A Curious and Bounteous Harvest

"Father Neophytes, Sinai" by Micha Bar-Am

"After Micha Bar-Am" by Marti Jones Dixon

"The Wooden Shoemaker" by Brenda James

"Elevated" by Heather Bullach

"Kaiyukan Aquarium" by Len Jenshel

"The Emperor" by Bobby Rosenstock

From Waterline Portfolio, by Arno Rafael

"The Dichotomy of Creativity" by Erin Mulligan

Untitled, by Myron Davis

"Immersion" by Michele Waalkes

"Man Handing Chair Into Woman..." by Robert Doisneau

Untitled by Ashley Mary

"Audrey Hepburn, Wedding Day, 1954" by Ernst Haas

"Vestal Virgin" by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker

A Curious and Bounteous Harvest

By Tom Wachunas

   “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” ― Albert Einstein

   “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” ― Erich Fromm

   EXHIBIT:  Double Exposure, THROUGH OCT. 27, 2018, at The Joseph Saxton Gallery of Photography, 520 Cleveland Ave. NW, in downtown Canton / Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Curated by Craig Joseph / Participating artists are: Tim Eakin, Kevin Anderson, Michele Waalkes, Margene May, Maria Hadjian, Beth Nash, Matthew Doubek, Annette Yoho Feltes, Erin Sweeney, Clare Murray Adams, Tim Carmany, Steve Ehret, Hugo Nadelbaum, Ashley Mary, Patricia Zinsmeister Parker, Bobby Rosenstock, Jesse Ewing, Kari Halker-Saathoff, Scot Phillips, Tom Wachunas, Marcy Axelband, Heather Bullach, Erin Mulligan, Sally Priscilla Lytle, Tina Myers, Kat Francis, Rich Pellegrino, Marti Jones Dixon, Jessica Bennett, and Christopher Triner.

   Curator Craig Joseph assigned each of the 30 artists in this exhibit a rarely or never before exhibited photograph from the Saxton Gallery archives. He then asked simply that they respond to the photograph by making a work of art in a medium of their own choosing. There were no other restrictions. In assessing the outcome, he tells us in his statement for the show, “…Some of them have re-created; some have gone in a totally different direction. Some have devised narratives; some have abstracted the source. But all of them have started a dialogue that we hope you’ll be a part of.”

   All representational photographs (i.e., pictorial likenesses to actual persons, places, events, or things) are, by their very nature, contrived compressions, or extreme distillations, of three-dimensional “realities” on to a two-dimensional picture plane. Even at their most mimetic or illusory, photographs are in that sense essentially abstractions. So it’s fair to say that each invited artist here has constructed an abstraction of an abstraction, either physically, conceptually, or both. Think of Craig Joseph’s curatorial invitation as you would a sower casting seeds across a fertile field – artists’ minds. The seeds grow, nurtured by that enigmatic, metaphysical phenomenon we call creativity - a quickening of memory, intuition, and inspiration. So this exhibit is a reaping that yields a veritable cornucopia of formal genres and styles - a lavish feast to sate all manner of aesthetic appetites. 

   Most interesting to me is is how, for the most part, the pieces made for this show don’t depend solely upon their photographic prompts to be interpreted or appreciated as discrete, engaging works of art in their own right.  

   Some of them are compositionally faithful to their photographic sources while enhancing or emphasizing a particular emotional or psychological perspective. Marti Jones Dixon’s painterly “After Micha Bar-Am,” for example, significantly intensifies the spiritual drama of Micha Bar-Am’s black and white portrait, “Father Neophytes, Sinai.” 

   Other works have extracted and expanded upon a specific visual component of the photograph, such as in Heather Bullach’s “Elevated,” a hyper-realistic oil painting of a haute couture high heel shoe. It’s a slick, sleek and spectacular divergence from the photograph by Brenda James, “The Wooden Shoemaker.”  And in a delightful take on a photograph by Len Jenshel called “Kaiyukan Aquarium,” Bobby Rosenstock’s tantalizing color woodcut, “The Emperor,” focuses on a single penguin.

   The connections between call and response in this context can range widely between edgy whimsicality - as in Kevin Anderson’s wonderfully giggle-inducing interactive sculpture “Some Rules Are Meant To Be Broken…” -  and the tenuous if not arcane. In that regard, the photo by Arno Rafael Minkinnen, “From Waterline Portfolio,” is strange and dream-like enough on its own terms. Perhaps not surprisingly, Erin Mulligan’s “The Dichotomy of Creativity,” an oil painting rendered in her signature fantastical/surreal style, is stranger still, but certainly no less intriguing.

   Maybe you could call Michele Waalkes’ “Immersion” an example of Romantic Minimalism. It’s a highly reductive sculpture in translucent blue resin forms that suggest the ocean waves you see in the untitled Myron Davis photo of a couple kissing in the surf.  Reductive, too, is the untitled acrylic abstract painting by Ashley Mary, in response to Robert Doisneau’s black and white “Man Handing Chair Into Woman In Newstand.” Yet for all of the painting’s smallness of scale, those electrifying colors exude an uncanny largeness. 

    Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s mixed media painting, “Vestal Virgin,” morphs the sophisticated, elegant film star, Audrey Hepburn - seen in the Ernst Haas photo, “Audrey Hepburn, Wedding Day, 1954” -  into a visceral, even lurid likeness of someone far less refined. Oh, the impudence! I could almost hear Parker’s lippy dame intoning, “The rine in spine falls minely in the pline.” Sassy.