is when an
art gallery can be more than a typical art gallery. Right now, The William J.
and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery at KSU Stark is a spectacular
junction. A magnificent experiential crossroads. A compelling nexus of the micro and macro, the mystical and
mundane.
The 32 works in
this exhibit - ranging in scale from hand-sized, to pieces more than 5’ tall
(as in the Synnoetic Systems series) or the 7’-wide A Synnoetic
System - consist of mixed media paintings, collages, and archival digital
prints. They combine hand-ground
pigments with digital elements and processes. Also included is a non-looping
digital animation of endless evolving DNA splices, and a 12-minute animation set
to a composition by the renowned composer Jeffrey Mumford.
Not
long after he was hired to teach painting at Kent Stark in 1989/90, Gregory
Little, who currently teaches digital art at Lorain Community College, embarked on a path to learn everything necessary to
make virtual reality artworks. “I
stopped painting and devoted myself to this task for eight years,” he explains,
“and succeeded in learning about all aspects of VR (virtual reality) to make
and exhibit my own virtual worlds. Now I
have returned painting to my toolkit, but also use all that I have learned to
produce a variety of digital assets that I use and reuse across a range of
mediums.”
Little’s works certainly aren’t conventional scenes
or pictures of objective, familiar realities. To fully look at them is
to be willing to engage a state of mind and be drawn into contemplations of
indeterminate depth. It is to enter evocations.
The striking Synnoetic
Systems pieces, for example, are named after a term coined in 1961 by
computer scientist Louis Fein to describe what he had called the “…symbiosis of
people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that
results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual
components.”
Little has
translated this concept into breathtaking, multidimensional panoramas. They’re
blissfully dense with infinitesimal details. Otherwordly indeed. The stratified
minutiae of organic particles and shapes, whether clustered in groups or individually
floating within supernal networks of fibers and filaments, all seem to oscillate
and glow, as if shot through with bursts of colored light from many distant
suns.
The art of Gregory Little is a wondrous
navigation of the longitudes and latitudes of visual perception itself, and an
otherwise astonishing spiritual adventure. Might this be what Nirvana looks
like?
In Memoriam: 911
By Tom Wachunas
Ten years ago I was
blessed with the opportunity to be included in a group show at downtown Canton’s
Anderson Creative (later named Translations Art Gallery), guest-curated by Dr.
Fredlee Votaw. Some of you readers may remember the exhibit. It was called “The
Persistence of Memory” – commemorating the 10th Anniversary of 911.
Here’s a link to my comments on the exhibit from back then:
http://artwach.blogspot.com/2011/09/mournings-after.html
So here we are once
more immersed - thanks largely due to the towering medium of television - in
our recollections of 911, twenty years later.
And here I am likewise
immersed. Not only in remembrance of an overwhelmingly tragic event, but also
in recollections of making my contribution to that 10th Anniversary
exhibit - a sculpture, nearly 5’ tall, called Window on the World. The process
was a long one, evolving through about 10 weeks during the summer of 2011, and
one I continue to think of as a series of daily meditations and a season of protracted
prayer.
It started with
purchasing, then gutting (removing the heavy picture tube) a big, used Magnavox
television from a Salvation Army store. An eery serendipity, this finding a
Magnavox TV. Magna vox, Latin for “great voice”. Next, building a wood pedestal. Then faux-painting
those forms to suggest the marble or granite finish of an elaborate gravestone
- a funereal totem.
The protracted
prayer element commenced when I began to handwrite a litany - the names of 2,977
people - on to 41 sheets of white paper, on each page three columns of names.
As I scrolled down the online list I found of all those who perished, one name
at a time, I touched the desktop screen, offering aloud each name to God as I wrote
it onto paper. I made photocopy reductions of those 41 pages, finally cutting
them into thin vertical strips that I glued to the inside walls of the hollow
TV shell, arranged to perhaps suggest the metropolitan skyline of NYC.
Even as I type this
now, in this moment at my computer desk, I can hear my TV in the living room,
broadcasting the reverential ceremonies transpiring at the 911 Memorial in lower
Manhattan.
Television. Tell a
vision. In this moment, I am praying yet again. Looking through this window on
the world. Here, but for the grace of God…
3D Menuscripts
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| Cozy Coupe (oil on canvas) |
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| Hoover Concept II (oil on canvas) |
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| Running Late |
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| Jamie's Hand |
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| Our House Cafe |
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| Glass Rack 1 & 2 |
By Tom Wachunas
“Art should be literally made of the ordinary world; its
space should be our space; its time our time; its objects our ordinary objects;
the reality of art will replace reality.” – Claes Oldenburg
EXHIBIT: 86’d – work by Daniel McLaughlin, at
VITAL ARTS GALLERY /
324 Cleveland Ave NW , in downtown Canton, Ohio / Gallery
Hours: Wednesday 4-8pm, Thu-Sat 6-10pm / THROUGH OCTOBER 16, 2021
From the posted exhibition
statement: “86’d is a series of contemporary works created by Canton artist
Daniel McLaughlin. The collection is inspired by his career in restaurants
spanning 20 years, and the often overlooked objects and materials in the
service industry…Large scale, non-traditional canvas structures with emphasis
on three-dimensional elements…Painting and sculpture combine various plywood,
paints, and finishes to create these minimally representational and playful
works of art.”
So, Pop Art meets
Minimalism? Here’s a truly fresh and fascinating salad, if you will, of big,
wall-mounted mixed-media sculptures, along with three oil paintings. But first,
there’s the terse yet conceptually loaded title of the show, 86’d.
While the precise
origins of the term are unclear, the most frequently cited history of the
expression relates to the restaurant industry of the early 20th century. By the
1930s, many restaurants in the U.S. were using ‘86’ as a shorthand code for
“not available,” or “we’re out of this item.” Other anecdotal tales mention
Chumley’s, a legendary bar in New York City located at 86 Bedford Street, where
rowdy patrons were routinely thrown out the door, and where they no doubt took
notice of the large 86 overhead as they were carted away by the cops. This came
to be called “being 86’d.” Other associations
are military in nature, such as Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military
Justice, handling soldiers who have gone AWOL. The code was also used in
reference to enemy planes shot down during the Korean War by F-86 fighter jets.
McLaughlin recently
shared this observation with me: “…I wasn't sure how well known the term is to
people that haven't worked in the industry.
But 1986 is the year I was born so I felt that was a good fit being that
a lot of the work is self representative.
And on certain days and times I feel out of myself (depleted) in a way,
as do others across, I think, any industry.
But in contrast to that, doing this work was really motivating and
energy- giving.”
In some ways, McLaughlin’s intriguing works
here can be regarded as 3D pages from a personal journal, or a surrogate self-portrait.
Some of the pieces include flattened accumulations of seemingly countless
handwritten guest checks and meal orders sealed into the surface of the plywood
forms. These are gathered records of his and fellow workers’ time on the job - menu
mementos, customers’ appetites recalled… the prosaic graffiti of restaurant
stewardship.
Considering the well-publicized
negative impact of COVID trauma on the restaurant industry, it is just a little
ironic that this show doesn’t really feel so much like a sad 86-ing as it does
an honest, even optimistic affirmation of a livelihood built on the materialities
of culinary service.
Call it metaphoric
food for thought, and energy-giving at that.
