Faux what it's worth, just for the pun of it

 

Faux what it’s worth, just for the pun of it…

By Tom Wachunas 

  “Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen.”

-      - Charles Simic

   From recent playtime in my studio and my head, in a spirit of fun I offer two new releases: Rock Music, and PUN. Rescued. Repurposed. Repsychled. So to speak. As it were. If you will. In other words, i.e., a.k.a. ipso facto quid pro quo. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget ergo, non sequitur. Veni, vidi, vici.

   The guitar? Drawing a bead on wordplay. Fretting the small stuff, sentimental music taken for granite, marbleized and marvelized, pinning down rhythm ‘n clues at a fast clip, pulling on my heartstrings, wired and weird.

   And PUN? Just something I herd somewhere.

Semiotic Scissorscoptics

 

Semiotic Scissorscoptics 

How To Join

Crumb Cake

Television

American Dream

The Experience

Screaming Woman

By Tom Wachunas

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone...the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”  ― Marcel Duchamp

“Psychologically, our thought - apart from its expression in words - is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.” - Ferdinand de Saussure

  Semiotics (from Merriam-Webster): a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.

Exhibit: OVERDOSE – art by Matthew Rose / at John Strauss Studios, 236 Walnut Ave. NE, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH APRIL 14, 2023 / (330) 456-0300 / Hours: Monday - Friday 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM /

https://john-strauss-furniture.myshopify.com/

   An American artist, writer and musician living and working in Paris, France, Matthew Rose has long exhibited his collage works, paintings and drawings throughout Europe and the US. He regularly contributes features and reviews to ArtBlog, at

https://www.theartblog.org/author/matthewrose/

    Looking for meaning and purpose in the mayhem of being alive on this beleaguered planet during challenging times, have we overdosed on Plethora? Are we comfortably numbed merchandizers and consumers, or hapless victims, of the worldly toomuchness of our own making?

   There are approximately 1,000 artworks in this exhibit – a dizzying abundance of mixed media somethings about the conditions of our existential conditions. Signs, signals, insignias, memes, messages. Many of these artaffects by Matthew Rose are collages /montages on canvas or painted boards. Threaded throughout is an aesthetic spirit inflected with conceptual and psychological elements of Surrealism, Pop, and Dada.

   Dada was a reactionary art movement born out of the trauma and hysteria of World War I. Many artists at that time rejected the nobler academic standards and practices that had governed making and viewing art for generations. Dada could be angry, cynical, ambiguous and funny all at once. It was an attitude often served up with a hardy helping of wicked sarcasm.

    Rose is something of a prolific hunter-gatherer. His weapon? Scissors. His prey? All manner of found printed stuff, both modern and vintage, mostly in the form of ads, illustrations, comics, diagrams, photos and texts snipped from newspapers, magazines, books. Extracting these items from their original settings, Rose arranges them on his surfaces like puzzle pieces.

   Some works are simple and “quiet,” joining a few images of a representational nature to a word, or phrase, floating on or embedded in a somewhat empty, minimalist-abstract ground. Others are far busier affairs – dense agglomerations of wildly diverse subjects that Rose sprinkles across the picture plane as if writing run-on sentences in a free-flowing stream of consciousness. Or conscience?

   Here’s where we as viewers intuitively seek some sort of narrative nestled in the art. We look to connect. Consequently we rummage and ruminate.  We become co-creators, co-conspirators, code-breakers, hunting for meaning. There’s no shortage of targets. Whether cryptic, cautionary or celebratory, here’s where every picture can tell a story and every story can spell a picture. Or a thousand of them.

  Who are those twin women pictured at the bottom of “The Experience?” What will really relieve their back pain? And who’s the screaming woman in “Screaming Woman?” Maybe she’s Mother Earth. Is she screaming her dismay, or her delight, at the multitude of her children’s excesses, hilarious or horrific? Maybe she’s really laughing after all. Either way, Mama’s making a lot of noise these days, and Dada never sleeps at night.

   Enjoy the hunt.

Always the Light

 

Always the Light 

By Tom Wachunas, with Diane Belfiglio

 

“…But the transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur…” – G.K. Chesterton

   First, the blur. Since learning of the sudden passing of Diane Belfiglio a few days ago, I know I do not grieve alone in a state of numbing sorrow, incapable of finding words to describe the enormity of her departing our midst.

   But then, the shape of her shining cuts through the billowing clouds of sadness. I remember. Thank Dear God I remember. Her impact as superb artist, beloved friend, teacher most excellent, colleague most encouraging. An altogether inspired and inspiring creative force in our community. Here are some of Diane’s words about her work:

   "I was educated in a professional art world that has been characterized by its shock value, biting social commentary, and 'in-your-face' commercial images. In contrast to that world in which I was raised, I am simply endeavoring to create in my art a respite for our weary souls…. No matter the subject or medium, my work is firmly grounded in the formalist ideas that have interested me since my beginnings as a professional artist: closely cropped images bathed in the interplay of pattern between sunlight and shadows. Although realistic in presentation, I rely heavily on the underlying abstract qualities of my forms. Shadows, ethereal by nature, take on a rigid structural aspect in my compositions. Colors range from brilliant to subtle in an effort to reproduce the strong sense of sunlight streaming through each piece. My goal is to transform the mundane into the extraordinary, so that we see beauty in images that generally go unnoticed by most of us on a daily basis.”

    Something extraordinary indeed. I have been writing about Diane’s work for about 25 years. So now let me offer you, dear readers, this memorial composite of past comments from numerous reviews.

   I’ll always see Belfiglio’s oeuvre as something akin to one hand firmly caressing earthbound materiality, the other channeling through it the warmth and movement of light. The ethos of her work is a see-worthy vessel that remains buoyant and sturdy in turbulent waters – intact and unabashedly beautiful in our splintered culture too often floundering in pointless pop junk and ugly sensationalism. Hers are contemplative, mindful visions for our thoughtless times. As such, they are acts of bravery, courage and love on canvas or paper. Woven into the arresting formal elegance of her pictures is a consistently tender, mesmerizing harmony of astonishing technical acuity and compositional lyricism that imbues them with the rarefied air of poetry. Call it all a constant rising to ineluctable light.

    Always, the light. Rest there, dear friend Diane.

   And finally, here are two links. The first, to Diane’s gorgeous website so you can visit and be reminded of her brilliant work. The second to Zanesville Museum of Art’s beautiful posting on Diane’s current exhibit there.

https://www.belfiglio.com/

https://www.zanesvilleart.org/exhibition-diane-belfiglio

Whirldscapes and Hortimorphs

 

Whirldscapes and Hortimorphs 

Evening Bloom on view at Geez Mound, by Ehret and Francis

Conjuring a Spirit Guide from the Hardware Store Parking Lot, by Ehret and Francis

Sun Shower, by Steve Ehret

Ate the Sun, by Steve Ehret

Alter, by Steve Ehret

Haze Glaze, by Kat Francis

Meet Me for Records in the Club House, by Kat Francis

Mr. Soul, by Kat Francis

By Tom Wachunas

“We hope to bring you into the play place of our imagination, to live out the earthly magic of the subconscious mind. A place for people to float, have fun and most importantly get weird. Climb hills, roll down them, smell flowers, star gaze, pounce from earthy plateau to plateau.”  - Steve Ehret and Kat Francis

EXHIBIT: POTION PARK – The Kaleidoscopic Garden of Steve Ehret and Kat Francis / at Canton Museum of Art’s Milligan Gallery / 1001 Market Avenue N., Canton, Ohio / last day of the exhibit is March 5^th / 330.453.7666 /

The Canton Museum of Art is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., and Sundays 1-5 p.m. Admission is free on Thursdays and the first Friday of every month.

https://www.cantonart.org/exhibits/current

   And again, here comes that notoriously tardy blogger with a way-late vigorous nod in the direction of two prominent local artists- Steve Ehret and Kat Francis. If you’ve not yet seen their intriguing collaborative exhibit, there are still a few days remaining.

  So…”Kaleidoscopic” Garden, or “Collide -oh! – Scopic” Garden? Here’s where the notion of potions comes into play. Depending on the recipe, some potions may taste sweet, others bitter. They can be remedial elixirs or toxic tinctures. The fantazzmagorical visions in this exhibit combine elements of both, though never in a spirit of malevolence.

   The mixed media assemblages (acrylic paint on cut-out wood shapes) by Kat Francis are layered, 3D collages that have a scrapbook souvenir quality about then. Her painting style is charming and direct, sometimes almost childlike. A recurring motif is an embedded face in profile (her own?) which appears to ingest, or spew out, floating snippets of natural scenery. The eye is peering out beyond the picture plane as if meditating, searching, or remembering.

    Steve Ehret’s strange oil landscapes are painted with a sumptuous  fluidity that makes his forms appear to breathe and bounce. Here’s nature morphed into a wondrous waltz of curly puddles, pods and petals; rippling rocks rising and falling; wriggling stones, wiggling stems; and all in rainbow colors that glow from the inside with light stolen from an unseen sun.  

   Strangeness comes into even sharper focus when both artists partner together in one painting, such as in Evening Bloom on View at Geez Mound, or Conjuring a Spirit Guide from the Hardware Store Parking Lot.  Looking at them is like tumbling into the proverbial rabbit hole of altered realities. They’re dreamy and disorienting, yet not downright nightmarish. Surreal, certainly, but not so much sinister as they are sly. Like a fox.

   Begging your pardon, Kat Francis and Steve Ehret never promised us a rose garden. Still, stop and smell the weird. Eye think you’re sure to find the aroma simply…curiouser and curiouser.

Into the Blue

 

Into the Blue 

The Gloaming #1 - 9

Waiting

Finding

Blue (detail)

Blue

The Gloaming 2

The Gloaming #1 - 9 (detail)

By Tom Wachunas 

“The substance of painting is light.” – Andre Derain

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit…”  - Mark Rothko

“Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.”  - Wassily Kandinsky

EXHIBIT: Jordi Rowe presents Blueing of the Light: The Gloaming / in  Studio M at Massillon Museum / THROUGH FEBRUARY 26, 2023 / 121 Lincoln Way East, downtown Massillon, Ohio / (330)- 833-4061

https://www.jordirowe.com/about

https://www.massillonmuseum.org/

 A MassMusings podcast interview with the artist will be posted at www.MassillonMuseum.org/533 , and on Spotify on Tuesday, February 21, 2023, at noon.

   Painter Jordi Rowe concludes the artist statement she posted for her exhibit with these thoughts: “Like abstract painters before me, I encompass the viewers in the emotion of experience, add in the remarkableness of the commonplace, and aspire to crystallize a particular everyday moment. I find it rejuvenating.”  With this series of spectacular paintings, she has indeed realized her aspirations in truly sublime fashion.

   The “commonplace” she refers to has much to do with a phase of twilight known as gloaming – those moments of chromatic glowing in the sky right after sunset and just before full nightfall. Sometimes, for a few seconds, when the sun is at a particular position below the horizon, that glowing can become a quickened pulse bursting into an instantaneous flash of intensified color.

   Rowe’s facile confluences of oil, acrylic and spray paints produce a dramatic materiality. The sumptuous tactility of her surfaces turns what quantum physics calls the wave lengths of light into what could be called wave weights of vibrant hues. Her painted abstract “skies” are effervescent vistas, breathtaking fields at once dense and diaphanous, earthy and ethereal, comprised of particulate stuff – misty, thick, fluid, rising and falling. Here’s a beautiful conjunction of substance and spirit, all breathing at the nexus of the physical and the metaphysical.

   Especially compelling is her sprawling installation called The Gloaming, #1- 9. These nine canvases are mounted close together in a single long row spanning two gallery walls. You could start taking it in on the bright yellow end, and follow the colors through those enthralling blues into the night. Or, walk from the opposite dark end of the row to greet the sunrise. Either way, it’s about the passage of time through fugitive moments of a day, each condensed into a finite plane - a page, if you will - and each a complete picture in itself.

   It’s like reading verses of an epic, wondrous poem in paint.

A Compelling Tribute

 

 A Compelling Tribute 

A Lot of Energy Makes a Little Matter, by Jack McWhorter

Ladders and Holes, by Mal McCrea

You Paint Like a Sculptor, by Alexis Huntsman

Transitions, by Kim Blankenship

The Light You Carry, by Emily Orsich

Promise Land, by Keri Graham

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

Millennium Simulation, by Alaska Thompson

By Tom Wachunas

 “The act of painting is a clash of different worlds, which in their conflict with each other create new worlds. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the studio is the quest for making paintings that have an equivalence in two or more directions. The paintings derive from a system of metaphors drawn from physical science. A kind of blank slate which allows me to describe what I think I know about existing in time and space, history and nature.”  -Jack McWhorter (1950 – 2022) 

EXHIBIT: Forward Formations: Students Celebrate the Life of Jack McWhorter / at Patina Arts Centre, 324 Cleveland Ave. NW, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH FEB. 25, 2023 / Viewing hours Thursdays Noon to 8 p.m., Saturdays Noon to 9 p.m.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  Sarah Amatangelo, Kimberly Blankenship, Jessica Bracken, Noah DiRuzza, Samuel Gentile, Casey Herndon, Rita Hoagland, Nick Hoover, Alexis Huntsman, Kristi Karickhoff, Azia Mae Layman, Keri Marie, Madi Miller, Daniel McLaughlin, David McDowell, Sarah Flower-McVey, Mal McCrea, Jack McWhorter, Emily Orsich, Justin Randall, Natalie Swonger, Brandy Torch, Alaska Thompson, Kaley Weaver, Megan Wanderer, David Whiteman

  Students once under the tutelage of Painter and Professor Jack McWhorter, who passed away on May 1, 2022, have come together to celebrate his life and legacy through a shared exhibition. Jack was a prolific and accomplished artist, and a beloved, influential teacher of painting for 32 years at Kent State University at Stark. Each artist in this thoughtful and compelling tribute - which includes some paintings by McWhorter - created a work of art inspired by one of his pieces.

   At the core of McWhorter’s aesthetic is a persistent navigation of tensions and harmonies within symbiotic dualities. His compositions, which he called “live surfaces,” are clusters or matrixes of lines, shapes, and patterns that juxtapose accumulations and singularities, gatherings and dispersals. Like an explorer’s field notes on remembered sights and sites, places and spaces, his pictures often entwine a then with a now, as if remembering their own beginnings even as they were being transformed by his intuition and imagination into wholly new visual moments.

   New visual moments. The artists in this exhibit haven’t settled for merely copying an exact style, technique or content of a McWhorter original. After all, this exhibit is about inspiration, not imitation. Amidst the great diversity of formal approaches here, there is nonetheless a palpable sense of kindred spirits speaking in their own distinctive dialects, connecting to the act of making art with passion and panache.

   The very walls of Patina Arts Centre have indeed become live surfaces.

What's the Elephant in the Room?

 

What’s the Elephant in the Room?  

By Tom Wachunas

…But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.   1Corinthians 1:27

“…Although what happens when the “holy fool” begins to be corrupted by the world? He can no longer exist in it…” – Craig Joseph

THEATRE: The Elephant Man, written by Bernard Pomerance, directed by Craig Joseph / at the Mary J. Timken Theatre, located in the Fine Arts Building on the campus of Kent State University at Stark, 6000 Frank Ave NW, North Canton, Ohio / Performances on Friday and Saturday (Feb. 3, 4) at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday Feb. 5 at 2:00 p.m.

Tickets for all performances may be purchased online 24 hours a day at www.playersguildtheatre.com.   Box Office:  330.244.3224.

Open this link to view digital program book:

https://stagemag.broadwayworld.com/modern/THE-ELEPHANT-MAN-The-Players-Guild-Theatre-23759

   Bernard Pomerances’ powerful 1977 play tells the tale of John Merrick, a 19th century English man so grotesquely deformed that he became a circus sideshow curiosity. Making Merrick “more human, more like us” was an all-consuming mission for surgeon Frederick Treves. He befriended Merrick and provided a home for him in London Hospital, safely away from public gawkers.

   As Craig Joseph so astutely observed in his digital Director’s Notes (link posted above), the play is a deep consideration of the conflicted motives, and flawed expectations by which we measure being authentically human, ‘normal’, or beautiful. The story, as Joseph puts it, “… suggests that human-made indicators of “civilization” - Religion, Medicine, Commerce, Art, Law - actually deform and distort our humanity from being its best.”  

   All eight members of the cast are remarkably gifted performers, which makes for an ensemble of brilliant versatility. Six of the eight play more than one character with impressive panache. For example, in the role of Ross, greedy manager of the travelling freak show, Matthew Heppe is chillingly crass. As the well-intentioned Bishop How, on the other hand, he’s an eager and gentle religion teacher.

   Natalie Sander Kern plays Carr Gomm, hospital administrator, with credible dignity and authority. Erin Moore is Nurse Snork, who is severely reprimanded for sneaking into Merrick’s room just to stare at him. Rosie Bresson, playing Miss Sandwich, gushes with confidence that she will be hired to be Merrick’s caretaker, only to quickly bolt from the room, terrified after actually laying eyes on him. These three cast members also play some of the privileged dignitaries visiting Merrick in his room. Additionally, they’re  strangely electrifying as a bizarre carnival trio of the slow-minded “Pinheads”  - victims of a head deformity known as microcephaly. Meanwhile, Shani Ferry’s portrayal of Mrs. Kendal is quite compelling. Mrs. Kendal is a proud, self-possessed stage actress who introduces Merrick to the world of high society (and feminine anatomy), even as she struggles with her own superficiality and emerging compassion.

   Woven into Pomerance’s writing is a generous dose of pathos, beautifully translated here by both Michael Glavan as Frederick Treves, and Henrick Sawczak as John Merrick. Over time, the relationship dynamic between the two characters seems to devolve from real tenderness - tempered by Treves’ insistence that Merrick understand certain rules of etiquette and other “standards” of societal thinking - into a volatile crisis of conscience. Glavan’s performance is wholly captivating as we watch his confidence dwindle into frustration, then anguish, over Merrick’s deteriorating condition amidst questions about God, suffering, science, and human dignity.

    Sawczak’s presentation of Merrick is among the most impassioned and intense performances I’ve ever seen on a local stage. True to the playwright’s instruction for the character to have no prosthetic costume or makeup, Sowczak presents Merrick’s deformity in the form of speech stutters from contorted lips; an awkward, elongated gait; a paralyzed hand; twisted neck and torso; and nervous eyes that can nonetheless focus with startling sharpness as he speaks his agile, questioning mind. None of these deftly articulated quirks interferes with the searing clarity of his words. His tone has an uncanny range that effectively communicates disarming honesty, wit, and wisdom, along with an acute sense of sarcasm.

One of the play’s most striking metaphors evolves as we watch Merrick one-handedly construct an artful model of St. Philip’s Church. He says he regards a church as an imitation of grace, and that his model is in the end only an imitation of an imitation. To Treves’ observation that humanity itself is just an illusion of heaven, Merrick quips that perhaps God “should have used both hands.”  As he fits the final piece on to his model – the steeple pointing heavenward – he emphatically announces, “It is done.” Surely a haunting echo of the dying words from Jesus.

   Yet for us, is the tale really finished? This is sublime stage literature. As such, it resonates well beyond its briskly-paced 21 scenes. In a world still unreconciled to its purposed soul, the story feels like it’s still unfolding.