Tender Terrors

 Tender Terrors

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…I grew old distracting myself from what I knew to be true. And then, just like I knew it would, it came late one night, looming with slowness, from the fjords.” –from What Would Kill Me, poem by Zachary Schomburg

    EXHIBIT: FJORDS – Art inspired by the poetry of Zachary Schomburg, through September 26^th, presented by Translations Art Gallery at Cyrus Custom Framing, located at 2645 Cleveland Ave NW, Canton 44709, with over 30 artists exhibiting.  (330) 452 – 9787  www.translationsart.com

    Zachary will be coming to Ohio and doing a poetry reading and book-signing on Thursday, September 24th, from 7-9 PM, at Cyrus.

   Webster defines fjord, or fiord, as “a narrow inlet or arm of the sea bordered by steep cliffs...” So already, the imagery conjured in our minds sets up an expectation of encounters with the strange, dangerous, and perhaps mystical. From that perspective, this exhibit doesn’t disappoint.

    After reading several of the poems from Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords, volume 1, and viewing their accompanying art works, I began to envision myself in a Quentin Tarantino movie, speaking the poems out loud, as in reporting my dreams to a psychiatrist. He’s gonna have a Freudian field day with this stuff, I’m thinking. The good doctor looks up from his note pad and pensively sucks his pen for a few seconds before mumbling the proverbial, “So tell me, how does that make you feel?” At which point I leap from the couch and punch him repeatedly in his face. As I wipe my bloodied knuckles on his chest, our eyes lock. His are wide, unblinking, terrified. “Thanks, Dad,” I say, leaving the room, adding, “I love you.”

   Rest assured that such an event would never transpire in my personal dealings. But it wouldn’t be so shocking in the situations and circumstances that Mr. Schomburg describes. He does so neither with sing-songy rhymes nor metric rhythms, but rather by seamlessly blending conflicted emotional rhythms. “There is one tree for every person,” he writes in The Killing Trees, “and the trees have all started falling on the person they’ve grown tall to fall on…” His image-laden sentences are delivered with such matter-of-fact, disarmingly conversational ease that their often barbed absurdities, or their precarious and occasionally nihilistic content, can take on an edgy humor if not unexpected tenderness.

   So Schomburg’s world is a fated one where, among other possibilities, people routinely wait for purposed trees to fall down and crush their skulls; where kids’ cereal is a malevolent commodity; where you might not be able to get into the movie theater because the clerk is having sex in the ticket booth; where rescue from disaster can make you just as likely to fall in love with the inevitability of death as with the rescuer.

   There are many commendable artworks in this exhibit – wildly diverse in styles and media - by more than 30 artists from both the Canton area (including some made in classes at the Stark County Board of Developmental disabilities) and outside our region. The ones I find especially arresting are those that - while to varying degrees recapitulating specific imagery from Schomburg’s words - resonate necessarily as metaphors for, or symbols of the poems’ often enigmatic and metaphysical aspects.

    Here’s just a partial list, pictured above in the following order. Tim Belden’s digital photo collage, Dead Star Breakfast Versus The Ming Muses (from the poem, What Would Kill Me) – a crispy contemporary Pop icon of insouciant cultural consumerism; Matt Medla’s monochromed painting on a knobless door, Boy in Waiting (from the poem, The Killing Trees) – a moving portrait of contemplative loneliness; Patrick Buckohr’s acrylic painting on a stressed wood panel, Because It Comes Right At You Does Not Mean It Comes To Save You (from the poem of the same name) – ambiguous and foreboding; Annette Yoho Feltes’ mixed media assemblage, The Relationship was Balanced by Equal Amounts of Baggage (from the poem, Someone Falls in Love with Someone) – a vaguely erotic device looking like it came from a Medieval alchemist’s lab.   

    This exhibit offers an intriguing take on “fate” and “bittersweet.” Many of the poems seem characterized by a wearied resolve, like knowing that even as you bite into a succulent peach, your pleasure is destined to end with cracking a tooth on the pit. And the idea of a fjord still looms large. There’s the lingering sense – alternately intriguing and cloying – that even if we’re left terribly mangled from our torturous slide down its stony ledges, there’s always the waiting arms of the sea. There, we’ll either bleed out, drown, or tread water until saved.

   Life can be like that.

Vista Botanica

Vista Botanica

By Tom Wachunas

 

    EXHIBIT: Vista Botanica, at Gallery 6000: works by Carolyn Jacob, Judi Krew, Eleanor Kuder, Margo Miller and Ron Watson THROUGH OCTOBER 30, 2015 / located in the CONFERENCE CENTER DINING ROOM at KENT STATE UNIVERSITY AT STARK, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio. OPENING RECEPTION on Wednesday, Sept. 16, 5:30-7:30 P.M.

PLEASE RSVP to Lori Caughey at 330-244-3518, or lcaughey@kent.edu

Directions: http://www.kent.edu/stark/cucc/directions-maps

   “Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”  -Paul Cezanne

    “Paint the essential character of things.”  -Camille Pissaro

    At the risk of indulging overly much in shameless self-aggrandizement, I’m telling you right now that in the roughly seven years that I’ve been curating group exhibitions at Gallery 6000, I don’t believe I’ve hung a show that fills the space with more delicious snap, crackle, and pop than this one. The cereal…er, uhm, serial feel of these botanical or landscape-themed works from five artists sets up an exhilarating journey through dazzling colors, forms, and textures. Call it a paean to Nature’s exquisite material structures and ineffable spiritualities.

    Toward that end, my inclusion of Ron Watson’s charcoal drawings may seem an improbable or counterintuitive one. But I think the idea he has rendered here speaks to subtler aspects of landscape art than do the visual components we typically encounter in the genre.

     If ever there was a primordial drawing medium, it’s charcoal – carbonized remnants of trees, essentially. From that perspective, there’s an intrinsic hauntedness and timeless quietude about Watson’s drawings. I don’t see these as depictions of foreboding skies or fields so much as soulful tone poems about contrasts – organic natural architectures silhouetted in misty atmosphere. And even at their most opaque or saturated, the velvety blacks still seem to breathe.

    Speaking of breathing in primordial Nature, while weeding through the loamy remnants of my summer garden recently, I was reminded of Eleanor Kuder’s arresting mixed media works on paper. Spatial depth in her pictures has for the most part been compressed into shallow planes dense with literal and abstracted references to floral life, such as in In The Garden. There’s a delightful, palpably spontaneous energy in the way Kuder incorporates linear contours that alternately define her forms and dissolve into animated clusters of radiant color.

    Expressionistic linearity of a different sort energizes the luscious sylvan character of the large oil canvases by Margo Miller. Undulate, for example, effectively lives up to its name with its rhythmic intertwining of large leafy forms in analogous blues and greens, punctuated by smaller “undergrowth” markings in complementary hues. All four of Miller’s works here balance the micro with the macro to evoke a sense of mystical discovery. The flowing breadth of her tactile brush strokes exudes remarkable gestural confidence, giving the notion of “forest” a metaphysical dimensionality.

    Judi Krew’s acrylic paintings sizzle with chromatic electricity. I’ve never seen ROY G. BIV so splendidly attired. Krew’s deft management of a hyperbolic palette, spread across a complex formal composition with spatial ambiguities, is particularly intriguing in her spectacular Shadow Play. Reversals of figure/ground, negative/positive shape dynamics make the shadows of buds and blossoms appear like so many spritely ghosts dancing amid the cactus forms.

    Rounding out this gathering are the digital photographs by Carolyn Jacob. Her approach is richly varied, ranging from documentary, as in the beatific Floralique, to the abstract, almost painterly Impression of a Rose. For all their modesty of scale, Jabob’s images constitute a decidedly enlarged vision of botanical lyricism. As such, they’re a stunning contribution to an exhibit best seen as an encounter with pure enchantment.

    PHOTOS, from top: In The Garden, by Eleanor Kuder; Floralique, by Carolyn Jacob; Undulate, by Margo Miller; Cattails, by Ron Watson; Shadow Play, by Judi Krew 

Momentous Mayhem

Momentous Mayhem

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “…This is the moment! Damn all the odds! This day, or never, I’ll sit forever with the gods!...”  –lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, for the musical Jekyll & Hyde

    It’s not unreasonable to think that the very idea of making Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, into a musical theatre work would seem destined from the start to be little more than a predictable exercise in cheesy melodrama. On its surface anyway, the 1997 musical (book and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, music by Frank Wildhorn) lives up to that potential.

   The task of transcending the musical adaptation’s rhetorical histrionics to offer something of truly artful substance rests squarely with the director and cast. I’m thrilled to report that in this Players Guild production, director/ choreographer Michael Lawrence Akers and his cast have accomplished the task in memorably grand fashion.

   Set in 1888 London, the iconic tale of Dr. Henry Jekyll and his diabolical alter-ego, Edward Hyde - and Jekyll’s noble but futile mission to eradicate human evil – unfolds, or rather explodes, on the Guild’s downstairs arena stage. It’s the physical intimacy of that environment which very effectively foments an already turgid narrative and magnifies the astonishing expressivity of the cast.

   In his dual role of Jekyll and Hyde, Joe Haladey delivers an utterly electrifying and uncanny rendering of impassioned light hopelessly fused with horrific darkness. As Jekyll, his tenor vocalizations are heart-piercing in their tender or plaintive sincerity, particularly in moments with his betrothed, Emma. In that role, Amanda Medley shines with her crystalline soprano. The sweetness of her character’s faith in her beloved Jekyll slowly fades to credible perplexity and hurt as he increasingly gives himself over to his doomed experiment.   

   Haladey’s Edward Hyde, as you might expect, is another matter altogether. From the gnarled face, the fly-away tangled hair (as Jekyll, his hair is tied back in a ponytail), and glaring eyes, to the gravel seemingly embedded in his lower-register voice, the transformation is wholly startling. And nowhere is his classically articulated struggle between good and evil more riveting than in the appropriately titled song, “The Confrontation,” late in Act II. Haladey is a frightening, agile embodiment of split personality.

    The alluring, silken muscularity of Heidi Swinford’s singing voice is well-suited to playing the role of Lucy - a sultry, hapless prostitute. Along with her companions draped in Victorian-era lingerie (all the period costumes designed by George McCarty II are stunning), she struts about a tavern with campy sensuality in “Bring On the Men.” Careful what you wish for, Lucy.

     Not long after she meets Jekyll, and being deeply moved by his goodness, the dichotomous tensions of the story become ever more taut  when Hyde seeks out Lucy’s “services,” only to subject her to his numbing, carnal cruelties. Those are choreographed with enough vicious authenticity in their duet, “Dangerous Game,” to raise an audible grimace from the audience. Later in the proceedings, Swinford and Medley join for one of the show’s most intensely poignant songs, “In His Eyes,” wherein Lucy and Emma, each unbeknown to the other, voice their affections for Jekyll with impressive bravura.  As with all the songs here, the singing is crisply enunciated in perfect balance with the beautiful sonority of the off-stage live orchestra under the direction of Steve Parsons.        

    Following each instance when Hyde executes his bloody sentence on a prominent citizen, the panicked townsfolk scurry on to the stage, holding up their newspapers’ front pages about the latest homicide, frantically waving them like so many surrender flags. The lavish ensemble number, “Murder, Murder,” becomes a desperate societal chant, thunderous in its polyphonic harmonies.

    A haunting allegory of our depraved times? Great theatre such as this can make it hard to tell the difference between art and life.     

    Jekyll & Hyde – The Musical, at Players Guild Theatre’s W.G. Fry Theatre, 1001 Market Avenue N, Canton, Ohio. THROUGH SEPTEMBER 20 / Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 PM, Sundays at 2:00 PM / Single Tickets $26, 17 and younger $19, Seniors $23 / BOX OFFICE (330)453-7617 / www.playersguildtheatre.com

    PHOTOS, courtesy Players Guild Theatre: Joe Haladey as Edward Hyde, and Heidi Swinford playing Lucy

Intimate Encounters

Intimate Encounters

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” –English critic Walter Pater, 1873

 

    EXHIBITS: Recent paintings by Marti Jones Dixon at Journey Art Gallery, 431 4^th Street (downtown Canton) THROUGH SEPT. 30; ALSO, Scenes From Hitchcock, at Julz by Alan Rodriguez, 220 Market Ave. N (downtown Canton), THROUGH OCT. 31

    At one point during my drive home from Journey Art Gallery after viewing these recent oil paintings by Marti Jones Dixon, the lovely Barcarolle from Offenbach’s opera, “Tales of Hoffman,” came on the radio. It was one of those uncanny moments when music absolutely clarified and magnified a visual encounter.

    Barcarolles were originally musical expressions based on the lilting, slow rhythms of folk melodies sung by Venetian gondoliers. And suddenly a picture coalesced in my mind of Marti Dixon gently – but oh so purposefully - laying down paint on a canvas, as if rowing through a scene, stroke by stroke.

    The images themselves can best be described as contemporary “genre art” – scenes of everyday life. [Note: the exhibit at Julz, which I’m not reviewing in this post, features scenes from Alfred Hitchcock films wherein Hitchcock inserted himself.] But this isn’t to denigrate them as being commonplace or unremarkable.  For that, all we need do is surf digital social media to look at myriad manifestations of photographic mediocrity.

   So yes, Dixon’s oil paintings are derived from photos, and their small scale enhances their casual, snapshot immediacy. Viewing them isn’t too unlike browsing through the artist’s personal photo album, or someone’s Facebook page. After that, though, what separates them from being ordinary depictions of the familiar is Dixon’s consummate skill in constructing, or orchestrating various elements that transform them into elegantly painted realities – parallel to observable reality, yet separate and unique.

    Here is an intimate world, true to itself. Dixon models her figures and objects not with the illusionistic drama of chiaroscuro, or by dazzling us with hyper-realist linear details, but with planes of color subtly modulated with distinct brush marks. The gestural confidence and fluidity of those markings at times recalls a Cezannesque expressivity, though perhaps not quite so muscular in nature. Paired with her translation of diffused light, which we might call warm or optimistic, most of these scenes are imbued with a tangible quietude and serenity.

   Meanwhile, there’s just the right touch of narrative and compositional mystique in some of them. We don’t directly know the people depicted, yet somehow feel invited to eavesdrop, or enter the space they occupy.  Bally Maloe House is a fascinating, unified fusion of rectilinear and curvilinear pictorial space. While the central room in the image recedes inward to another room’s doorway, its light-colored ceiling seems to flare outward and forward on the top left edge of the painting to a darkened, arched point, playfully directing our attention to both the staircase leading up, and outward, beyond the picture plane. What room might we encounter then? Could it be the lovely chamber where the man and woman are seated at the table in Tea? 

  Dixon’s relaxed technique allows each brush stroke, each individually described shape, to have a character all its own - like a musician’s solo passages beautifully integrated with the structured, lyrical rhythms of the full orchestra. Shhh. Can you hear the harmonies?

    PHOTOS (from top):  Edie Coming In; Bally Maloe House; Tea; Green Room

This Holiday's No Picnic

This Holiday’s No Picnic

By Tom Wachunas

     Seat Of The Pants Productions and The Plain Local Community Center For The Arts present Picnic, by William Inge, in the Black Box Theatre, located in Glen Oak High School, 1801 Schneider St. NE, Canton, Ohio / August 28- 30/ Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday afternoon at 2 / Tickets are $16 for adults and $12 for students, and can be purchased at www.translationsart.com/picnic

    A recurring sound in this production of William Inge’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Picnic, is that of the plaintive whistle from a passing train. Signaling both a place left behind and a future destination, the sound becomes a role unto itself - a haunted harbinger of jarring changes that transpire in a Kansas small town neighborhood preparing for a picnic (which, ironically enough, we never actually see) on a sweltering Labor Day.

   Once again, director Craig Joseph (with several notable past Canton Players Guild productions to his credit) shows his remarkable acuity for drawing out compelling realism from his cast members. They truly own their roles, imbuing Inge’s language - which on paper can sometimes seem hoakey and histrionic – with visceral authenticity. Additionally, The Black Box Theatre is made all the more intimate by Micah Harvey’s artful set that cuts across the floor so that we in the audience, viewing it from two sides, feel like neighbors peering into the shared back yard where most of the story unfolds.

   Justin Edenhoffer plays Hal, a scruffy, college-dropout drifter who rolls into town like a Kansas twister. For all of his bad-boy strutting and shirtless posing, he’s complicated and essentially an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Mr. Edenhoffer embodies Hal’s lithe sexuality and swagger with masterful agility even as he realizes his shortcomings. He’s hired by the amiable Helen, who is apt to see the best in anyone - and played here with a spirit of wisdom and endearing tenderness by Kathy J. Boyd - to do handy work around her house where she cares for her (unseen) ailing mother. Living next door are her neighbors, single-mom Flo (April Deming), her two daughters,  18 year-old Madge (Anna Gallucci) and younger sister Millie (Natalie Welch), and a school teacher tenant, Rosemary (Jacki Dietz).   

   Anna Gallucci’s Madge - the proverbial prettiest girl in town - is an arresting portrait of melancholy and vulnerability as she negotiates an identity crisis. When Flo complains that Madge spends too much time in front of the mirror, Madge replies that it’s only because she wonders if she even exists beyond the physical beauty that everyone else is so crazy about. When she hears that lonely train whistle, she imagines journeying to a place freed from the constricting conventions of life in rural Kansas, and finally liberated from her mother’s agenda for her to marry the sophisticated, clean-cut and monied Alan (Tim Carmany), Hal’s former fraternity brother.  She’s perfectly positioned to fall for Hal’s “dangerous” charms, if only because he (of all people!) sees her not as a pretty doll to be coveted and claimed, but a real person to be cherished.

    As the doting mother Flo, April Deming effectively exudes quiet desperation and pensive urgency, eager for Madge to marry into a life she herself couldn’t acquire. Meanwhile, Natalie Welch nails the role of the scholarly tomboy Millie, resentful over all the attentions paid to her older sister, with an infectious, animated mix of sass and woundedness.

    Some delightful moments of comic relief are provided by Jacki Dietz, playing Rosemary, along with Angeleina Valentine and Jeannie Clarkson, who play Irma and Christine respectively, Rosemary’s chatty teacher compatriots. Dietz is also central in some of the play’s most emotionally volatile scenes. In one, fueled by a few swigs of bootleg whiskey, she unleashes an explosive verbal assault on Hal - a no-holds-barred condemnation of everything she finds objectionable about him. Later, she surrenders her dignity in a pathetic plea for marriage to her reluctant suitor, Howard (Andrew Knode), a plainspoken if not clueless store owner. Particularly memorable there is Knode’s demeanor of numbed acquiescence in the face of Dietz’s euphoria.  

In his role of Alan, Tim Carmany renders a convincing transformation – from an initially genuine enthusiasm at his reunion with Hal, through growing irritation at Hal’s bravado, and ultimately into devastating heartbreak over Hal’s inevitable seduction of Madge.

    Indeed, the operative energy in this story is inevitability. In the end, you get the sense that even for young Millie, earlier teased and harassed by the gadfly paperboy named Bomber (Kyle Burnett), romance waits somewhere in the wings.

Picnic isn’t just a dated snapshot of 1950s Midwestern life tinged with despondency and sexual repression. Alternately poignant and searing, it is a timeless reminder that in any quest for real personhood, the only certainty is change itself. Dreams can be born and broken with all the regularity of a train running right on time.

    PHOTOS by Jeremy Aronhalt, from top: (1) left to right, Kathy J. Boyd, Natalie Welch, April Deming, Justin Edenhofer (center), Tim Carmany, Anna Gallucci; (2) Anna Gallucci (left), April Dening; (3) Natalie Welch (with cake), April Dening (seated), Kathy J. Boyd

Oh Gaud

Oh Gaud

By Tom Wachunas

 

    From Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary:

    Gaud, n.

1.   a worthless or trifling ornament; a trinket; a bauble

2.   [pl.] showy gaieties

3.   a jest; trick; sport; fraud [Obs.]

 

    “I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.”  -Andy Warhol 

    EXHIBIT: Oxytocin – works by Maxim Rossett at BLISS Gallery, 334 4^th Street NW, downtown Canton, THROUGH SEPTEMBER, Tuesdays-Fridays Noon-4 p.m.

    First, a caveat about reasonable art gallery protocol. At the time I closely viewed this exhibit, it was several days after the artist reception and public opening (which I could not attend). Some works had already sold and were out of the building. It’s possible that if you stop by to see the show in the coming weeks, you might not see the same show I saw. I think that professional etiquette in the context of the Arts District requires fairness to the interested viewing public – and the artist – by leaving all the work intact and viewable until a clearly stated end date. After all, we’re talking about art exhibits here, and not just glorified garage sales. ‘Nuff said.

    File this review under confessions of a conflicted voyeur. There’s a certain irony in naming this art exhibit “Oxytocin,” after a hormonal neurotransmitter that reportedly dispels anxiety or fear while engendering feelings of affectionate bonding. While I’m loathe to “love” these mixed media works on paper and canvas by Maxim Rossett, there are marginal aspects I “like,” if only in the Facebook application of the word. Liking something in that electronic universe is an ambiguous signifier, and not necessarily a clear indication of a wholeheartedly warm embrace of a specific idea or content. I respectfully ask that as you read on, hold that thought.

   The July 29 posting at www.curatorialcollective.com tells us that “noted influences” in Rossett’s art include such modernist luminaries as Henri Matisse, Jean Dubuffet, Philip Guston, and Cy Twombly. Yet based on the pictorial evidence we see in this exhibit, the influence of those particular painters often seems more incidental and peripheral than consistently substantive.

    I think a more revelatory exploration of historical precedents for Rossett’s punk-funk, “low-brow” approach can take us as at least as far back as the “anti-art” shenanigans of the Dada movement, which emerged just after World War I in Europe. The prevailing spirit among the Dadaists was one of vociferous disgust with what they perceived to be the utter corruption of Western culture. Their dismantling of traditional academic definitions and practices of art-making essentially climaxed a process that had begun during the last few decades of the 19^th century. The seeds of their discontent would nevertheless grow into the daunting diversity of other ideas and methods that would shape all of 20^th century Modern Art.

    Additionally, the frenetic drawing energy apparent in many of Rossett’s configurations, combined with the loose, spontaneous painting style (though too often appearing diffident and arbitrary) is in many ways a throwback to the “Neo-Expressionism” of the 1980s. In particular, the graphic impact of his figurative renderings at times brings to mind the urban graffiti character and brutally raw stylizations of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s (1960-88) paintings.

    Rossett’s works aren’t really “compositions” in any ostensibly elegant or traditional (academic) sense, though his black and white drawings do employ a relatively more sleek cohesiveness. They are, rather, sprawling juxtapositions, or panoramic collisions of disparate (and desperate) cartoons, appropriated imagery, cryptic symbols and frenzied, obsessive patterns often interspersed with textual content. Whether single words and phrases, or snippets of dialogue between the zany residents of these montages, they seem to constitute a collective sociopolitical commentary (sometimes with religious undertones) or philosophical treatise on…you name it.

   In one of the black and white drawings (unfortunately, there are no titles posted with the pieces), a thought balloon, hovering over the profile of a grimacing man holding a smiley-face mask on a stick in front of him, reads “Emotions grow hysterical beneath the passivity.” Just to the right of that passage, scrawled in jittery letters above the headless body of a nude woman, are the words “GAWD IS NOT DEAD.” And neither is gaud.

    Rossett’s pictures are meandering streams of consciousness (his, ours, or both?) that might describe a disjunctive flea market of the mind. Their compositional anarchy, and their sheer density of visual data is perhaps a symbol of, or messy paean to the dizzying manifestations and functions of contemporary social media. Therein, searching for the sublime and meaningful amid the ugly, the absurd, and the just plain silly, can be an exasperating exercise.  

    For that reason alone, I’ve often been tempted to unfriend the entire institution of Facebook, for example. Yet like many of us, I am easily hooked. Similarly, despite my ambivalence toward the brand of art practiced by Mr. Rossett, I can’t seem to stop looking at his derivative doodlings.

Afterglows

Afterglows

By Tom Wachunas

 

    “For that is the power of the camera: seize the familiar and give it new meanings, a special significance by the mark of a personality.”

   -Alfred Stieglitz

   “…Walking through some of these spaces, you could almost feel some of the spirit that this town grew up with so many years ago…”

   -Michael Barath, speaking to Dan Kane, The Repository, Aug. 6, 2015

   EXHIBIT: Interiors, photographs by Michael Barath -  on view THROUGH AUGUST, at Julz by Alan Rodriguez, 220 Market Avenue N. in downtown Canton / Tues.- Fri. 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. / Sat. 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

    The 20 photographs by Michael Barath in this exhibit, presented by TRANSLATIONS at Julz by Alan Rodriguez, constitute a ruminant journey through abandoned buildings from bygone days in Canton. The images depict various interiors of the now dormant Hercules Engine plant (its original building dating to the late 1800s), as well as interiors of other unspecified Victorian residential structures. Barath’s deftly composed images of atrophied architectures are certainly a nostalgic unveiling of sites long hidden from most of us, and a sobering witness to the ravages of time and neglect.

   Yet curiously enough, the character emanating from these images isn’t strictly one of doleful ruination. There is an aura of enchanting hauntedness that makes these “dead” spaces breathe with a mystical light. The factory interiors, some of them cavernous, such as Factory Afternoon, are imbued with a hushed luminosity that softly illuminates their structural rhythms and shadowed recesses. The sensation of dysphoric emptiness is delicately balanced with a misty, even reverential light that borders on the Gothic. And for that matter, Barath’s approach can additionally seem almost painterly in the way it captures, not unlike Romantic-era artists, a dramatic atmosphere.   

   A similar ethereality is at work in many of the residential spaces depicted -  Victorian Bathtub and Victorian Blue Bath, for example – framed to focus on their strangely intricate geometries and textures. These pictures are both pragmatic and poetic records of evanescence. People lived here once.

   Amid the tactile grotesqueries of fallen plaster, rubble-strewn floors, or layers of peeling wallpaper, Barath’s compelling images of domestic relics arrested in time nonetheless leave us with an uncanny sense of lingering elegance, and of dignity in the deterioration.

 PHOTOS, from top (courtesy Michael Barath,    https://mbarath.smugmug.com/Site-Pages/About ): Factory 20, Factory Windows, Factory Afternoon, Victorian Blue Bath