Krew Couture

 

Krew Couture 

We Burned

What color is your COVID?

Dress for Sex-cess: Truth or Dare

Good and Hot (left) / The Peacock Gown

COVID Coat #2 and the Hydration Dress

By Tom Wachunas 

“…Fashion is instant language.”  – Miuccia Prada 

EXHIBIT: Judi Krew: Hoard Couture, Where Art Meets Fashion / Through October 6, 2021, at Massillon Museum STUDIO M / 121 Lincoln Way East in downtown Massillon, Ohio / 330.833.4061

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/

From Judi Krew’s exhibition statement: “…I embrace the mantra of reuse, repurpose, reconsider, and reimagine to guide the overall concept of each piece. What began nine years ago as a small scale sculptural dress serves to explore the idea of why we feel the need to hold onto “things”, this project has grown into an exploration rooted in problem solving…The original intent of Hoard Couture, to reduce an accumulation of things, has evolved over time into a series that sometimes looks back at our past and perhaps also forward to our future…”

   Here’s an eye-popping parade of femiquinns bedecked in a bodacious array of unconventional materials. In this context, we can rightly regard Judi Krew’s works as not just “fashion design”, but also as remarkable mixed-media sculptures.

   On a purely formal level, she consistently achieves an elegant balance of volume and mass animated with electrifying patterns and textures, and all harmonized by an intoxicating color sensibility.  

   On a conceptual plane, I think there’s a kind of probity to many of these pieces that brings new meaning to the idiomatic trope of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve. In all of their astonishing intricacy of constructed details, these exquisitely crafted assemblages are more than merely decorative. They’re declarative. I’m confident that you would be well served to read the text placards accompanying each piece, wherein Krew speaks about the history of her materials and their ideological symbolism, as well as processing and resolving the technical challenges in making a given piece actually wearable.

  Fashion statements indeed. Here’s just a few examples.

   Dress for Sex-cess: Truth or Dare is a stark white denim dress covered with handwritten names or victim numbers of 358 women who filed sexual harassment claims against Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, Bill Clinton, and Dr. Larry Nasser. It’s a literally gripping document and, as Krew tells us, “…a walking, wearable record of history to spark conversation and awareness.”

    What color is your COVID is a cape comprised of neckties with varying configurations of circles, spots and dots, and attached toetags with numbers written on them. Krew counted every single one of those circles, spots and dots, totaling 44,935. But that number is just a starting point for grasping the symbolism of this ingenious work. Once again, here’s where reading the placard can be especially vital in appreciating the meticulous way Krew breaks down that tally further into a sort of algorithm signifying the staggering and still growing number of COVID victims in the U.S.

   We Burned is a beautiful and haunting remembrance of the deadly 2018 California Wildfire season. That billowy bodice is a cluster of 2,000 hand-cut “leaves”, each one burned or charred, and made from such things as greeting cards, photos, wrappers and cartons – stuff easily lost to fire. Krew adds this poetic note: “…Sometimes a leaf will fall off and float away, another lost soul returning to nature.”

   In all, the excellent physical installation of this collection exudes an inspiring theatricality. You might easily imagine being backstage at a fashion show, or standing in the wings while gazing at the line of “models” poised to strut and swirl their fantastic finery onto the runway. A palpable sense of imminence. Suddenly those static sculptures seem positioned to become kinetic entities in space - a thrilling and provocative work of performance art.

   MEET THE ARTIST at the STUDIO M reception on Saturday, Aug. 28, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

ALSO, MassMu will post a podcast interview with Judi Krew on Tuesday, September 21, at noon.

On a Parting Note

 

On a Parting Note 

The End and the Beginning, by David McDowell

Citalopram, 30 Mg, by Kevin Anderson

Summer Into Fall III, by Diane Belgiglio

End of an Era, by Heather Bullach

Childhood Sliding, by Sharon Durkin Charmley

Moving On, by Joseph and Li Hertzi

By Tom Wachunas 

“THE LAST HURRAH features 65 artists reflecting on last things, final occurrences, ends of stuff, and how and when events come to a close. It's the last exhibit I'll be curating under the Translations banner, and a celebration of all the wonderful artists who've collaborated under the brand in the past 11 years.”  - Craig Joseph

EXHIBIT: The Last Hurrah / at Downtown Branch of Stark Library, 715 Market Avenue N., Canton, Ohio / on view THROUGH AUGUST 28, 2021 during library hours / 330-452-0665

   Of all the art spaces that have come and gone from downtown Canton’s “arts district,” none was for me a more exciting art gallery in the truest sense than Translations (located at 331 Cleveland Avenue NW). Craig Joseph’s curatorial acuity consistently provided us with shows of remarkable aesthetic and conceptual depth.

    It’s certainly no surprise, then, that this Last Hurrah is any less inspired and inspiring. The show is exceptionally rich in its diversity of media, materials and styles, including several excellent written works presented in enlarged text on tall, wall-mounted banners of white paper. The emotional, psychological, and spiritual arc of this entire exhibit is broad, often infused with poignant reflections on not just endings, but the prospect of hope in beginnings as well. So come ready to really read, literally (hey, this is a library after all) and figuratively.

   On one level, I’ve been thinking about the end of the Translations era as a somewhat bitter pill to swallow. Speaking of pills, there’s Kevin Anderson’s stark Citalopram, 30 Mg. Made from molded (carved?) foam, it’s a larger-than-life representation of an antidepressant medication. To everything there is a season if not a cure, eh? That specified 30 Mg dosage seems to deepen the piece’s symbolism. In the world of print media, writers’ often ended their typed articles or press releases with – 30 - . It’s a codified designation, and I’m not sure if it’s still a common practice in journalism. In any case, it means “finished” or “end of story.”

   On a more important level, I’m thankful and honored to be in the company of all the of very fine artists who made work for this show – a  communal, heartfelt farewell to an important exhibition platform. Read the statement that David McDowell included with his mixed media work, The End and the Beginning, and see how he expresses his own gratitude. Inspired by a memory of an incident from 20 years ago, it’s a mesmerizing image of a glowing tree, on fire after being struck (and killed) by lightning, and actually flickering here in blue and green LED lights. I echo McDowell’s concluding words: “…May we let this Last Hurrah prompt us not to mourn, but to step up. Some clichés are true: Every ending is a new beginning. Thank you, Craig.”     

A Compelling Illumination of 'Different"

 

A Compelling Illumination of ‘Different’

By Tom Wachunas 

‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ – from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3

“A much-needed, beautiful testament to the power of the human spirit and the power of being oneself.”  - Craig Joseph 

 PERFORMANCE: THE ABSOLUTE BRIGHTNESS OF LEONARD PELKEY, written by James Lecesne, Directed by Abraham M. Adams, Starring Craig Joseph

A Seat of the Pants production, at Malone University Founders Hall, 425 25th Street NW, Canton, OH  

Sunday, August 8th at 2PM (in person) / Saturday, August 14th at 8PM (in person) / Friday, August 20th at 8PM (in person or all day online)

Tickets $20 - info at     www.seatofthepants.org/productions.

   This play is a marvelous one-man show and an otherwise brilliant tour de force of storytelling. Written by James Lecesne and here deftly directed by Abraham M. Adams, it stars Craig Joseph, who plays every character – eight in all – beginning with Chuck DeSantis, a frayed-at-the edges police detective with a fondness for quoting Shakespeare, as in, “The evil that men do lives after them...” We might quickly think we’re in for a rough ride when in his opening lines, he glibly declares, “… The dark side is my beat.”

    For the next 70 minutes, we watch and listen as he re-lives a case from 10 years ago, probing what happened to Leonard Pelkey, a fourteen-year-old boy who had gone missing in his Jersey Shore small town. The detective interviewed a bevy of local citizens. They included Leonard’s guardian, feisty “aunt” Ellen, who owned a local beauty salon and who refused to call the boy “gay,” preferring instead, “just different”; Ellen’s jittery daughter, Phoebe; chain-smoking Marion, who tearfully recalled at one point how Leonard  “…saw us not the way we were, but how we hoped to be…”; Buddy, the British director of a local drama and dance school who treasured Leonard’s uncanny theatrical talents; Otto, the German immigrant who owned a clock repair shop where Leonard took refuge from the bullies who relentlessly attacked him; and Gloria, the church-going, bespectacled widow of a mobster, and who spotted one of Leonard’s signature  rainbow platform sneakers floating like an omen in the lake outside her home. Good news, this Leonard’s shoe, thought the detective. And bad news. Leonard wasn’t attached.

    Yes, there’s evil and darkness and tragedy here. But that’s not the end of this ride. Evidenced by all the character’s very animated testimonies, most of the townsfolk judged Leonard’s differentness to be somehow intolerable. “Too much,” they said. Yet in honestly recalling what he did and said, and how he did it and said it, hardened hearts were softened. It’s a bittersweet hindsight, to be sure. Only when Leonard was gone from their midst did they see him, in all his objectionable “flamboyance” and quirkiness, as a bringer of light, indeed love. His undaunted trueness to himself gave them pause to examine their own lives in that same light.

    All of these characters come to credible life thanks to Craig Joseph’s remarkable performance acumen. From the timbre of his various accents (New Joisey, Britain, Germany) to the detailed nuances of body language, his expressivity is riveting, at once fiery, poignant and not without a generous dose of edgy humor. He turns the playwright’s words into specific, tangible people with attitudes - funny, happy, frightened, angry, mournful -  switching from one to the next with astonishing speed and precision. And all of it is beautifully enhanced by lighting and sound elements designed by Micah Harvey and Megan Slabach respectively.

   This is beyond fine acting. It’s absolute magic.

Edgy Evocations

 

Edgy Evocations 

Crosscurrent_01

Text/Context_01

Text/Context_04

Beyond Interpretation_10

By Tom Wachunas 

“You can make anything by writing.”   - C.S. Lewis  

“Letters act as practical and useful signs, but also as pure and inner melody.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

“Handwriting is a spiritual designing, even though it appears by means of a material instrument.”  - Euclid

“Calligraphy is the most direct form of all artistic expression. Just as each movement of the dancer is absolute, so every gesture of the calligrapher is essential. It is not the meaning of the character but the writing–the movement of execution and the action itself–that is important.”  - Tseng Yu-ho Ecke

EXHIBIT: John Chang: In Ink—Transformation of Calligraphy, THROUGH AUGUST 11, 2021, in STUDIO M at The Massillon Museum  / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon, Ohio / Phone: 330-833-4061 / The Massillon Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday 9:30am - 5:00pm,  Sunday 2:00pm - 5:00pm

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/539

From Merriam-Webster: Definition of calligraphy / 1a: artistic, stylized, or elegant handwriting or lettering / b: the art of producing such writing /

2: PENMANSHIP / 3: an ornamental line in drawing or painting

   Born and raised in Shanghai, China, John Chang is now based in Southern California. At one point in his statement for this solo exhibit, he writes: “…By invoking calligraphic forms, I am commenting on the distortion of language, but I am also reclaiming the energy of the written word. Tapping into my ancestral roots, I also use pigments for their symbolic power. For example, black and white are the colors of most ink painting but also represent yin and yang… I consider myself a 'spiritual escapist.’"

  Escape from what, and into what? Frankly I’m not exactly sure. Not able to interpret the elegantly drawn Chinese characters/words floating throughout his paintings like so many ghosts, I can only guess. I’m reminded that one of the paintings in the show is called, interestingly enough, Beyond Interpretation. This is not to say that the process of interpretation can’t be intriguing. Here, it most certainly is.

   For starters, remember that the traditional strictures of Chinese calligraphy require a mastery of brush (or pen) and ink. Chang’s arresting paintings are a departure from that ancient discipline. An escape? They regularly employ large, shiny textured shapes (or plains) rendered in the plastic patina of black acrylic paint. A nod to modern Western industrialism?

   There’s plenty of ambiguity here. Visual tensions. Weight and counterweight. Yin and yang. Positive and negative. Are those precisely-edged black shapes -  looking like so many puzzle pieces - macroscopic views of partially defined calligraphic letters? Or is that more what the white shapes are doing? Which is the positive shape, which is the negative ground? Indeed, both the black and white fields are transparent, revealing a variety of underlying as well as superimposed characters, marks, drips, scrapes, and textures. In some of the paintings, Chang has incorporated scraps of corrugated shipping boxes. The Amazon-delivered pleasures of American consumerism?

   A synthesis of text, context, subtext. Abstractions. Gestures. Actions of the hand to set the mind traveling. Metaphors for a meeting of cultures, a hybridization of identities.

   So as a viewer, maybe on one level you could commence your own inter-actions with these fascinating works by becoming a spiritual inquisitor. Think  of them as (I can just about hear your groaning now)… guesstures.

Meanings to an End

 

Meanings to an End 

Untitled  (1991)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (2021)

By Tom Wachunas 

“…Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus…”  - Ken Kesey, quoted in the Tom Wolfe novel, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

   Back on May 4, I received an email from curator Craig Joseph (remember Translations Art Gallery in downtown Canton?) with an invitation. Here’s most of the email content:

  “ Ladies and Gents... I am very likely going to be departing Canton this fall in pursuit of an MFA or some other new adventure, but before I go, I want to create with you one last time under the Translations banner.

To that end, I've poured over 10 years of files to pull together a list of most everyone who has ever exhibited in a Translations show before and I'm inviting you all to be part of one last hurrah…

The show is called THE LAST HURRAH and I'm inviting you to reflect artistically on some sort of ending, a last something, a finality. Might be the ending of a favorite book or movie, might be the ending of a relationship, might be a historical ending (the Titanic sinks or Marie Antoinette gets beheaded), might be getting your vaccine. It's entirely up to you what you choose…”

The exhibit is planned to open at the Main Branch of Stark Library on Friday evening, July 30, and run through August 28.

  I decided to make a piece about my troubled departure from New York City (after living there for fourteen years - ten of those in Brooklyn). The new piece is called “Outbound,” and it’s been 30 years in the making.

   It wouldn’t be accurate to say, however, that I’ve been actually working all that time on the painting itself. Better to say… it’s been working on me. The piece was originally a slap-dash acrylic self-portrait on a small scrap of unstretched canvas (11 ½” x 13”). It was the last painting I made in 1991, during my final days in Brooklyn -  homeless, jobless, divorced. In debt. And drunk. A few months after painting it, I left Brooklyn at night, a few days before Christmas, on a Greyhound bus – the last bus ride I’ve ever had - bound for my native Ohio, where I have remained ever since.

   I never thought of that untitled painting as a “last hurrah”  so much as a last, lurid harumph from a devastated New York dreamer. It seemed to me that nothing in it spoke enough about its generous measure of dark ugliness. In fact I always felt it prodding me through the years to do something more with it, not to make it somehow prettier, but rather to at least paint a hint or two of specific context or point of reference. The painting kept saying only, “You’re not finished with me yet.”

   And so for this exhibit, I finally got on board to finish the journey.

Myra Schuetter's Not-So-Still Lifes

                                                   Myra Schuetter’s Not-So-Still Lifes 

Listen

I Should Have Stopped with the Animals

Devil's in the Details

Break Out

Distortion vs. Transparency (detail)

Distortion vs. Transparency

By Tom Wachunas 

   Hopefully, we are seeing a time in our history when people are beginning to break out of their “molds” and are able to be the people they are and want to be…What helps one segment of our society helps all of us.  – Myra Schuetter  

EXHIBIT: We’ve Got Issues: Watercolors by Myra Schuetter / at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton / THROUGH JULY 3, 2021 / Facemasks required–

Visit www.cantonart.org/reservetickets     330.453.7666

Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am – 8 pm /Friday - Saturday: 10 am – 5 pm; Sunday: 1 – 5 pm / Regular Admission: Adults - $8, Seniors (60+) & Students (with ID) - $6 / Children (12 & under) and Museum Members – FREE / FREE ADMISSION on Thursdays

   Myra Schuetter is a native of Jasper, Indiana. For the past 40 years or so she’s been honing her considerable skills as a watercolorist working in a meticulously realistic style. Her complex and intricate compositions are executed with a commanding exactitude of details and exquisite color dynamics that are nothing short of astonishing.

   These very large watercolor paintings – you could rightly call them heroic in scale - are in one sense still lifes. They’re also allegories, populated by lots of toys and action figures. At first you might think that the paintings are children’s tales, or memories, or perhaps tailored to a child’s perspective.

   So on yet another level, the paintings are narratives. These elaborate visual stories are actually very grown-up commentaries and observations that often speak to the social and political sturm und drang of our troubled time and place. Schuetter effectively explains what inspired them in the placards posted with each painting.

   For her 2016 work, I Should Have Stopped with the Animals, the artist recalled an occasion of talking with her husband about the state of the world.  At one point in the conversation he had asked, "Do you think God ever said, 'Maybe I should have stopped with the animals’?" The various toy figures in the painting are engaged in a war, all transpiring on and around a large Bible, opened to the Book of Genesis (the story of creation and the end of Eden). Not to be irreverent, but the husband’s inspiring question does remind me a bit of Mark Twain’s glib suggestion to God that, “… the human being is another disappointment and… is no considerable improvement upon the monkey.”

   Distortion vs. Transparency is an especially intriguing work from 2012, prompted by Schuetter’s recollection of the terribly contentious public meetings in her city where her husband was once the chairman of the Utilities Services Board. The meetings were held to determine a feasible alternative to the city’s outmoded coal-fired power plant.  

   In technique alone, particularly in the way Schuetter renders a variety of colored glass vessels (a  ‘transparency” that tends to emphasize or exaggerate the words visible behind the vessels ) and the shadows they cast, the painting is a tour de force. It’s a three-tiered essay of sorts. The characters arranged in the top row represent a pompous, loud and angry faction spreading misinformation. The middle row presents more reasonable folks, sincerely seeking a viable solution, while the bottom row presents what the artist calls the trusting “silent majority.”

   In the border that frames the painting called Listen, that same word appears in 57 languages. Meanwhile the image shows a diverse crowd of confrontational characters holding protest signs. In her comments on the work, Schuetter has written, “…For all of our arguing, conflict and anger, no one is listening to the “other side,”…getting to know the other side and truly listening to them usually doesn’t happen…”  

  There are multiple voices present in this work - indeed throughout the entire exhibit - and none of them really ‘still’ (as in still life) after all. So look and read closely. But also listen. You might even hear your own

Pulpitudes

 

PULPITUDES 

Buried Alive For Four Months

The Devil Beast Of Tuz Golu

The Man Who Snuffed Out Hell

Jet-Sled Raid on Russia's Ice Cap Pleasure Stockade

The Shy Killer

By Tom Wachunas 

"I learned how to compose, how to tell a story. There's no way I could have done what I did later if I hadn't had all that men's adventure magazine work." -Mort Künstler 

EXHIBIT: Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustration / at the Canton Museum of Art (CMA), 1001 Market Avenue North, Canton, Ohio / organized by the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY and toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC / THROUGH JULY 3, 2021 / Facemasks required–

Visit www.cantonart.org/reservetickets    330.453.7666

Tuesday - Thursday: 10 am – 8 pm /Friday - Saturday: 10 am – 5 pm; Sunday: 1 – 5 pm / Regular Admission: Adults - $8, Seniors (60+) & Students (with ID) - $6 / Children (12 & under) and Museum Members – FREE / FREE ADMISSION on Thursdays

 BACKGROUND, excerpted from CMA MAGAZINE: “Mort Künstler is recognized as America’s premier painter and chronicler of authentic American history, especially noted for his incomparable renderings of Civil War events. The artist began his career, however, as an illustrator during the golden age of pulp fiction books and magazines… In a sense, he became “The Don” of illustrated pulp fiction, a title that alludes to that prodigious writer of pulp fiction, Mario Puzo, and his illustrious novel The Godfather. Puzo had a work ethic akin to Künstler’s, and the two collaborated on many assignments during their years working for Magazine Management Company, Inc. Künstler created the original visuals for Puzo’s Mafia saga, which influenced future depictions of Vito Corleone, including Marlon Brando’s iconic portrayal of The Don in the 1972 Oscar-winning film The Godfather…

   Mort Künstler: “The Godfather” of Pulp Fiction Illustrators features more than 80 original illustrations by Künstler that enlivened the covers and pages of American paperback books and magazines such as True, Argosy, Stag, For Men Only, Male, Adventure, and Saga, throughout the pulp heyday of the 1950s and ‘60s. Most of these illustrations are being exhibited publicly for the first time, and their subjects are wide-ranging and unabashedly action-packed: military conflicts, criminal heists, Cold War espionage, man against nature, and much more. Nobody captured hardboiled action better than Mort Künstler. His illustrations embody the very essence of the pulp era.”

   Let’s start with considering three quotes. First this, from American photographer Aaron Siskind (1903-1991): “In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration.”  Next, from American writer and comic book artist Brian Stelfreeze:  “I think there's art, and then there's illustration. Art comes from a deeper place.” And then this, from American painter Frank Stella: “…But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”

   Folks have been yakking about the supposed difference between “fine art” and “illustration” for centuries. In the quotes I cited here (and there are myriad others that I could have chosen as examples), there’s the snarky hint of illustration thought to be merely something. Something diminutive and inconsequential, something shallow, something weightless. As if to categorically declare, from the highbrow pulpits of aesthetic snobbery, that art is art and illustration is illustration and ne’er the twain shall meet. To that I say balderdash and baloney, fiddle-faddle and flapdoodle, humbug, hooey, hogwash and hokum. And lest I forget, piffle and poppycock and thank you very much Merriam-Webster.

    Illustration can signify many things to many people, depending upon taste and context. In the context of painting, for example, it seems to me that the practice of illustration has been too easily stigmatized as commercial entertainment. Perhaps the most laughable dismissal of illustration as art lies in the idea that illustrators lack originality because their imagery is nothing more than a translation of a written story. Tommyrot and twaddle. On that basis, why shouldn’t we write off countless representational painters through the entirety of art history - including all those beloved Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical painters of old, for example - as mere hacks?

   Consider one more quote, from British illustrator Quentin Blake: “I suppose illustration tends to live in the streets, rather than in the hermetically sealed atmosphere of the museum, and consequently it has come to be taken less seriously.”

    Ironic, isn’t it? Here we are, in a museum, seriously filled with “mere” illustrations. Paintings. Most of them show a marvelous mastery of the gouache medium (opaque watercolor).  Mort Künstler’s compositions, drawn from stories, are exciting visual adventures rendered with stunning precision and a compelling flare for the theatrical. Come look. If you find them “entertaining,” more power to them, and to you. It’s an offer you shouldn’t refuse.