Looking Beyond Anemic Nostalgia

Looking Beyond Anemic Nostalgia

"Rumspringa" by Russ Hench

"Saccharin" by Jake Messinger

"I Can Resist Anything Except Temptation" by John Bruce Alexander

"Sisters" by William Bogdan

"Elevated" by Heather Bullach

"Summer into Fall III" by Diane Belfiglio

By Tom Wachunas

   “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”  - Edgar Degas

   EXHIBIT: The 77^th Annual May Show, at The Little Art Gallery, THROUGH JUNE 1, 2019, located in the North Canton Public Library, 185 N Main St, North Canton, OH / viewing hours are  Monday – Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. (closed Sundays Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day)

   In years past, I’ve appreciated the Annual May Show at The Little Art Gallery in the same way some folks enjoy the sparkling effervescence of very fine champagne. Though it pains me to think it, the current group of 53 works chosen by jurors Andrew Richmond and Cris Dugan from 81 submissions has, for the most part, all the zest of homogenized milk.  

   This year’s exhibit is a numbing overdose of strictly representational imagery. My intention is certainly not to categorically denigrate the historic precedents for this kind of art (portraiture and figurative, landscape, animal and floral, still lifes). Still, I miss seeing work from some of our region’s accomplished practitioners of non-objective abstraction.

   My overall disappointment, however, isn’t with representational art per se so much as with the largely prosaic and impotent character of the content on display here. Throughout the show there seems to be a reigning spirit of nostalgia for tried and true academic aesthetic traditions, but it’s a clichéd and anemic one. If the gallery were a restaurant, you might feel hard- pressed to find a gourmet-quality meal. That said, there are a few savory entrées (and I’m not referring to the jurors’ award winners) in this hodgepodge of otherwise generic side dishes.

   Russ Hench’s spectacular acrylic on paper, Rumspringa, is a bubbly whoosh of mesmerizing, hyper-tiny textures and patterns – a liquid, kaleidoscopic  dream. And speaking of dreams, there’s the enigmatic surrealism of Jake Mensinger’s oil on canvas, Saccharin. The strange theatricality of it is a salient reminder of the magnetic power of sheer mystery.   

   A more jarring theatricality is in play with John Bruce Alexander’s dizzying mixed media collage, I Can Resist Anything Except Temptation. The work is an explosive rush of maniacal memes and topical tropes about the contagion of societal ills that plague us, all floating inside a glass box like an emergency alarm. A mad jigsaw manifesto written in Hell?

   Don’t be too quick to dismiss the stark simplicity of William Bogdan’s black-and-white woodcut, Sisters. Are these grainy, striated figures floating into, or out of, fragile memory? It’s a fascinating ambiguity at work here, at once alluring and startling in its graceful rawness.  

  Heather Bullach’s oil painting, Elevated, is a super-realistic rendering of a haute couture high heel shoe. Look long and hard at the distribution of light and shadow, at those tiny accents of jewel-like primary colors that shimmer along the expanse of golden tan. Her impeccable painting technique seems impossibly subtle. More than just a sleek picture of a common worldly object, this is contemplation itself, stunningly nuanced. Similarly compelling, Diane Belfiglio’s oil pastel, Summer into Fall III, uses electrifying color and superb composition to turn an ordinary floral motif into a palpable sensation of unmitigated joy. Elevated indeed, both of these artists deftly achieved  transcendence from the quaint to the quintessential.