Ascending to the Depths

Ascending to the Depths

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

    EXHIBIT: “The Tree of Life” – Mixed media assemblages and watercolors by Scott Bryant, at the Little Art Gallery, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 North Main Street, North Canton / one week remaining – on view THROUGH OCTOBER 4 / 330.499.4712

   My desire to post a more timely commentary on this exhibit has been thwarted both by a daunting teaching schedule and the complexity of my interpretation of Scott Bryant’s work. The latter reason is quite ironic because in many ways I consider him something of a kindred spirit, both on the superficial plane of his sculptural working materials (combinations of found objects, paint-stiffened fabric, and various other common substances)  and for the spiritual thrust of the subject matter.  

    After initially viewing his pieces at the September 3 reception (which include ten mixed media sculptures, each with an accompanying watercolor painting numbered in the image with Roman numerals I through X), I was unusually eager to write about them, only to experience an unsettling and protracted realization that I couldn’t easily distinguish between forest and trees, as it were. Part of my dilemma was rooted in the sheer diversity of esoteric imagery that Bryant presents.

    He tells us in his statement that “…this collection was nurtured through years of personal and spiritual seeking and study.” A pilgrim’s quest, then? In that sense, aren’t all artists - and for that matter, all serious viewers of art – pilgrims of a kind? More specifically, Bryant references “The Tree of Life” and its ten spheres, or animating energies, as “the timeless blueprint explaining the construction of the universe.” What he doesn’t specify in so many words is his embrace of The Kabbalah, an ancient body of teachings originating in Judaic mysticism that addresses, among other things, the nature of the cosmos. That said, some viewers might infer as much via the Hebrew script that Bryant incorporates in his watercolors.

    In any case, The Kabbalah articulates the Tree of Life as a sort of “map” of creation and an embodiment of ten Divinely-revealed principles for life. Additionally, there are syncretic adaptations of Kabbalah teachings to be found in the writings of some Christian mystics as well as Greco-Roman philosophies/religions. So it’s no surprise that beyond the Judaic iconography in Bryant’s work, we also encounter Christian and mythological references.

    Bryant’s assemblages – at once biomorphic and architectonic - are placed atop open-volume pedestals made from what appear to be recycled wooden crates or warehouse pallets. It’s an austere and airy look, yet complementary to the visceral physicality of the assemblages on top. These are 3D meditations, like so many impromptu shrines, or altars erected along the way to a holy destination.

    Some of the figural elements blended into the assemblages are rendered with remarkable finesse, as in the eerie, purple shrouded figure in Transformation (#9). But for pure fluidity of form and lyrical impact, none is more elegant than the free-standing sandstone sculpture (wonderfully polished to suggest wood), The Flame. While it is actually not part of the ten-work “Tree of Life” sequence, the spiraling, abstracted figures locked in a kiss are nonetheless a thematically relevant and compelling symbol of unified materiality and spirit.      

    After an extended second viewing of the exhibit, and beyond any strictly formal or conceptual analyses, it occurred to me that Bryant’s work resonates enough outside the confines of its physical properties or specificity of historical sources. I’m reminded of art’s potential to transcend even an artist’s most nobly-stated intentions, and of art’s capacity to lead us on unexpected ascents to other fruitful places. Such as the mind of God, for example.

   One could well ask, “What’s Bryant’s work really about?” Based on his statement alone, from his perspective as I understand it, the short answer is… everything. Hoping not to sound too flippant or obtuse, I’ve grown increasingly comfortable with the long answer: everything else.

    PHOTOS, from top: The Flame; Transformation - #9; Severity (Gevurah)-#5; Passion Burns - #5; Beauty (Tiferet)- #6

Tender Terrors

 Tender Terrors

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…I grew old distracting myself from what I knew to be true. And then, just like I knew it would, it came late one night, looming with slowness, from the fjords.” –from What Would Kill Me, poem by Zachary Schomburg

    EXHIBIT: FJORDS – Art inspired by the poetry of Zachary Schomburg, through September 26^th, presented by Translations Art Gallery at Cyrus Custom Framing, located at 2645 Cleveland Ave NW, Canton 44709, with over 30 artists exhibiting.  (330) 452 – 9787  www.translationsart.com

    Zachary will be coming to Ohio and doing a poetry reading and book-signing on Thursday, September 24th, from 7-9 PM, at Cyrus.

   Webster defines fjord, or fiord, as “a narrow inlet or arm of the sea bordered by steep cliffs...” So already, the imagery conjured in our minds sets up an expectation of encounters with the strange, dangerous, and perhaps mystical. From that perspective, this exhibit doesn’t disappoint.

    After reading several of the poems from Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords, volume 1, and viewing their accompanying art works, I began to envision myself in a Quentin Tarantino movie, speaking the poems out loud, as in reporting my dreams to a psychiatrist. He’s gonna have a Freudian field day with this stuff, I’m thinking. The good doctor looks up from his note pad and pensively sucks his pen for a few seconds before mumbling the proverbial, “So tell me, how does that make you feel?” At which point I leap from the couch and punch him repeatedly in his face. As I wipe my bloodied knuckles on his chest, our eyes lock. His are wide, unblinking, terrified. “Thanks, Dad,” I say, leaving the room, adding, “I love you.”

   Rest assured that such an event would never transpire in my personal dealings. But it wouldn’t be so shocking in the situations and circumstances that Mr. Schomburg describes. He does so neither with sing-songy rhymes nor metric rhythms, but rather by seamlessly blending conflicted emotional rhythms. “There is one tree for every person,” he writes in The Killing Trees, “and the trees have all started falling on the person they’ve grown tall to fall on…” His image-laden sentences are delivered with such matter-of-fact, disarmingly conversational ease that their often barbed absurdities, or their precarious and occasionally nihilistic content, can take on an edgy humor if not unexpected tenderness.

   So Schomburg’s world is a fated one where, among other possibilities, people routinely wait for purposed trees to fall down and crush their skulls; where kids’ cereal is a malevolent commodity; where you might not be able to get into the movie theater because the clerk is having sex in the ticket booth; where rescue from disaster can make you just as likely to fall in love with the inevitability of death as with the rescuer.

   There are many commendable artworks in this exhibit – wildly diverse in styles and media - by more than 30 artists from both the Canton area (including some made in classes at the Stark County Board of Developmental disabilities) and outside our region. The ones I find especially arresting are those that - while to varying degrees recapitulating specific imagery from Schomburg’s words - resonate necessarily as metaphors for, or symbols of the poems’ often enigmatic and metaphysical aspects.

    Here’s just a partial list, pictured above in the following order. Tim Belden’s digital photo collage, Dead Star Breakfast Versus The Ming Muses (from the poem, What Would Kill Me) – a crispy contemporary Pop icon of insouciant cultural consumerism; Matt Medla’s monochromed painting on a knobless door, Boy in Waiting (from the poem, The Killing Trees) – a moving portrait of contemplative loneliness; Patrick Buckohr’s acrylic painting on a stressed wood panel, Because It Comes Right At You Does Not Mean It Comes To Save You (from the poem of the same name) – ambiguous and foreboding; Annette Yoho Feltes’ mixed media assemblage, The Relationship was Balanced by Equal Amounts of Baggage (from the poem, Someone Falls in Love with Someone) – a vaguely erotic device looking like it came from a Medieval alchemist’s lab.   

    This exhibit offers an intriguing take on “fate” and “bittersweet.” Many of the poems seem characterized by a wearied resolve, like knowing that even as you bite into a succulent peach, your pleasure is destined to end with cracking a tooth on the pit. And the idea of a fjord still looms large. There’s the lingering sense – alternately intriguing and cloying – that even if we’re left terribly mangled from our torturous slide down its stony ledges, there’s always the waiting arms of the sea. There, we’ll either bleed out, drown, or tread water until saved.

   Life can be like that.

Vista Botanica

Vista Botanica

By Tom Wachunas

 

    EXHIBIT: Vista Botanica, at Gallery 6000: works by Carolyn Jacob, Judi Krew, Eleanor Kuder, Margo Miller and Ron Watson THROUGH OCTOBER 30, 2015 / located in the CONFERENCE CENTER DINING ROOM at KENT STATE UNIVERSITY AT STARK, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio. OPENING RECEPTION on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 5:30-7:30 P.M.

PLEASE RSVP to Lori Caughey at 330-244-3518, or lcaughey@kent.edu

Directions: http://www.kent.edu/stark/cucc/directions-maps

   “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”  -Paul Cezanne

    “Paint the essential character of things.”  -Camille Pissaro

    At the risk of indulging overly much in shameless self-aggrandizement, I’m telling you right now that in the roughly seven years that I’ve been curating group exhibitions at Gallery 6000, I don’t believe I’ve hung a show that fills the space with more delicious snap, crackle, and pop than this one. The cereal…er, uhm, serial feel of these botanical or landscape-themed works from five artists sets up an exhilarating journey through dazzling colors, forms, and textures. Call it a paean to Nature’s exquisite material structures and ineffable spiritualities.

    Toward that end, my inclusion of Ron Watson’s charcoal drawings may seem an improbable or counterintuitive one. But I think the idea he has rendered here speaks to subtler aspects of landscape art than do the visual components we typically encounter in the genre.

     If ever there was a primordial drawing medium, it’s charcoal – carbonized remnants of trees, essentially. From that perspective, there’s an intrinsic hauntedness and timeless quietude about Watson’s drawings. I don’t see these as depictions of foreboding skies or fields so much as soulful tone poems about contrasts – organic natural architectures silhouetted in misty atmosphere. And even at their most opaque or saturated, the velvety blacks still seem to breathe.

    Speaking of breathing in primordial Nature, while weeding through the loamy remnants of my summer garden recently, I was reminded of Eleanor Kuder’s arresting mixed media works on paper. Spatial depth in her pictures has for the most part been compressed into shallow planes dense with literal and abstracted references to floral life, such as in In The Garden. There’s a delightful, palpably spontaneous energy in the way Kuder incorporates linear contours that alternately define her forms and dissolve into animated clusters of radiant color.

    Expressionistic linearity of a different sort energizes the luscious sylvan character of the large oil canvases by Margo Miller. Undulate, for example, effectively lives up to its name with its rhythmic intertwining of large leafy forms in analogous blues and greens, punctuated by smaller “undergrowth” markings in complementary hues. All four of Miller’s works here balance the micro with the macro to evoke a sense of mystical discovery. The flowing breadth of her tactile brush strokes exudes remarkable gestural confidence, giving the notion of “forest” a metaphysical dimensionality.

    Judi Krew’s acrylic paintings sizzle with chromatic electricity. I’ve never seen ROY G. BIV so splendidly attired. Krew’s deft management of a hyperbolic palette, spread across a complex formal composition with spatial ambiguities, is particularly intriguing in her spectacular Shadow Play. Reversals of figure/ground, negative/positive shape dynamics make the shadows of buds and blossoms appear like so many spritely ghosts dancing amid the cactus forms.

    Rounding out this gathering are the digital photographs by Carolyn Jacob. Her approach is richly varied, ranging from documentary, as in the beatific Floralique, to the abstract, almost painterly Impression of a Rose. For all their modesty of scale, Jabob’s images constitute a decidedly enlarged vision of botanical lyricism. As such, they’re a stunning contribution to an exhibit best seen as an encounter with pure enchantment.

    PHOTOS, from top: In The Garden, by Eleanor Kuder; Floralique, by Carolyn Jacob; Undulate, by Margo Miller; Cattails, by Ron Watson; Shadow Play, by Judi Krew 

Momentous Mayhem

Momentous Mayhem

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…This is the moment! Damn all the odds! This day, or never, I’ll sit forever with the gods!...”  –lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, for the musical Jekyll & Hyde

    It’s not unreasonable to think that the very idea of making Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, into a musical theatre work would seem destined from the start to be little more than a predictable exercise in cheesy melodrama. On its surface anyway, the 1997 musical (book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, music by Frank Wildhorn) lives up to that potential.

   The task of transcending the musical adaptation’s rhetorical histrionics to offer something of truly artful substance rests squarely with the director and cast. I’m thrilled to report that in this Players Guild production, director/ choreographer Michael Lawrence Akers and his cast have accomplished the task in memorably grand fashion.

   Set in 1888 London, the iconic tale of Dr. Henry Jekyll and his diabolical alter-ego, Edward Hyde - and Jekyll’s noble but futile mission to eradicate human evil – unfolds, or rather explodes, on the Guild’s downstairs arena stage. It’s the physical intimacy of that environment which very effectively foments an already turgid narrative and magnifies the astonishing expressivity of the cast.

   In his dual role of Jekyll and Hyde, Joe Haladey delivers an utterly electrifying and uncanny rendering of impassioned light hopelessly fused with horrific darkness. As Jekyll, his tenor vocalizations are heart-piercing in their tender or plaintive sincerity, particularly in moments with his betrothed, Emma. In that role, Amanda Medley shines with her crystalline soprano. The sweetness of her character’s faith in her beloved Jekyll slowly fades to credible perplexity and hurt as he increasingly gives himself over to his doomed experiment.   

   Haladey’s Edward Hyde, as you might expect, is another matter altogether. From the gnarled face, the fly-away tangled hair (as Jekyll, his hair is tied back in a ponytail), and glaring eyes, to the gravel seemingly embedded in his lower-register voice, the transformation is wholly startling. And nowhere is his classically articulated struggle between good and evil more riveting than in the appropriately titled song, “The Confrontation,” late in Act II. Haladey is a frightening, agile embodiment of split personality.

    The alluring, silken muscularity of Heidi Swinford’s singing voice is well-suited to playing the role of Lucy - a sultry, hapless prostitute. Along with her companions draped in Victorian-era lingerie (all the period costumes designed by George McCarty II are stunning), she struts about a tavern with campy sensuality in “Bring On the Men.” Careful what you wish for, Lucy.

     Not long after she meets Jekyll, and being deeply moved by his goodness, the dichotomous tensions of the story become ever more taut  when Hyde seeks out Lucy’s “services,” only to subject her to his numbing, carnal cruelties. Those are choreographed with enough vicious authenticity in their duet, “Dangerous Game,” to raise an audible grimace from the audience. Later in the proceedings, Swinford and Medley join for one of the show’s most intensely poignant songs, “In His Eyes,” wherein Lucy and Emma, each unbeknown to the other, voice their affections for Jekyll with impressive bravura.  As with all the songs here, the singing is crisply enunciated in perfect balance with the beautiful sonority of the off-stage live orchestra under the direction of Steve Parsons.        

    Following each instance when Hyde executes his bloody sentence on a prominent citizen, the panicked townsfolk scurry on to the stage, holding up their newspapers’ front pages about the latest homicide, frantically waving them like so many surrender flags. The lavish ensemble number, “Murder, Murder,” becomes a desperate societal chant, thunderous in its polyphonic harmonies.

    A haunting allegory of our depraved times? Great theatre such as this can make it hard to tell the difference between art and life.     

    Jekyll & Hyde – The Musical, at Players Guild Theatre’s W.G. Fry Theatre, 1001 Market Avenue N, Canton, Ohio. THROUGH SEPTEMBER 20 / Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 PM, Sundays at 2:00 PM / Single Tickets $26, 17 and younger $19, Seniors $23 / BOX OFFICE (330)453-7617 / www.playersguildtheatre.com

    PHOTOS, courtesy Players Guild Theatre: Joe Haladey as Edward Hyde, and Heidi Swinford playing Lucy

Intimate Encounters

Intimate Encounters

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” –English critic Walter Pater, 1873

 

    EXHIBITS: Recent paintings by Marti Jones Dixon at Journey Art Gallery, 431 4^th Street (downtown Canton) THROUGH SEPT. 30; ALSO, Scenes From Hitchcock, at Julz by Alan Rodriguez, 220 Market Ave. N (downtown Canton), THROUGH OCT. 31

    At one point during my drive home from Journey Art Gallery after viewing these recent oil paintings by Marti Jones Dixon, the lovely Barcarolle from Offenbach’s opera, “Tales of Hoffman,” came on the radio. It was one of those uncanny moments when music absolutely clarified and magnified a visual encounter.

    Barcarolles were originally musical expressions based on the lilting, slow rhythms of folk melodies sung by Venetian gondoliers. And suddenly a picture coalesced in my mind of Marti Dixon gently – but oh so purposefully - laying down paint on a canvas, as if rowing through a scene, stroke by stroke.

    The images themselves can best be described as contemporary “genre art” – scenes of everyday life. [Note: the exhibit at Julz, which I’m not reviewing in this post, features scenes from Alfred Hitchcock films wherein Hitchcock inserted himself.] But this isn’t to denigrate them as being commonplace or unremarkable.  For that, all we need do is surf digital social media to look at myriad manifestations of photographic mediocrity.

   So yes, Dixon’s oil paintings are derived from photos, and their small scale enhances their casual, snapshot immediacy. Viewing them isn’t too unlike browsing through the artist’s personal photo album, or someone’s Facebook page. After that, though, what separates them from being ordinary depictions of the familiar is Dixon’s consummate skill in constructing, or orchestrating various elements that transform them into elegantly painted realities – parallel to observable reality, yet separate and unique.

    Here is an intimate world, true to itself. Dixon models her figures and objects not with the illusionistic drama of chiaroscuro, or by dazzling us with hyper-realist linear details, but with planes of color subtly modulated with distinct brush marks. The gestural confidence and fluidity of those markings at times recalls a Cezannesque expressivity, though perhaps not quite so muscular in nature. Paired with her translation of diffused light, which we might call warm or optimistic, most of these scenes are imbued with a tangible quietude and serenity.

   Meanwhile, there’s just the right touch of narrative and compositional mystique in some of them. We don’t directly know the people depicted, yet somehow feel invited to eavesdrop, or enter the space they occupy.  Bally Maloe House is a fascinating, unified fusion of rectilinear and curvilinear pictorial space. While the central room in the image recedes inward to another room’s doorway, its light-colored ceiling seems to flare outward and forward on the top left edge of the painting to a darkened, arched point, playfully directing our attention to both the staircase leading up, and outward, beyond the picture plane. What room might we encounter then? Could it be the lovely chamber where the man and woman are seated at the table in Tea? 

  Dixon’s relaxed technique allows each brush stroke, each individually described shape, to have a character all its own - like a musician’s solo passages beautifully integrated with the structured, lyrical rhythms of the full orchestra. Shhh. Can you hear the harmonies?

    PHOTOS (from top):  Edie Coming In; Bally Maloe House; Tea; Green Room