A Compelling Perspective on Local Contemporary Art

A Compelling Perspective on Local Contemporary Art

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…It is incumbent on artists to anticipate as much as possible how their work will be received and positioned. But, after a certain point, it is not in their control to do so.”  -Hal Foster 

   EXHIBIT: 72^nd Annual May Show, at The Little Art Gallery (LAG), located in the North Canton Public Library THROUGH MAY 31, 185 North Main Street, North Canton, 330.499.4712  Ext. 312

    In a recent email, an artist friend shared his dismay at not being included in this long-established annual juried show. He took it as a rejection of him – his invested self. His thoughts prompted a mental note to myself to write a post about the whole idea of being rejected from juried shows and what it might signify exactly. Meanwhile, I add here that I was gratified to have a piece accepted for this exhibition, which garnered an Honorable Mention in the mixed media category.

    As artist/blogger Judi Krew pointed out in her recent comments on this exhibit (see  http://snarkyart.blogspot.com/2014/05/72nd-may-show-north-canton-little-art.html ), “…some long-time established talents are missing in action.”  Until a few years ago, there was a consistent presence of repeat performers who for years seemed to have “cornered the market” of local juried shows. But an air of decorative sameness had settled in. Beyond the traditional representational art (floral/landscape, still-life and portraiture genres) so dominant in these parts, even overtly modernist works seemed often to have become increasingly mimetic and formulaic to the point of vapidity.   

   So I think it refreshing that the sheer diversity of artistic practices and philosophies characterizing the postmodern era is becoming more apparent. As lesser-known artists and modes of expression emerge, exhibits such as the LAG May Show and the annual Stark County Artists Exhibit at Massillon Museum have become notably broader in their iconographic and ideological content. Artistically speaking, Stark County’s once lethargic stroll into the 21^st century is picking up speed.

    The jurors’ (Della Clason Sperling, Ph.D., and Heather Hayden) statements for this show are unusually revelatory in terms of the serious thinking they applied to the task at hand. I highly recommend you read them when you view the exhibit. This is one group show that doesn’t move me to complain much at all about their prize picks. Collectively, they’re an extraordinary group of technically excellent pieces that range from traditional styles and subject matters to more challenging conceptualizations.

    Murli Marayan’s well-named Harmony (Second Place, Oil category) is practically symphonic in its rhythmic interplay of light, color dynamics, textures and patterns depicting women working in a rice paddy. A serene, spiritual vision.

    Indeed, spirituality is a recurring element in several works. Among those, Theater of the Mind by John B. Alexander (First Place, Acrylic) is painted on the back side of a clear acrylic panel attached to a clothes hanger. A figure posed in yogic meditation faces a gray brick wall. Transparent resin oozes down from the top of the panel - a drip-dried enigma, a mystery washed with clarity. Thinking about the unyielding substance of… nothing? We may never know. Red alert…the show has been cancelled.

    There is at once a sobering, funereal gravitas and maybe just a hint of hope about Dr. Fredlee Votaw’s God Please Exist (First Place, Mixed Media). His shadow box format is well suited to the coffin-like feel of his figures masked in gauze on the left side. One is a sleeping (or dead?) adult, the other a baby. Buried or emerging? Nestled on the right is a rectangular, wood-slatted form/vessel covered with tiny strips of paper reading “God, please exist!” Are these the chanted supplications of myriad souls hoping to enter eternal bliss? Or is this a sarcophagus, a reliquary for the desperate and lost?

    Votaw’s work is placed next to a lovely, haunting oil painting by Lisa Jackson Wood, called Innocence. The painting is executed on an arched wood panel, suggesting perhaps a church window. A little girl reaches for the wing of an angel hovering above her, casting its shadow across her dress and the face of her doll on the ground. The group of locusts at her feet is static for the moment, like impending trouble held at bay by a holy protector.  The proximity of these two pieces allows them to play off each other in fascinating ways. It’s just one example among many here of LAG curator Elizabeth Blakemore’s sharp attention to both visual logic and thematic content, creating a cohesive viewing experience throughout the gallery.

    Finally, Best in Show honors went to Dan Chrzanowski for his graphite work, 13 ½ x 14 1/2 With String. This is a tour de force convergence of stunning technique and ideation. It’s art about art; drawing about drawing; a sort of conceptual selfie; a picture of a piece of wrinkled white paper on a piece of flat dark paper…on flat white paper. Rendered in pencil, it has all the look of a fine lithograph. Imagine that. Illusion on illusion.

    In some ways the work is complementary to the aforementioned John B. Alexander piece. To the extent we can imagine lifting a raised corner on Chrzanowski’s crinkled paper to reveal something –to look behind the wall as it were - we are indeed drawn into a theater of the mind. I’m reminded of Pliny the Elder’s famous story of a contest between two Greek painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds attempted to eat them. Parrhasius responded with a painting of a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis attempted to push the drapery aside to see the painting behind it.

    This is to say that while I think the Best in Show entry here has roots in the Classical view of art as a perfect reflection of natural/physical reality (and in that sense “entertaining” in the noblest sense of the word), it’s also an exquisitely subtle, challenging meditation – a metaphor, actually - on how we define, process and evaluate art today.

    PHOTOS (from top): Harmony by Murli Narayan; Theater of the Mind by John B. Alexander; God Please Exist by Dr. Fredlee Votaw; 13 ½ x 14 ½ With String by Dan Chrzanowski   

Mulligan's Travels

Mulligan’s Travels

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

    “Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso

   EXHIBIT: Symphony of Life: The Art of Erin Mulligan, at the Canton Museum of Art, THROUGH JULY 20; 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton; 330.453.7666  www.cantonart.org

    For the last eight years or so, I’ve watched Erin Mulligan continually secure her place as one of this region’s most compelling and, no doubt, popular painters. In all that time, this exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA) is the largest gathering of her work I’ve seen in one place. It allows some of my past observations about individual works, scattered through many group shows, to finally coalesce into a more unified appreciation of her oeuvre.

    In some ways Mulligan’s work recalls the symbolic sprawl of Hieronymous Bosch paintings, the stark scenarios of Salvador Dali, and the elaborate allegorical journeys and characters described by J.R.R. Tolkein. After viewing this show three times, however, I find other hackneyed generalizations such as ‘surreal’ and ‘fantastical’ (which I’ve previously employed in discussing Mulligan’s work) to be ultimately unsatisfying descriptors of both her content and style.

   Those terms don’t go far enough in separating her iconography from many other painters who render all manner of alien landscapes, goulish monsters and slap-dash sci-fi silliness. Not that there’s anything wholly vapid about that level of sensationalist pictorial entertainment, but I think Mulligan offers something more conceptually engaging if not enigmatic.

    If only in their virtuosic technique, with their astonishingly fine, crisp detail, her musings are of a distinctly elevated character. She doesn’t just put oil paint on the surface of her clay board panels so much as embed it. In the laudable tradition of the finest Flemish masters, she builds up her paintings in successive layers of pigmented glazes that give a remarkable chromatic depth to her images.

    Some of the paintings are reminiscent of the tenebrism employed by post-Renaissance masters whose figures appeared to be sharply illuminated in contrast to darker, relatively featureless backgrounds. Mulligan’s murky, vaguely defined backgrounds in pieces such as The Consequence of Being Human, The Poetry of Deception or Cicadas After Rembrandt  evoke real drama. The sheer theatrical intensity of these painted stories is, ironically enough, all the more augmented by their very small scale.

   At times their theatricality is simply eerie. At others, it’s utterly nightmarish. Saturn after Goya is a direct appropriation of Francisco Goya’s horrific Saturn Devouring His Son – one of his “Black Paintings” from late in his life. Mulligan’s version, every bit as ferocious and bleak, might be a fable about lost or destroyed youth, as her Saturn ingests a child dressed in bunny pajamas.  

    In the paintings with the most brightly illuminated passages, as in Cosmos Umbilicus  among others, the light, for all its otherworldly lustre, seems less than joyous. It’s a tentative light, more like twilight than dawn, and one that seems to impart a patina of pessimism. It never fully overcomes the pervasive sense of tainted innocence, conflicted emotions and frail mortality threaded through many of the works here.

    Rabbits breathe fire or morph into frogs, cats grow wings, fish parachute into fiery battles, humans grow spider legs or birth alien parasites… Even the air in Mulligan’s strange narratives is equal parts sparkling fairy dust and ash. Yet the chimerical whimsicality of her images belies their very robust and urgent embrace of vexing dualities in this world.

    We’re told in the recent issue of the CMA magazine that Mulligan compares her paintings to orchestrated music – symphonies – to be perceived and unraveled by the viewer. An interesting metaphor, to be sure. Her spectacular paintings remind me that soaring, melodious lyricism is never so sweet as when it is placed against haunting dissonance.

   And that, as Mulligan suggests in her statement for the show, is the stuff of life.

    PHOTOS (from top): Cosmos Umbilicus; The Consequence of Being Human; Nadine’s Curtains; Katywhite (A Treaty with the Slugbots) and Katywhite Embryonic Stage    

A Scholar and Artist of Remarkable Passion

A Scholar and Artist of Remarkable Passion

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”

    -Leonardo da Vinci

    For those of you who missed the recent Repository articles regarding the retirement of M.J. Albacete, executive director at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA) since 1988, I include here the links:

http://www.cantonrep.com/article/20140418/NEWS/140419100

http://www.cantonrep.com/article/20140421/OPINION/140429872/2013/OPINION

   Particularly thrilling was Gary Brown’s piece that started on the front page of the April 20 issue, and continued to occupy ALL of page A-6. I can’t recall reading a heftier or more warmly written Repository profile of a local citizen than this. And the fact that it speaks so comprehensively of one man’s astonishing impact on the local arts milieu is all the more gratifying.

   So while there’s no need here to recap his curriculum vitae or an inventory of the commanding CMA exhibitions presented during his tenure, I feel moved to offer some thoughts along more personal lines.

    I returned to Canton in late 1991 after living as an artist/ journalist in New York City for 14 years. It was to be at first a temporary geographic change - a critical crossroads as I needed to rethink the trajectory of my life. I don’t mind telling you that during my first several weeks here, I feared I had entered a cultural wasteland, devoid of a vibrant arts community or contemporary “gallery scene.”

    But it was in fact my earliest visits to the CMA in 1992 that greatly swayed my decision in favor of settling in Canton, and soon I was regularly reviewing its captivating exhibits for two regional arts publications. For the remainder of the 1990s and well beyond, I’ve had countless opportunities to speak with Mr. Albacete (whom I will henceforth refer to as Al) about the exhibits I was addressing. I remain wholly impressed by the depth of his analyses and his gift for articulating them beautifully, both in written and spoken form – something I consider to be a fine art in itself.

    From the beginning of our professional relationship, it was clear to me that his sage observations and assessments are predicated on a firm grasp of art history, which is in turn a manifestation of his very real passion for grasping and expressing essences. Through the years I’ve personally found that passion to be increasingly contagious, and I can’t be grateful enough.

   Long before Canton’s downtown arts scene became a reality, Al’s tenure was already distinguished by an astute attention to the highest standards of aesthetic quality as seen in CMA exhibitions.  More than an “executive” in the administrative sense, he is an inspired/ inspiring custodian and proponent of cultural excellence.  And while the museum has been  billed “First Stop” for the popular First Friday events downtown, I think it’s fair to say that the CMA has always been first in the minds of those who consider visual arts presentation as a vital component of Canton’s cultural profile. Thanks to Al’s tireless dedication to overseeing the presentation of truly edifying art, I also think it right, now more than ever before, to call the CMA “Gateway to the Canton Arts District.”

   Now, thinking about his immanent retirement and possible pursuits to come, I recall a few past Repository articles wherein some local leaders expressed their hopes for Canton to become a viable cultural destination beyond just a football mania Mecca. So here are a few questions – challenges, actually - to Repository policy makers: Do you share the same hopes? Is it unreasonable to think that your newspaper itself could be a relevant cultural destination? Then why not elevate public awareness and include the voice of Albacete in truly educating your readership through his writing on the arts?  

    On a lighter note, if there’s anything even vaguely resembling a dowdy side to Al’s myriad intellectual and artistic interests, it may well be his love for limericks. These are humorous poems usually associated with naughty (some might say “dirty”) content, comprised of five anapestic verses in a rhyme scheme of aabba. [Note: an anapest is a metrical foot consisting generally of two short syllables followed by one long syllable, or of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.]

    A few years ago we were exchanging thoughts, albeit somewhat jokingly, about the efficacy of writing “clean” limericks, even though the idea does seem antithetical to their traditional nature. Still, in fond remembrance of all our exhilarating exchanges over the years (and certainly in anticipation of more to come), I offer this closing shot to Al and all my readers:

    This is my work anapestic,

    only a little majestic.

    I labored last night

   to get these rhymes right,

   so here’s a poem antiseptic.

Music of the Spheres

Music of the Spheres

By Tom Wachunas

 

    Describing this season’s final concert by the Canton Symphony Orchestra at Umstattd Performing Arts Hall on April 26 brings to mind a bevy of feel-good bromides. Still, none would be more apropos than “out of this world.”

   Everything that makes this orchestra truly noteworthy was in full force. With just two works on the program – Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter”, and Holst’s The Planets, the orchestra under Maestro Gerhardt Zimmermann thrilled the capacity audience with its broad palette of commanding sonority, astonishing technical virtuosity and gripping expressionism.

    Zimmermann’s reading of Mozart’s greatest symphonic accomplishment was brilliantly balanced in its moderate pacing, precision of textures, and palpable affection for Mozart’s intricate, complex mixing of thematic motifs. That intricacy is clearly apparent in the first movement’s melding of majestic pomp with gentle graciousness. Even more so, the second movement is a sumptuous triad of contemplative, fiery and calming moods.

   But it’s in the ebullient finale where Mozart pulled out all the fugal stops as it were. The coda is a magnificent soundscape of five interwoven melodic elements and the orchestra met its dizzying contrapuntal challenges with remarkable clarity and authority. This was no headlong rush into perfunctory flamboyance, but rather a stunning surrender of sorts - an impassioned caress of the breathtaking power of the music itself.

    While Gustav Holst’s The Planets is certainly less complex than Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony in terms of its seven movements’ thematic structures, the work is nonetheless Olympian in its dramatic thrust.  Augmenting the already cinematic character of the music were the gorgeous HD projections on a giant screen above the orchestra. They were originally created by filmmaker Duncan Copp in cooperation with NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratories for a 2009 production by the Houston Symphony. The images were a constantly moving, hypnotic montage of photos from satellites, surface rovers and computer generated animations of vast alien landscapes.

    The orchestra has never been more startlingly thunderous, particularly during the brutish, menacing tumult of the first movement, Mars, the Bringer of War, or more committed to brassy, heroic jubilance than in the fourth movement, Jupiter. Balancing out these and other moments of rattling aural intensity were many powerful passages throughout the work wherein strings, winds and percussion soared into lyricism so crisp and shimmering that the air in the auditorium seemed to crystalize.

    As if defying the beautiful mass and poetic gravity of the previous six movements, Holst fashioned his final movement, Neptune, the Mystic, not as an outward burst of otherworldly wonder, but a diaphanous falling away of melodic fragments.

   Like so many meteoric trails of light, the orchestra evanesced into distant harmonies. Then, amid the instrumental fading, the faintest of eerie intonations from an offstage women’s chorus gradually emerged into a haunting, wordless cadence that in turn progressively drifted to nothing.

   This silence of the spheres was indeed a potent, mystical ending. Yet days after the concert, it continues to speak volumes in my memory – not so much of cosmic phenomena, but of the mesmerizing phenomenon that is the Canton Symphony Orchestra.   

   www.cantonsymphony.org

On the Commendable Wit and Wisdom of Comedienne Joan Rivers

Remembering the Week that Changed Everything

Remembering the Week that Changed Everything

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.”  - John 12:32

 

    It’s Holy Week. I’ve come to savor it as a time to consider and celebrate exactly what Jesus meant when he uttered his last words before dying – “It is finished.”

    Notice he didn’t say, “My life is finished.” “It” was his purpose on earth, the culmination of his incarnate walk among us. It was his design for all of humanity – an immutable, perfect design. It was the invitation to step into everlasting communion with him – our destiny, which he planned before any of us were here.

    In the crucible that is my still-evolving understanding of his very real, living presence, Jesus continues to make an eternal future with him accessible by dwelling in me. I am, to be sure, an imperfect abode for his Spirit. I am corrupted and corruptible, yet miraculously and progressively renewed as I am caught up in the throes of transformation.

    And so here I get around to offering for your consideration a 2013 work of mine that was included a short while ago in the Sacred Voices exhibit at the Canton Museum of Art (pictured above). Titled Drawn Clothes to Him, this mixed media (paint-stiffened clothing, graphite, 48” x 48”) wall piece is an ancestry totem of sorts. In that it takes a form suggestive of Jesus crucified, it is intended to declare my identification with him. This spiritual self-portrait is a meditation on New Testament writings by the apostle Paul, specifically those which describe believers as new beings, immersed in a spiritual process of complete identification with Christ crucified and risen.

    Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Particularly inspiring and relevant are these words from Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and again, from Galatians 3:27, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.”

    These cathartic verses would be meaningless were it not for what transpired in the last earthly days of Jesus – what we now call “Holy Week.”   Drawn Clothes to Him was made to be a physical expression of these verses – a tangible prayer of surrender to, and gratitude for what Jesus made possible.

   Finally, and with my deepest thanks, consider these additional words as Easter approaches:

   Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present you requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4: 4-7)

The Stuff of Akrewed Memories

The Stuff of Akrewed Memories

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”  - George Carlin

 

    EXHIBIT: From The House of Hoard: A Collector’s Collection of Hoard Couture, work by Judi Krew at Translations Art Gallery, 331 Cleveland Avenue NW, downtown Canton, THROUGH APRIL 26. Gallery open Wed. – Sat. Noon to 5 p.m.

    www.translationsart.com    www.judikrew.artspan.com 

 

    Assembled assorted appurtences of artistic attire. A bodacious bric-a-brac boutique. A curious collector’s colloquium on cheap chic. A disambiguation of dressy detritus. An elaborate exposition of eccentric entities. A fanciful flurry of floordrobes. A goofy gamut of glad rags. 

   Apparently, this show has awakened the word hunter/gatherer in me. It’s an appropriate enough pursuit when considering the content and presentation of Judi Krew’s Hoard Couture.

   With this exhibit, she showcases her ongoing line of sculpted dresses. It’s a sprawling pastiche of myriad odds and ends constructed to look like whacky pop diva gowns from another dimension (eat your hearts out Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ke$ha, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, et al.). But that’s a somewhat superficial impression. So don’t make the mistake of neglecting to read Krew’s statement as well as the title documents that accompany each work.

  You might call these objects the evolved culmination of an error in judgment - what she calls in her statement “…a great idea gone totally wrong.” Once upon a time, Krew determined a protocol for preserving personal memories by making dresses from all manner of well-organized and stored ingredients. So she insists she’s not a “hoarder” in the pathological sense of the word. Understandable enough. Call her, then, an avid gatherer of stuff with which she makes very funky armor against forgetting. She planned to put her creations on hangers. However, the formal demands in manifesting her idea presented unforeseen problems to be solved. Krew needed to be not just an inventive clothier, but a structural engineer as well. The dresses far outgrew closet storage, blossoming into full-fledged freestanding sculptures. And they lived heftily ever after.

     A host of heady hilarities. Judi-cious jumbles of jocular junk. Lavish lumps of levity. A marvelous marrying of materials. A pretty profusion of processed petticoats.  A riotous raiment roundup.

    Humorous word-play is a significant element in Krew’s descriptions. One dress laden with animal bones and fur is marked, “They used to say I was nothing but skin and bones.” Another made of matchbooks, “This dress could be really hot if it were not so striking.” And another - a second version of a wedding gown made from plastic Wonder Bread wrappers and which melted in an unprotected gallery window – reads, “She rises again…it was the yeast I could do.”

    Beyond the sheer spectacle of meticulously composed color schemes, engaging pattern dynamics and entertaining tactile ornamentation, these works are intriguing celebrations of the power of physical matter to evoke the intangible. Ordinary consumerist tchotchkes take on a vibrant life of their own and become extraordinary totems of remembrance – what Krew likens to “…personal encyclopedias or scrapbooks.”  

    Snappy samplings of surreal styles. A treasure trove of tantalizing textures. A vantage point on variform vanities. Wondrous wads of whimsicality. A zenith of zany Zeitgeist.