Sublime Symbiosis

 

Sublime Symbiosis 

Old Delhi - Jama Masjd

Others in their World

A Synnoetic System (detail)

A Synnoetic System

Synnoetic Systems - 7

Synnoetic Systems - 6

By Tom Wachunas 

   “In creating these works I combine our most advanced digital tools and processes with ancient traditions of making. This series represents a world within our world; an unseen world at the edge of our perception, at the edge of what our most advanced tools are able to measure…The driving force behind the work for me is always to make the work as beautiful, sensual, felt, and sometimes whimsical as possible, regardless of media.”  - Gregory Little

EXHIBIT: Parallel Worlds – Mixed Reality Artwork by Gregory Little / at The William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery, located in the Fine Arts Building at Kent University at Stark / 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, OH / THROUGH SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 / Gallery Hours Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT JACK MCWHORTER AT 330-244-3356 OR JMCWHORT@KENT.EDU.

Reception and Gallery Talk – THURSDAY September 23 - 5:30 p.m.

From Merriam-Webster/  Symbiosis (sim-bē-ˈō-səs- )  = the living together in more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms; a cooperative relationship

   I am agape. Agog. Amazed and awestruck. Flabbergasted and gobsmacked. Did I mention impressed?

   So this is when an art gallery can be more than a typical art gallery. Right now, The William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery at KSU Stark is a spectacular junction. A magnificent experiential crossroads. A compelling  nexus of the micro and macro, the mystical and mundane.

   The 32 works in this exhibit - ranging in scale from hand-sized, to pieces more than 5’ tall (as in the Synnoetic Systems series) or the 7’-wide A Synnoetic System - consist of mixed media paintings, collages, and archival digital prints.  They combine hand-ground pigments with digital elements and processes. Also included is a non-looping digital animation of endless evolving DNA splices, and a 12-minute animation set to a composition by the renowned composer Jeffrey Mumford.

    Not long after he was hired to teach painting at Kent Stark in 1989/90, Gregory Little, who currently teaches digital art at Lorain Community College, embarked  on a path to learn everything necessary to make virtual reality artworks.  “I stopped painting and devoted myself to this task for eight years,” he explains, “and succeeded in learning about all aspects of VR (virtual reality) to make and exhibit my own virtual worlds.  Now I have returned painting to my toolkit, but also use all that I have learned to produce a variety of digital assets that I use and reuse across a range of mediums.”

   Little’s works certainly aren’t conventional scenes or pictures of objective, familiar realities. To fully look at them is to be willing to engage a state of mind and be drawn into contemplations of indeterminate depth. It is to enter evocations.

   The striking Synnoetic Systems pieces, for example, are named after a term coined in 1961 by computer scientist Louis Fein to describe what he had called the “…symbiosis of people, mechanisms, plant or animal organisms, and automata into a system that results in a mental power (power of knowing) greater than that of its individual components.”

   Little has translated this concept into breathtaking, multidimensional panoramas. They’re blissfully dense with infinitesimal details. Otherwordly indeed. The stratified minutiae of organic particles and shapes, whether clustered in groups or individually floating within supernal networks of fibers and filaments, all seem to oscillate and glow, as if shot through with bursts of colored light from many distant suns.

    The art of Gregory Little is a wondrous navigation of the longitudes and latitudes of visual perception itself, and an otherwise astonishing spiritual adventure. Might this be what Nirvana looks like?