Meet me at the corner of stasis and flux

Meet me at the corner of stasis and flux

By Tom Wachunas

   EXHIBIT: no place is perfectly round - Sculpture installations by Jonas Sebura and Emily Duke / at Main Hall Art Gallery, Kent State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Avenue NW, North Canton, Ohio / THROUGH DECEMBER 1, 2017 (Closed November 10, 23-26) / Viewing hours Monday-Friday 11 a.m - 5 p.m.

    This exhibit is very much about place. I’m talking, first, about the cerebral locale we inhabit wherein we can be wholly mindful of our present moment in a specific setting. And secondly, while in that moment, are we willing to seek and go to a unique somewhere in our own experience, cued by the articulated materials placed before us? 

   Both Jonas Sebura and Emily Duke are Fine Arts faculty members at Kent State University’s main campus – he an Assistant Professor (Sculpture), she an Adjunct Professor (Ceramics). The separate sculptural works here are not outright collaborations between the two artists. Yet viewed collectively, there’s harmony in how their pieces converse with and otherwise complement each other as conceptual and material entities.  

   The three intriguing works from Jonas Sebura are imbued with a spirit of performative geomancy – that ancient and mystery-shrouded practice of divination through the placement (or place-ness) of lines or figures and forms within a geographic context. Here, that geographic component takes the symbolic form of low-lying, white polygonal tables, or planes, upon which his sculptural elements interact in varying states of balance and tension. They suggest the passage of time, a feeling of impending motion, or forward progression, as in “The Approximation of What Is and What Could Be.” On one end of the table, there’s a concrete fossil of a footprint, and on the other a mold of the foot itself. A journey undertaken. 

   The slick, black, monolithic forms in his “Landscapes and Lay Lines” might be impenetrable totems, or mute sentinels of vexing, unknowable things. There’s a cryptic element of arrested animation in the form of a tiny jewel-like bauble dangled from a hand attached to a tree branch… all of it seemingly presided over by a startling mask made from resin-cast teeth and mounted atop a thin upright rod. Ruminating on angst?

   While Sebura’s pieces exude an improvisatory, lyrical theatricality, the five works by Emily Duke are relatively more calculated designs that evoke a tranquil domesticity. The starkly handsome coffee table arrangement in “Matching Suite” is a facile balancing of horizontality and verticality, as well as textures. Looking down through the tinted glass top of the table, the shaggy black yarn of the rug below becomes a muted grey plane subtly echoing the smoky surface of the narrow conical form – call it a lamp shade - hovering above.

   A similar playfulness transpires in “The Flavor of My Private Identity.”  The physicality of the hanging towels gets slyly undermined when you find that their presumed soft, fluffy texture is illusory - a printed image, not actual fluffiness. I’m reminded that a constructed illusion or facsimile of a place (in this instance, a wall in a bathroom), though perhaps a memory, is still a unique somewhere in real time and on its own terms. In veiling the actuality of the towels’ texture, the mimetic formality of this tableau becomes a fascinating metaphor, or mental place, for considering the nature of privacy.

   As discrete units, the artworks in this exhibit certainly give us a sense of individualized aesthetic approaches and/or personal identities of the artists. In this context, you might think of Emily Duke in the role of a structural engineer, perhaps even a mathematician, and Jonas Sebura as an alchemist. She creates elegantly prosaic counterpoints to his mystical, brooding poetics. That said, together they’ve made the gallery into a unified tableau of contrasts, or dualities: density and transparency, reflective and opaque, smooth and coarse, organic and geometric, personal and public, literal and metaphorical.

   And then there’s brain-teasing title of this exhibit. What might “no place is perfectly round” really mean? Is it a literal statement of fact, or some sort of riddle? 

   I could read ‘no place’ in the objective or quantitative sense, as in, “There is no such thing as a perfectly round place.”  Or I could regard it in the qualitative, subjective sense, meaning any location I find to be undesirable, as in, “This perfectly round house is no place, man.”  No place might then be anyplace I don’t like or want to visit. So then, is no place a variant of nowhere? But in that case, isn’t nowhere just a squeezing together of words which might mean that I’m actually… now here? 

    I guess dwelling in these elliptical considerations has taken me nowhere fast to a perfectly challenging place. And for those viewers among us who actively savor such challenges, this show is just the place to be.

   PHOTOS, from top: (1.)The Approximation of What Is and What Could Be, steel, wood, concrete, resin, crystals and sea shells, by Jonas Sebura / (2.) Landscapes and Lay Lines, steel, resin, wood, concrete and sea shells, by Jonas Sebura / (3.) detail from Landscapes and Lay Lines / (4.) The Flavor of My Private Identity, stoneware, printed silk Charmeuse, plexi-glass, thread, grout & wood, by Emily Duke / (5.) Matching Suite, pit-fired stoneware, steel, plexi-glass, tempered glass and acrylic yarn, by Emily Duke

Surrendered

Surrendered

By Tom Wachunas

      Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”  - Genesis 32:26

   Yet another commentary on a very recent work of mine.

   I was a senior in high school when I first saw a picture of Paul Gauguin’s 1888 painting, “Vision After the Sermon.”  To this day, and far beyond the importance of the work as a pivotal and innovative aesthetic development in Gauguin’s oeuvre, the painting still fascinates me. More than ever before. 

  There’s something timeless about that intense red ground upon which two figures are locked in hand-to-hand combat. Historical analyses of the painting invariably tell us that Gauguin depicted Christian congregants meditating on a sermon about Jacob’s encounter with an angel. I’m not sure how and when folks began to embrace the notion that Jacob ever wrestled with an angel as such. The Genesis author made very clear that it was a man who grappled with Jacob all night long. Read the account for yourself in Genesis 32:24-39.  In any case, I’ve always seen both figures in the painting as immersed in the searing aura of spiritual struggle and catharsis. A baptism by fire. 

   As a Christian, I’ve come to understand that Jacob’s opponent was most probably the pre-incarnate Jesus, who is both God and a man like no other, and that Jacob did indeed receive his blessing, but not without cost. He was thenceforth left with a limp - a sort of permanent spiritual tattoo.

   And so it is that  reflecting on how deeply Gauguin’s dramatic imagery has remained imprinted  for so long on my consciousness, I had originally named my work – a relief painting made from found clothing and feathers, all stiffened with several coats of latex acrylic - “Gauguin’s Tattoo.” I struggled with making the piece sporadically for nearly a year – my own nightlong wrestling match, if you will. In the end, however, I called it simply enough, “After the Sermon.”

   What sermon? Nothing less than the totality of Scripture. 

   “After the Sermon” is a symbol of an outcome, a consequence, an aftermath. On one level it’s a processing of that contentious, selfish, and ultimately dangerous state of mind and heart wherein we humans so easily indulge in inventing and reinventing God as we would like him to be. We think we find peace in conforming him to our own image and desires. We can certainly be a proud lot, yes? Armed with all manner of philosophies and intellectual probity, it is in the end only a sinister sort of joy that we take in our arrogance, our pride in thinking that our idea of God must in fact be the indisputable reality of God. But God isn’t an idea.  

   On a more personal and important level, “After the Sermon” is about calm after the storm, stillness after the arguments, the surrender that heals the limp. It’s a prayer of thanksgiving. Resting on and in the only reality there is, Christ, there is what the Apostle Paul called in Philippians 4:7 the “peace of God which transcends all understanding.”

   That’s His story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Ravishing Virtuosity and Power from the Canton Symphony Orchestra

 Ravishing Virtuosity and Power from the Canton Symphony Orchestra

By Tom Wachunas

   In his program comments celebrating the 80^th season of the Canton Symphony Orchestra (CSO), Music Director Gerhardt Zimmermann wrote, “Why do I love conducting this wonderful orchestra?...The CSO is that rare gem of orchestras that conductors seek to make music with. Their playing is committed, heartfelt, powerful, and above all, exciting.”

   For the season-opening concert on October 14, that rare gem dazzled with exceptional brilliance, beginning with Samuel Barber’s Essay For Orchestra No. 2, composed in 1942. It’s a marvelous, single movement work of interwoven, contrasting themes and developments, and exemplary of Barber’s passionately lyrical aesthetic. Here the ensemble perfectly captured the work’s changing moods – like painting an expansive landscape of emotions in sumptuous orchestral colors - with compelling precision and dramatic sonority. The briefly tranquil opening theme gave way to darker passages of churning drama and foreboding. Those in turn transitioned to more light-hearted, pastoral interludes, with melodic counterpoints that eventually morphed into the majestic and triumphal solemnity of the explosive conclusion, all clearly thrilling the audience. 

    Lauren Roth, a former CSO concertmaster and now concertmaster of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, returned to Canton to perform Camille Saint-Saëns’ lavish Concerto No. 3 for Violin and Orchestra. What made this homecoming all the more exciting was that this was the first time Roth performed the concerto with an orchestra, though you’d never guess it from her virtuosic playing, delivered with astonishing fluidity and authority.

   Roth’s demeanor was mesmerizing, at once gently measured and aggressive, evident in both her impassioned facial expressions and stance. She was communing with not only the ensemble, but also with her instrument, making it sing in a marvelous range of tonalities, and at times seeming to demand its submission to the many technical challenges of the music. Her playing was especially poignant during the second movement, wherein the graceful violin melody engaged in a delicate dance with the woodwinds. Throughout the work, she articulated Saint-Saëns’ lush cadenzas – ravishing in their fast arpeggios and scales, double stops, and flawless ascensions into incredibly high-pitched harmonics – with stunning bravura.

   Respighi’s Fontane di Roma (Fountains of Rome), and Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome) comprised the second half of the evening. The orchestrally rich score for the latter work called for a massive orchestra. Consequently, for this concert, the CSO ensemble was 92 members strong – a substantially larger group than usual, providing an unprecedented aural depth to the proceedings.

   While the performance of The Fountains of Rome was utterly enchanting, it was in the final movement of The Pines of Rome – “the pines of the Appian Way”- where the orchestra became an unforgettably unified embodiment, delightful in its unabashed flamboyance, of the composer’s intent. Respighi described it as the “…unceasing rhythm of numberless footsteps. A vision of ancient glories appears to the poet’s fantasy: trumpets blare, and a consular army bursts forth in the brilliance of the newly-risen sun…”

   A low, rumbling, relentless cadence, suggesting an army on the march, reverberated through the entire concert hall in ever-loudening layers, enough to rattle bones and make the heart race. We were engulfed in plangent waves of brassy martial trudging, augmented by the extra brass players standing in the side aisles. Maestro Zimmermann was particularly animated, turning this way and that, like a general rallying his troops. The final jubilant chord was a piercing blast, raising a collective shout of amazement from the audience. It was as if all of Roman history had just passed before us in a protracted sonic boom.

INDIVISIBLE ?

INDIVISIBLE ?

By Tom Wachunas

   It’s still hurricane season. It will remain hurricane season long after its official meteorological end. Volatile storms of ideological conflicts will continue to afflict us, leaving us powerless and floundering in the vast, ever growing debris fields of our spiritual malaise.

    Questions blowin’ in the wind. A rare urge, or surge, this – to share with you, on this platform of ARTWACH, some considerations of my art for a change.

   Above, you see three paintings. At the top, “The Untied State of America,” made just a few weeks ago. Next, “Broken English Readymade,” from 2016. And at the bottom, “The United State of McMerica,” from 2010. Seems I’ve been developing a series. Maybe. “Political” art? That’s too easy and convenient a descriptor. Try ‘spiritual exercises,’ or ‘meditations,’ or even prayers.  The pleas, the please, of a wounded heart. An S.O.S. – Save Our Soul.

   …One nation, under God?

   The American flag, abstracted on grocery bags. Grocery bags – containers of consumables, sustenance, nutrients, sanitation necessities. Grocery bags – containers for disposables, things unwanted, trash. White stripes scratched with letters. Detached syllables. Words and phrases once familiar, now fragmented, foreign, fraught. 

   What do we stand for, and when? In whose presence? Untied, we kneel. The American Scream. Forgive us, Father, for we know not what we do.