Valuing the invaluable: And the winner is...

"Fourier" by David Kuntzman

"The Nightgown" by William M. Bogdan

"L3-L4" by Stephen Tornero

"Burdened and Becoming #2" by Spencer S. Molnar

"Diary Portrait #58" by Anna Rather

"Chasing Shadows" by Laura Donnelly

Valuing the invaluable: And the winner is…

By Tom Wachunas

   “The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.”  - Chris Ofili

   EXHIBIT: Stark County Artists Exhibition / THROUGH JANUARY 13, 2019 / at the Massillon Museum,  121 Lincoln Way East in downtown Massillon / Tuesday through Saturday 9:30am - 5:00pm, Sunday 2:00pm - 5:00pm / Phone: 330-833-4061 /

 http://www.massillonmuseum.org/

   It’s baaack…The Massillon Museum’s annual juried Stark County Artists Exhibition. By now, many of you readers have already seen it. If not, there’s still a little more time to do so, and it would be time very well spent. This diverse collection – 55 works by 43 artists chosen from 206 submissions from 84 artists - is even more exciting than last year’s in just about every way. And once again, I’m elated and grateful to be included.

   One predictable aspect of the show keeps it safely ensconced in the sacrosanct tradition of awarding prizes. It’s a typical practice that chooses one piece to be Best in Show, then a Second Place, then a Third Place, and several Honorable Mentions. In the past I’ve described the practice as stale and even at times feckless. In short, a largely irrelevant ritual. I still hold that view. More on this a bit later.

   Meanwhile, the photos I include here, in no particular order, are of just a few of many works I consider especially compelling or particularly fascinating in this exhibit. Two of the pieces pictured here are on the exhibition list of award winners; four are not. I’m choosing not to tell you which are which because the jurors’ awards in this show had only a small impact on my own assessments.

   David Kuntzman’s acrylic painting, Fourier, is downright spectacular in its sheer precision of execution.  With intersecting angular planes of eye-popping color, Kuntzman has constructed a playful geometric marvel of spatial ambiguity.

    There’s a stark, haunting simplicity to William Bogdan’s manually colored woodcut, The Nightgown. While the claustrophobic verticality of the work feels funereal, suggesting a person squeezed into a coffin, the featureless, tightly framed figure of the woman inside seems not so much gone, but uncannily present and rising.

   The linen weaving by Stephen Tornero, L3-L4, is an exquisitely crafted, fibrous organism or perhaps a landscape of sorts. It’s a dynamic tour de force of myriad threads that seem to breathe through undulating colors and patterns.

    Spencer S. Molnar’s abstract Burdened and Becoming #2 (acrylic, spray paint, and charcoal on canvas) is a startling, electrifying portrait –  bursting with vicious angst and raucous glee all at once. Electrifying, too, is the textured Diary Portrait #58 (mixed media), by Anna Rather. Here is a mesmerizing, shaman-like figure floating in the dark, with eight hands  conjuring or emanating (or absorbing?) all sorts of bright energy currents and waves of particulate matter and runic marks.

   And speaking of effective textures, with her modular Chasing Shadows, Laura Donnelly gives us a tender remembrance of a mother walking with her child on a sunny day. Donnelly adorned her ceramic grid of handmade stoneware tiles with a wispy rendering of the walking figures and their elongated shadows, and also incised the clay with subtle decorative patterns. Additionally, the tiles aren’t all mounted as if on a flat floor or wall. A few of them float above the picture plane, casting their own shadows, and enhancing the sense of motion in space. 

   I don’t think it at all unreasonable to expect that another group of jurors might designate any one of these, or for that matter a considerable number of other works in this exhibit, as the Best in Show, or second, third, etc. My annual complaints about hierarchies of awards are not at all meant to impugn the intelligence, integrity, or sincerity of the jurors.

   But the problem remains. Keep in mind that in juried shows, the works we see represent a daunting enough process of judging, of choosing. Any work we see has in effect already received a significant award, or honor, by virtue of being just that – one of the Chosen. I call the process ‘daunting’ because like it or not, for better or worse, in the realm of the arts there is no such thing as a universally applicable algorithm for objectively discerning absolute formal or conceptual excellence. There’s no inviolable constitution of art laws. Now more than ever before, isn’t it interesting how eagerly we might honor a work for how imaginatively it breaks what few academic rules of aesthetic order remain in place these days? That’s the delightfully unreasonable nature of this beautiful beast we call art – its often vexing capacity for usurping the status quo, for defying expectation, for posing tough questions rather than easy answers. Despite (or sometimes even because of ?) a juror’s education, experience, or expertise, it usually comes down in the end to subjective matters of personal tastes, biases, predispositions - at best a consensus of well-meaning opinions.

   Given these variables, our current paradigm for juried art exhibitions tends to be an exercise in distinctions without a difference. Instead of calling the folks who select the art ‘jurors,’ could we simply call them co-curators?  And in place of a descending order of monetary prizes, how about no prizes at all? If we still insist on giving some sort of special recognition beyond the very real honor of being one of the Chosen, maybe each curator could simply choose a favorite piece or two and issue a spiffy certificate declaring as much and leave it at that.

   Dreaming aside, somehow I don’t think such ideas will gain much traction in this culture of ours, entrenched as it is in cherished rituals of competition and celebrity. We love our trophies perhaps too much.

   In any case, let’s not forget the most unheralded winners of this art contest – the public viewing community. They’re not charged an entry fee, and they get to see invaluable evidence of extraordinary experiments and probative visions from another remarkable community - Stark County’s  artists. As a citizen of both communities, I am doubly blessed.

   Happy New Year.