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| Sauntering, by Randi Reiss-McCormack |
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| Bush with Sky, by Robert Solomon |
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| RED HERRING, by Gerri Rachins |
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| Domain, by Thomas Berding |
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| A Darlington Square, by Anthony Cuneo |
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| Recollection No. 94 (Los Angeles) |
In a New York State of Mind (Part 2)
By Tom Wachunas
"Quite simply, I was in love with New
York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love
with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you
never love anyone quite that way again.” — Joan Didion
EXHIBIT: Mutual Aid – a group exhibition at The
Lemmon Gallery, Located inside the Kent Stark Fine Arts Building, 6000 Frank
Avenue, North Canton, Ohio / THROUGH OCTOBER 26, 2018 / Gallery viewing hours
are Monday – Thursday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m, and Friday 11 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. RECEPTION
on Thursday Oct. 18, 5 – 7 p.m.
/ Contact: Professor Jack McWhorter,
Since resettling in Stark County in 1992 with
a vague hope of connecting with a thriving contemporary painting and gallery
milieu, I still often miss breathing in the crackling atmosphere of painters
regularly engaged in bold experimentation, and experiencing the scope and depth
of their probative visions that made my life in New York for 14 years so
inspiring and enlivening. In these parts,
while there is certainly a noteworthy contingent of such adventurous painters,
they’re a relative minority. A majority of local artists exhibit a
comparatively constricted aesthetic identity, with a propensity for the pretty,
the already tried and true, the tepid and the quiet,…stuff safely ensconced in
the more predictable, quotidian conventionalities of traditional artmaking.
With this
visitation from city that never sleeps, Mutual
Aid is another gratifying example of how the gallery exhibitions at Kent
Stark are so consistently compelling in drawing a bead on the rich and
sprawling vista of contemporary art beyond our immediate region. If you’ve not
yet read the background / thematic statement for this show, posted here on
October 3 (Part 1), I think it important you do so. Here’s a link:
Also,
another key to appreciating the artists’ motivations here can be found by reading
their statements in the exhibition’s excellent digital catalogue, so here’s
that link:
In appreciating the
thematic parameters for this show as laid out in the exhibition statement, I
found one application of the ‘mutual aid’ concept to be particularly resonant
when appreciating the sheer diversity of the artists’ approaches. It’s the idea
that mutual aid “…is an acknowledgement that paintings create a relationship
between two things or situations that suggest ‘multi-directional
conversations.’”
Think of
conversation here as a call-and-response dynamic. Painters can be great
conversationalists, which is to say they’re initiators of, as well as
respondents to not only ideas, feelings, chosen models, or memories, but also
the process itself of manipulating paint. A mark, a brushstroke, a shape, or a
color can activate, or ‘call’ another into being, and another, and another, and
so forth. The painting itself becomes a codified map or journal of protracted thinking,
actions, and reactions through time. The entire exhibit is a wholly engaging
dialectic on the often complicated relationships between intuition and
intention, conscious design and chance occurrence, harmony and dissonance,
mimesis and deconstruction.
Here’s just some of
the many works I found especially
arresting: The frenetic flirtation with intricacy and chaos in Randi
Reiss-McCormack’s Sauntering; the
runic simplicity and indeterminate space of Robert Solomon’s Bush with Sky; the enigmatic playfulness
of Gerri Rachins’ RED HERRING; the
sumptuous textures and motion in Thomas Berding’s Domain; the ghosts under the geometry in Anthony Cuneo’s A Darlington Square; the reductive,
monolithic flatness of that looming black shape in Barbara Marks’ Reflection
No. 94 (Los Angeles). What is that
thing anyway? A tree? An alien vessel landing? A tornado touching down? Toto, I
have a feeling we’re not in Canton anymore.
Levity aside, it’s in that challenging place
of not always knowing precisely what we’re looking at - of allowing for the
intrigue of unanswered (or unanswerable) questions - where much of the allure of
this show is to be found. There’s meaning in the mysteries if we can grasp that
paintings, and the processes of
making them, are essentially metaphors for not just the celebration of the
familiar and the understood, but for navigating all manner of existential
conditions, including life’s most vexing conundrums.
So if a painter can
let a painting emerge and simply be on
its own terms, we as viewers, in the
spirit of mutual aid, can often return the favor by not overthinking it. Then maybe Descartes’ classic
philosophical tenet of Cogito, ergo sum
(I think, therefore I am) could give way to the much more scintillating Miror, ergo vivo - I wonder, therefore I live.
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