Faculty Faculties

Faculty Faculties 

Jack McWhorter, "Beginnings of a Complex"

Andrea Myers, "Switchswatch"

Kim Eggelston-Kraus, "Bound Geometry"

Erica Raby, untitled

Jennifer Jones, "All Things Considered"

Bridgett O'Donnell, "Cloud 0"

Mary Mazzer, "Where All the Cool Kids Live"

Tom Webb, "Nikola Tesla"

By Tom Wachunas

   “…a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.” - Clive Bell

   EXHIBIT: Faculty Exhibition / through September 24, 2019 at the William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery, located in the Kent State University at Stark Fine Arts building / 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio / featuring the work of Kent State University at Stark's art faculty members: Kim Eggleston-Kraus, Jennifer Jones, Mary Mazzer, Jack McWhorter, Andrea Myers, Bridget O’Donnell, Erica Raby, Danny Volk, Tom Wachunas, Tom Webb / Gallery Hours:  Monday-Friday 11:00-5:00 pm

   My unusually busy teaching schedule this semester at Kent State University at Stark has placed unprecedented demands on my time these days. Hence the long interval between blog posts. Regrettably, after today, there are only two full days left (Sept. 23 and 24) for viewing this current exhibit of 26 works by 10 Kent Stark Fine Arts faculty members. But it most definitely merits your close attention if you can manage a visit.

   It’s a highly captivating and impressively diverse show, rich in the way it engages not only the eyes, but the mind as well. I’m pleased to be a part of it. Included are two of my 3D drawings (graphite on salvaged computer towers) from a series called Deus ex Machina – commentaries on the self-perpetuating mysteries and mayhem of the Internet.

  Jack McWhorter’s visceral abstractions are sumptuous, exhilarating episodes of gestural action and reaction, of painterly call and response.   There’s an uncanny sense of being immersed in ever-evolving structural systems, or stratified, biomorphic phenomena. The tangible and ephemeral simultaneously congeal and disperse, depicting the history of their own making.

Switchswatch, a machine-sewn fabric collage by Andrea Myers, is an amorphous tapestry of sorts, with a subtly sculptural, kinetic, maybe even musical dimensionality. All those loosely attached stripes of vibrant color, like so many bright notes, punctuate and pop off the billowy, soft-toned ground, pulsing in an undulating crescendo which is in turn intertwined throughout with meandering, whispered lines of single colored threads. Here’s a harmony of macro and micro. The perpendicular warp and weft of fabric is elegantly balanced with a curvilinear countermelody.  

There’s also an elegant harmony in Bound Geometry, an earth-toned stoneware sculpture by Kim Eggleston-Kraus. Industrial-feeling, architectonic geometry is fused with organic forms that suggest curved, folded wings.

   The intimately-scaled, untitled mixed-media paintings by Erica Raby are infused with a quiet sort of playful tension and complexity. In these tactile explorations, at once dense and fragile, little scraps of collaged, repurposed paper shapes float atop, or peek out from underneath thin layers of paint, often with overlying clusters of seemingly random abstract patterns and wandering marks coexisting in a state of suspended flux. 

   All Things Considered is a particularly curious (if not somewhat jarring) installation by Jennifer Jones. It features a tipped-over baby carriage and coiled, intestine-like fabric forms embedded with rubber nipples - all spread out on a latch hook rug colorfully emblazoned with a not-too-vague likeness of a vagina. Is this a spilling out of maternal, feminist guts? All things considered indeed.

    One of Bridget O’Donnell’s intaglio prints on handmade paper, Cloud 0, presents some especially intriguing questions. In its meticulous rendering of illusory texture, it has the documentary immediacy of an archaeological photo of…what? A levitated fossil? An eerie shard of unknown substance? A relic from the primordial deep? Haunting.

   Questions abound, too, in both Mary Mazzer’s luminous oil and acrylic on paper painting, Where All of the Cool Kids Live, and Tom Webb’s enigmatic acrylic painting, Nikola Tesla (named for the inventor and engineer who designed the modern alternating current electrical supply system). Sometimes art can be a bit inscrutable. But a little mystery can go a long way towards keeping us alert to possibilities. To remain in a state of lingering inquiry is one sure sign of being alive.

   And finally, speaking of inquiry, there’s the fascinating installation from Danny Volk, The News Gallery (TNG) – 32 artist proposals printed on newsprint. The installation is set up like an archival reading room in a library, with 8 newspaper issues hung from slotted dowels on a wooden rack. Here’s the background supplied by Volk: “Volume 1 of The News Gallery was hosted by SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio from January 25 through March 22, 2019. Participation in the project was open to artists who submitted exhibition proposals to SPACES during the 2017 and 2018 open calls but who were not offered space in which to realize their visions. TNG is interested in recognizing the inherent energy with which these proposals were submitted, redirecting their intended trajectory, and providing an alternative exhibition opportunity within the space. With the artists’ consent, TNG published application materials for 32 artist proposals over the course of 8 weeks.”

   In some ways you might regard Volk’s generous acknowledgement of creative proposals as an artwork in itself, and his installation here as a work of shared performance art. You, the reader and assessor of artists’ ideas, are as much an active performer as Volk is.