Metascores (rhymes with...)

 

                                                             Metascores (rhymes with…)  

  

Chorus: 34 Drag Chute

Chorus: Little Nova Rocker

Chorus: Singing Through a Hole

Chorus: Singing Through the Fence

Chorus: Singing on President's Day

Chorus: Gold Finch Song

        

By Tom Wachunas 

   “A painter… in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.”

― Wassily Kandinsky, from Concerning the Spiritual in Art

EXHIBIT: Chorus and Understudy, An Invitation to Look – 29 paintings by Earl Iselin / 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 OCTOBER 29, 2021 / Gallery Hours Monday – Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m. (NOT OPEN on Friday, Oct. 15)

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

Artist Reception and Gallery Talk – THURSDAY OCTOBER 21 - 5:30 – 7:30 p.m.

    In a recent statement about his work, Earl Iselin wrote about a seminal encounter from his days as an undergrad at Kent State University. While there, he often visited Robert Smithson’s land art installation, Partially Buried Woodshed, made on the University grounds in 1970. Sitting inside the entropic structure (i.e., designed by Smithson to disintegrate over time) induced a sensation of being buried alive. In that setting, Iselin’s view of the sky – a signifier of possibility for fully experiencing a present moment  – was obstructed.

   That memory resonates in his poetic philosophizing about painting. What he has called “skying the painting” speaks to the purpose of his pictures. “To be at home in painting means to defy the past,” he tells us, adding, “Every generation has to come to painting for itself. Every generation must go through the labor of off-loading in order to find what is appropriate for them, to unemcumber their work. We have to decide what we will take with us into the present, and what we will leave behind. Our inspiration must find lift.”

    Looking at these paintings brings to mind the phenomenon of synesthesia, from the Greek syn, meaning "together", and aisthesis, meaning "sensation." Synesthesia happens when one sensory or cognitive process is stimulated enough to cause a simultaneous perception or experience in another sense or cognitive pathway.

    A recurring pathway in Iselin’s paintings is the grid. It’s a motif apparent in much of modernist painting history, and one that can codify any number of contexts, including architectural constructions, urban landscapes, maps, measured units of time, or the very idea of repeated patterns found in nature.

    Iselin’s grids vary widely in terms of their rigidity and clarity. There are painterly, tactile actions – both representational and purely gestural or abstract – resting under, intertwined through, or placed directly on top of the grids. Faces, places, or objects – faded or fading, softly in the past, or loudly in the present. Balance and counterbalance. Seen and… heard?

   The titles of these paintings are intriguing. Most of them suggest a musicality, beginning with the word ‘Chorus’ followed by a reference to a specific subject. Voices singing and continuously interwoven. Iselin’s use of the grid as a delineated system for containing his marks and shapes is not so far removed from how a composer scores a musical work via a staff - the horizontal, 5-lined configuration for attaching or mapping the various signs and symbols that articulate melodies and harmonies, pace and rhythms, or durations in time.

   So here’s an invitation to not only look, but perhaps to listen as well. Iselin’s paintings are, on one fascinating level, scores written for the instrument of his imagination and yours. To look at this impressive collection is to join a choir and…find lift.