Destination Dynamic, Group Galvanic

 

Destination Dynamic, Group Galvanic 

A.I. Brainbleed, by Tom Wachunas

Phoenix (l), Harmony (r), by Phoenix Keane

Travel, by Sherri Hornbrook

Why (l), Because (r), by Samuel Gentile

Don't Move, by Jessica Morton

I Keep Changing (l), Maybe I'm Changing, by
Stephanie Piscitello

 

Over and Over, by Stephen Tornero

Junctures, by Jeff Leadbetter

But Now It's Done, by Aaron Foster

By Tom Wachunas

EXHIBIT: Annual Kent- Stark Art Alumni Exhibition, at the William J. & Pearl F. Lemmon Visiting Artist Gallery, located in the Fine Arts building, Kent State University Stark Campus – 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio / through October 10, 2025/ viewing hours Monday-Thursday 8a.m. to 6p.m., Fridays 8a.m. to 3p.m

   Heads up! This gathering of 37 works from 22 artists – either former Kent Stark art class students, or current or former Stark art department faculty members (regardless of discipline) – is certainly one of the most exciting local group shows I’ve seen this year.

   Here’s a veritable contemporary wellspring of remarkably diverse content, styles, skills and materials: painting, drawing, printmaking, digital, stoneware, mixed media assemblage.

    OK yeah, I’m in it too. Don’t let that stop you. Just know I’m genuinely grateful for the invitation to join such impressive art makers as these. So if you’re looking for really good reasons to come and look at this immersive treasure of an exhibit, I’ll give you 22: Emily Bartolone, Phillip Buntin, Noah DiRuzza, Faith Emerson, Andrew Foradas, Aaron Foster, Samuel Gentile, Bill Govan, Sheri Hornbrook, Christine Janson, Phoenix Keane, Erin Kelly, Eleanor Dillon Kuder, Jeff Leadbetter, Mary Mazzer, Maria McDonald, Jessica Morton, Julianne Nipple, Stephanie Piscitello, Stephen Tornero, Tom Wachunas, David Whiteman.

   Happy hunting.

Talking Tin and other Rustbelt Ruminations

 

Talking Tin and other Rustbelt Ruminations 

Tilted House

The Laughing West Virginian

Produce Man

Just Smile

Dog Faced Man

Man in Yellow

Mill

By Tom Wachunas

“Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades… abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.”  - Charles Simic

“Every normal human being (and not merely the 'artist') has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious, it is merely a matter of courage or liberating procedures ... of voyages into the unconscious, to bring pure and unadulterated found objects to light.”  - Max Ernst

“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”— Jean-Luc Godard

 And this, from artist  Robert Villamagna: “I am very passionate about working with found materials, especially those items that show use, wear, and rust. I love stuff with character…I’m giving that discarded piece of metal, or that old object, a new life, a different life…For me, walking through a flea market is like walking through a well-stocked art materials store. The flea market is my palette.

 

EXHIBIT: Mixed-media assemblages, found objects/metal collages by Robert Villamagna, at THE GALLERY SPACE – on view to August 30, 2025 / curated by Priscilla Roggenkamp / located in two retail spaces, NEST (open Mon.- Sat. 10-6 and Sun. 11-4) and FRANCIS JEWELERS (open Mon.-Fri. 9-5), in ‘The Market Place’ shopping center, 1800 West State Street, ALLIANCE, Ohio

https://robertvillamagna.com/

 

   And here’s yet another sniveling apology for a late art report from this  wandering wordnerd. Anyway, first order of business: a laudacious THANK YOU to the highly accomplished textile artist and musician, Priscilla Roggenkamp, for curating a new art exhibit venue called The Gallery Space, located in Alliance.

   Featured in this soon to be concluded exhibit is the prolific mixed media artist, Robert Villamagna, who grew up in the Ohio River rustbelt. The  artworks that he creates in his West Virginia studio are delightfully vibrant constructions utilizing, among other elements, repurposed lithographed metals (‘tins’), found objects, and vintage photographs.

   His “stuff with character” exudes a distinctly narrative spirit in the form of collaged emblems, labels, logos and insignias, often accompanied by symbolic faces and caricatures that seem to pop out of printed texts. Villamagna’s mementos are much more than random juxtapositions of flea market flotsam or found vintage junk. These souvenirs are truly scintillating and otherwise intriguing evocations of bygone blue collar days in the rustbelt, before it became… well, too rusty to remember.

   Next up at The Gallery Space: Paintings by Christopher Triner, with opening reception on Thursday, September 4, 5 – 7pm.

Shall We Continue?

 

 Shall We Continue? 

We're Finally Landing

Mother Tree

I Go to See the Place Once More

Interloper

Torchlight

By Tom Wachunas  

“Contemplation is at once the existential appreciation of our own ‘nothingness’ and of the divine reality, perceived by ineffable spiritual contact within the depths of our own being.” – Thomas Merton

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” – Pascal Mercier

EXHIBIT: Both Sides of the Brain – Paintings by Kit Palencar, at Strauss Studios Gallery/ 236 Walnut Avenue NE, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH AUGUST 23, 2025 / viewing hours Wed.-Fri. 11-6, Sat 12-5, CLOSING RECEPTION ON AUGUST 23, 5 – 9pm

 

https://artwach.blogspot.com/2025/02/life-at-corner-of-now-and-not-yet.html

   He’s baaack…For the second time this year, Canton viewers can embrace the art of Kit Palencar. In February, I saw his marvelous solo exhibit at Canton Museum of Art (CMA). You can click on the above hyperlink in case you want to read my thoughts about that experience. While this collection at Straus Studios Gallery does include several pieces from the CMA exhibit, the majority are other and newer works, though certainly no less compelling infatuating. What I wrote in February remains apropos here: Palencar’s paintings are profoundly soul-probing visions.  Constituting an eloquent object lesson in contemplation, they are poignant, mystifying and illuminating all at once.

   Contemplating what? Palencar tells us, "The left and right sides of the brain—often accepted as separate domains—merge in these works to form a unified, complex narrative about our existence and inevitable mortality…I encourage viewers to confront the tension of our human nature against the scientific definitions of what nature is. Nature does not resist its cycles… Through these paintings and drawings, I aim to question how we, as conscious beings, engage with our own impermanence. Can the cerebral and the organic find harmony? This exhibition invites viewers to witness that tension, and perhaps, to feel at home in it."

    There’s a painting in this exhibit which reminds me of doing what I do with much of my time, why I do it, and where I often do it. The painting is titled, interestingly enough, I Go To See the Place Once More.

    And so I’m baaack, in an art gallery. Seeing once more. I’m riveted by that guy immersed in an eerie glow of greenish light looking at what might be a smart screen (or a smart SCREAM?). With his mouth slightly agape, he appears gripped, surprised. Maybe even a bit alarmed. Might this be an OMG moment? A reveille? Is it a call to tension, or simply whole-minded attention?   

     Palencar’s paintings ask us to think about thinking by bridging the gap between our cerebral hemispheres. A marriage of left to right, as it were. The left hemisphere of my brain, where logic and reason supposedly reign supreme, accepts that the artist is embracing the inevitability of natural life’s impermanence. Mortality. Ok, death. However, that ever-present interloper - the right hemisphere of my brain - breaks in and incites an emotional dialogue with all sorts of suggestions and questions, including a memory of God’s somber words to Adam in Genesis 3:19 (which Palencar cites in his statement), “…for dust you are and to dust you will return.” If that’s all there is to our story, such a promise could conceivably create an inconsolable existential angst. Tension, to be sure.

   Yet as long as we’re on the subject of conversing with God about nature and death, what do we think about these words (from Romans 8:22-23)? “We know that the whole creation has been groaning, as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.”

   Another promise, another truth. For relief, for release. Can we think of death, then, as not a meaningless dreadful end, but a necessary portal to glorious eternal life? From dust to divine destiny. It’s…inevitable. And with that, I feel perfectly at home.

   Thank you again, Kit Palencar. Your art is an exquisitely epiphanic conversation starter.  

HYPERPSYCHESCAPES

 

Hyperpsychescapes 

Crowded Skies

3-Bedroom Duplex

Air Mattress

Church

Balloons 2

Fever Ball

By Tom Wachunas

“…Flat Affect is not about a call to action, but a sort of resignation – the numbed state of waiting for security, for permanence, for a future that feels less borrowed…” – Maxmillian Peralta

Wordlessly watching /He waits by the window/ And wonders /At the empty place inside… (lyrics from “Helplessly Hoping” by Steven Stills)

 

EXHIBIT: FLAT AFFECT –  paintings by Maxmillian Peralta / at Massillon Museum Studio M / 121 Lincoln Way East in downtown Massillon, Ohio / ON VIEW THROUGH AUGUST 3, 2025 /330.833.4061 / viewing hours: Tuesday through Saturday 9:30am - 5:00pm and Sunday 2:00pm - 5:00pm

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/    

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/home/exhibits/detailpage/maxmillian-peralta-flat-affect

  

   Executed with admirable precision - what some might call a hyper-realism technique - the recent paintings here (acrylic and acrylic ink on canvas) by Maxmillian Peralta are pensive and mercurial juxtapositions of indoor and outdoor spaces,  structures, and objects.

   The artist’s statement posted with these works is a remarkably eloquent exercise of forthright candor. A brave honesty. Peralta is unapologetic in telling us that the paintings “… reflect the quiet generational dread of contemporary existence…These empty interiors, moody and subdued, hold a stillness charged with hopeless unease…They are impossible, looming visions and omens that confront the viewer with my personal anxieties around trauma and fear…They evoke a world which feels increasingly cold and impossible to navigate or survive: a place where fear is ambient, collective, and unavoidable…”

   Accordingly, the surreal scenes and sites Peralta constructs are haunting conflations of the familiar and the enigmatic to make startling (albeit beautifully painted) symbols of an ineluctably bleak existential emptiness. “The result,” he confesses, “is a meditation on displacement and dread – interior and exterior, private and political – quietly seeping into one another.”   

   Like a strange procession of little puffy white clouds, quietly seeping into the azure firmament of “Crowded Skies,” there’s an X-ray image of the artist’s teeth floating above a huge utility pole holding up a wild tangle of black wires. Wires presumably connected to some desirable place? Are those teeth smiling, or grimacing? Could this be the gaping mouth of our entire world hungry for empathy, meaning, and purpose? Or a plea for the power to plug into mercy and hope? If so, then please sir, can I have some more?

   Ahh, the dreadful weight of waiting. Reality bites.

MEGAMAZED, Part 2

                                                        MEGAMAZED, Part 2 

MEGAMAZED, Part 2

By Tom Wachunas and John Sabraw

“… I don't know, it just makes me ask really metaphysical questions, you know? …Lots of feels in this one…”  - John Sabraw

 

EXHIBIT: APEIRON – The Eco-Art of John Sabraw / at Canton Museum Of Art/ 1001 Market Ave. N., Canton, Ohio/ THROUGH JULY 27, 2025 /  Open Tuesdays - Thursdays from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Sundays 1-5 p.m.

https://www.cantonart.org/exhibits/apeiron-eco-art-john-sabraw-april-29-2025-july-27-2025  

https://www.johnsabraw.com/

 

   Measuring 7 ft x 18.75 ft x 4 ft., John Sabraw’s Glide is absolutely spellbinding - a galvanizing, supersensory journey into both earthly and astral dimensions. Walk all around slowly, underneath what appears to be a  boat suspended high above your head. It’s not a solid form. It’s perforated. You can see through it, up into the gallery ceiling spotlights. From this worm’s-eye view, and from certain angles, those lights can sometimes seem to congeal into a single bright orb, bright like the blazing sun. Or you can look through the stern, into the cosmos of many suns and their planets, and see constellations projected on the wall. Preternatural imprints of numinous  presences and forces.

   What is this ethereal vessel? An excavated fossil? A skeleton? A memory?  I read this Sabraw work to be a complex place, where manmade and natural actions could connect to preserve environmental life, or just as readily collide to harm it. Here’s an elaborate symbol of planet earth, engineered into an intricate and hypnotic matrix of holes and tunnels, pits and pathways, synapses and circuits.

   John Sabraw was very generous in responding to my questions about his materials and processes. So here’s what he wrote back to me. His words. Glide indeed. Welcome aboard.

**************************************  

Materials: The top frame that suspends the boat is hand made of wood…The hull or "skin" of the boat is made of Laser Felt Eco - a fabric constructed from recycled plastic bottles…I painted the exterior with our iron oxide pigments we make from acid mine drainage pollution - in this case I made an acrylic paint out of our raw - or sienna - colored pigment.

The laser cut pattern of the hull is made of two components:

1. Hand drawn maps of the room and pillar underground mine that is responsible for the acid mine drainage pollution currently pouring into Sunday Creek at Truetown, Ohio - where it proceeds to 'kill' the creek for the next 7 miles. This is where we are building our full-scale treatment plant.

2. Patterns from the Intel Chipset: 440LX, Code Name: Balboa, Release Date: August 1997 [I could have chosen any chip really, but my daughter was born that month and year so why not? Also, it is the first motherboard with AGP (accelerated graphics port), and I had a Pentium at the time and may have even used this chip to start my professional art career having received my MFA from Northwestern two months prior.]

These two patterns look so similar to me and are both of mankind's making to funnel energy for our contemporary way of life [coal for the industrial age, electrons for the computer age]. Perhaps this collage of the two in the hull is my way of asking the question: is there some key here? A visual revelation of our environmental scale adenosine triphosphate (ATP)? I don't know, it just makes me ask really metaphysical questions, you know?

The final pattern is a map of constellations that is silhouetted on the wall from a light shown through the stern. This is from how the sky looked above Danforth Chapel in Lawrence, KS on January 25 1992 at 6:30pm CST. The moment I got married. It contains the astrological signs of myself, my wife, and my daughter all next to each other - which I thought was very portentous considering we wouldn't have our daughter for several years. I think about space a lot, having collaborated with astrophysicists before, and I think about the universe and the big questions a lot through that context. Lots of feels in this one…

Insiteful Immersions, Fusions, and Extractions

 

 Insiteful Immersions, Fusions, and Extractions 

GLIDE

 

SHIMMER

ORDONNANCE

 

Floating

Presence of Water (detail)

Presence of Water

 

Falling Upwards

 

By Tom Wachunas

APEIRON (ἄπειρον): a Greek word meaning (that which is) unlimited; boundless; infinite; indefinite

 “…I am unearthing the topographies created from our extraction of natural resources and exploring their paradox. For they are at once wondrous feats of human engineering, yet also emblematic of our consumption and hubris…There is a terrible beauty in the resulting artworks that balance the delicate and the brutal…” - John Sabraw

EXHIBIT: APEIRON – The Eco-Art of John Sabraw / at Canton Museum Of Art/ 1001 Market Ave. N., Canton, Ohio/ THROUGH JULY 27, 2025 /  Open Tuesdays - Thursdays from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Sundays 1-5 p.m.

https://www.cantonart.org/exhibits/apeiron-eco-art-john-sabraw-april-29-2025-july-27-2025

 

https://www.johnsabraw.com/

   

   The sprawling collection of John Sabraw's eco-conscious (and eco-conscience) works  currently on view at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA) is magnificent on every level. From their conceptual and spiritual probity to the arresting epic scale of their riveting visual dynamics, they constitute the most compelling  exhibit I’ve seen at this museum in many years.

   John Sabraw is a Professor of Art at Ohio University where he is Chair of the Painting + Drawing program/  Digital Art + Technology Chair/ and a passionate environmental activist.  This impactful collaboration with CMA Curator of Exhibitions, Christy Davis, has given us a thoroughly provocative conflation of what Sabraw calls “the delicate and the brutal.”

   He tells us, “I am an artist who collaborates with scientists and environmentalists to find solutions to issues of sustainability – fusing art and science. The main focus of my research currently is working with a team of engineers and watershed experts to remediate streams polluted by acid mine drainage from abandoned coal mines.”

     In a flowing mindfulness of underminings, if you will, his paintings are remarkably immersive experiences that exude a protean rawness.  Along with generous applications of actual Appalachian coal in finely pulverized form, they also incorporate transformed sludge, i.e., iron oxide pigments developed from laboriously extracted toxic acid mine drainage that had polluted many miles of streams in southeastern Ohio, leaving once thriving waters devoid of life. While the paintings are certainly jarring enough translations of fractured earth and broken habitats, I find them haunting in another way.

   Here is an invitation to see artist as supplicant, making art as an earnest action of entreaty. A prayer? In this context, Sabraw’s paintings are a dramatic calling out for rescue from ruination.

   I intend to very soon post Part 2 of my commentary on Sabraw’s exhibit, specifically a closer examination of his immense sculptural spectacle called Glide. Meanwhile, fond as I am of wandering in wordplay, I can tell you that John Sabraw’s art has transported me to somewhere beyond merely fascinated or mesmerized. So what comes after awestruck and gobsmacked? Here in ἄπειρον, I’m… megamazed.

Mourning Prayers

 

     Mourning Prayers 

DAWN

It's too new to know the name for it (deep scar)

 

May we know how to love and not hate

Unbelievable Chaos II

Ein Sof (unending)

Burning Bush

The Music Stopped

The Sky After

     By Tom Wachunas

“A nova is a star that shows a sudden, dramatic increase in brightness. Black holes are created when stars collapse in on themselves at the end of their lives and their bright light goes out. Singularity is a point or region where space and time become distorted or break down. It is a point at which a function reaches infinity, particularly when matter is infinitely curved, as at the center of a black hole.”  - Exhibit title conceived and explained by Shelly Mika

EXHIBIT: SINGULARITY – works on paper by Kim Goldberg / at Strauss Studios Gallery, 236 Walnut Ave. NE, downtown Canton, Ohio / through June 13, 2025 / Gallery hours: Wed. - Fri. 11 – 6, Sat. 12 – 5

https://john-strauss-furniture.myshopify.com/collections/kim-goldberg

 

https://www.kimgoldberg.com/  

    Based in Omaha, Nebraska, artist Kim Goldberg tells us in her exhibit statement that her Singularity series of watercolor and ink works on paper was prompted by the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 NOVA Music Festival in Israel. She writes, “That morning, those attending…looked up to see what they thought was a fireworks display. They soon learned they weren’t seeing fireworks, but rockets launched by Hamas terrorists. Singularity represents the beauty of the NOVA participants and the horror on the ground that day. It honors the lives of those who were taken, the deep mourning of their families, and the trauma experienced by survivors. It processes the emotion of that day and asks: what do we do when the world turns upside down?”

   Upside down indeed. Inside out. Panic and pain. Black holes of exploded earth. Smothering smoke. Sky on fire. Piercing screams. Weeping. People scattered. Running. Captured. Bleeding. Dying. Where is refuge or rest, solace or quiet?

   Kim Goldberg’s abstract ink and watercolor compositions on paper aren’t literal illustrations, duplications, or imitations of an already well-reported, horrific event. Her fascinating configurations are nonetheless compelling reports in their own right. The larger unframed works here are hung like outstretched flags, banners, or pennants. Doleful banderoles seemingly lined up for a funereal procession. They bear intricate images that float like so many pulsating emblems or insignia, all centered in surrounding blank white grounds.

    Here’s a symbolic, even seductive sort of complex calligraphy. Amorphous and jagged shapes are juxtaposed with linearities, both sharp and soft, cutting through or hovering in washes of colors saturated and opaque, or translucent and fading into an undefined distance. Ahh, that fading away. Into a longing for refuge, for a peace that surpasses understanding. The sheer depth of Goldberg’s metaphysical imagery, her visual “writing” as it were, mesmerized me, drawing my eyes further and further into even the tiniest of visual passages wherein swirling moments of chaotic discordance give way, if ever so briefly, to hope and harmony.  Thus seduced, I wasn’t just looking at paintings, but into them, and just far enough to be effectively drawn to a quiet state of…prayer.      

   These works are eloquent, powerful evocations that speak the unspeakable. Abstract painting can do that. Kim Goldberg accomplishes as much with stunning acuity and a remarkably brave panache.