Digging Through, Seeing In

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 21^st, 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

http://caroldiamond.com/index.html

[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, “125^th 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 / 125^th Street Arches