Oct 312024
 

Adrienne Elise Tarver

Cara Despain

Cara Despain

Ashanti Chaplin

Ray Anthony Barrett

Ray Anthony Barrett

Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan

One room of the gallery with Margaret Griffith sculpture (center)

Jane Chang Mi

Andrae Green (paintings) and Phoebe Collings-James (sculpture)

Andrae Green

Margaret Griffith

Margaret Griffith (detail)

Against Dystopia, the group exhibition at Diane Rosenstein curated by niko w. okuro, presents a variety of interesting work that speaks to the times we are living in.

The exhibition includes ten international artists representing twelve cities across the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and all five regions of the United States-  Ray Anthony Barrett, Ashanti Chaplin, Phoebe Collings-James, Cara Despain, Andrae Green, Margaret Griffith, Jane Chang Mi, Olivia “LIT LIV” Morgan, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Adrienne Elise Tarver.

From the gallery-

Presented on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, Against Dystopia is ‘a far-reaching exhibition, both in terms of the diverse backgrounds and approaches of its featured artists, and the social, cultural, and geographic ecosystems those artists represent and critique,’ writes okoro, who is based in New Haven, CT. The exhibition ‘features artworks that inhabit a spectrum of anti-dystopian thought, from mobilizing conceptualism to overcome historic traumas and the precarity of the present, to envisioning future utopias against seemingly insurmountable odds.’

Against Dystopia transforms fear and anxiety surrounding the uncertainty of our shared future into a tangible site of hope—one where collective memory reminds us of our agency to enact change today, and rich cultural traditions empower us to imagine alternative futures. Of significance is the inclusion of artists who identify as multi hyphenates, playing numerous social roles within their communities, such as advocate, change agent, chef, documentarian, educator, father, filmmaker, mother, musician, oceanographer, researcher, and too many more to name.

Artworks are grouped into three thematic sections, each of which explores creative strategies of resistance and works against dystopia at all costs: field research, symbolic interactionism, and speculative fiction.

Ray Anthony Barrett (Missouri), Ashanti Chaplin (Oklahoma), Cara Despain (Utah/Florida), and Jane Chang Mi (Hawai‘i/California) use field research to map histories of frontierism, settler colonialism, and land politics onto ecological and socioeconomic systems today. With a focus on listening to the land and sea to both unearth and atone for difficult truths, these artists name and dismantle dystopian practices on the path to reconciliation. Embracing an appreciation for both hyperlocal traditions and the tenets of global citizenship, each underscores our shared duty to ensuring ecocultural sustainability and Earth’s habitability for future generations.

While Margaret Griffith (California), Olivia Morgan (New York), and Adrienne Elise Tarver (New York) work through markedly different mediums and styles, they share a fearlessness in addressing ongoing tensions and questions surfaced amidst the political firestorm of 2020. Embracing tenets of symbolic interactionism, or the theory that individuals shape and are shaped by society through daily interactions and the co-creation of meaning from symbols, these artists remind us of the power of human connection to bridge difference. Each steers towards social cohesion by processing collective grief and the enduring impacts of the 2020 presidential election, the proliferation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement respectively. Whereas Morgan and Griffith subvert symbols that often polarize rather than unite us within physical space—such as fences, face masks, and smartphones—Tarver reaches into the past to pull forth reimagined symbols that speak to our spiritual interdependence.

Phoebe Colling-James (United Kingdom), Andrae Green (Massachusetts/Jamaica) and Esteban Ramón Pérez (California) boldly envision alternative realities by using speculative fiction and symbolic allegory to sew threads of connection across time and space. Each resists linearity and subverts narrative tropes to instead materialize the fluid spiritual dimensions of lived experience. Through their layered ceramics, paintings, and sculptures, these artists mine the depths of their respective Jamaican/British, Jamaican/American, and Chicanx heritages to comment more broadly on social conditions today, prompting us to dream beyond what’s readily visible or knowable.

Against Dystopia opens concurrently with The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art x Science x LA, which similarly explores, “opportunities for civic dialogue around some of the most urgent problems of our time by exploring past and present connections between art and science.” By convening an international group of visionary artists to help initiate these dialogues, Against Dystopia prompts viewers to pursue deeper understanding of shared challenges and solutions, on both the micro and macro levels.’

This exhibition closes 11/2/24.

 

 

Oct 232024
 

Austin Lee’s uses a combination of technology and traditional artistic techniques to create work in a variety of mediums for Psychomachia, his latest exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. The saturated colors in his paintings (and the blue of the center sculpture) make them eye catching, while his subject matter creates, at times, a feeling of unease.

From the gallery-

Austin Lee knows how to render human emotion. Through a unique process that has defined his career, Lee explores human psychology and emotions by integrating software technologies with traditional methods of artmaking to produce vibrant paintings, sculptures and video works. Psychomachia marks Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in eight years and third exhibition with Jeffrey Deitch.

Lee’s work explores the hyperreality of social media and the internet, and, in this exhibition, he continues to explore the complexity of human connection that can be refracted through our digital age. He uses 3-D and virtual reality software to make drawings that are then painted on canvases with airbrush or fabricated in materials like resin and bronze. Lee turns inward and examines his own raw emotions through saturated hues and uncanny images.

The exhibition also draws inspiration from a transformative visit Lee made to the Giotto Chapel in Padua, Italy, where he was inspired by painted scenes from the 14th-century poem Psychomachia by Prudentius. The poem, which depicts the allegorical battle between virtues and vices for control over the human soul, served as an important source for several paintings in the exhibition. Some paintings show imagery that is directly pulled from the Chapel’s walls, while other paintings are quiet references to familiar symbols, like animals and families. Lion with Blue Eyes (2024), for example, conjures feelings of valiance and strength, whereas In Bed (2024) invites visitors to participate in a more unsettling sensation–– the feeling of being vulnerable or being under surveillance.

Central to the exhibition space is Blue Fountain (2022-2024), Lee’s fountain sculpture that was previously exhibited in his solo museum exhibition at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea in September 2023.

The mezzanine features a series of new video works that continue to explore surveilled environments and the disquieting feelings in the paintings. The animated figures ogle at the viewer from the same viewpoint as reflected in In Bed. It is common for Lee to build upon previous works, placing them in a rich, multidimensional visual world through rendering them in different media.

This exhibition is on view until 10/26/24.

Oct 042024
 

Dennis Johnson, “Red Hot Trucking”, Acrylic on canvas

Paintings by Elaine Mathews (two left) and William Nelson (painting on the right)

Mixed media piece by Michael Stanley (left); Center sculptures by Lucia Grossberger Morales; Pair of paintings by Lisa Van Herik (right)

Photo on left by Bill Leigh Brewer; Center painting by Jan Slawson and work by Karen Elizabeth Baker (right)

Painting on left by Dennis Johnson; Center photographs by Andy Nystrom; Right painting by Mariana Maldonado-Pagán

Photograph on the left by D Wallace Colvard; Sculptures by Dean Steiner (center) and photograph by Dean Genth (right)

The Artists Council is a non-profit organization focused on local artists in the Coachella Valley. They host several exhibitions, classes, and workshops in their gallery space in Palm Desert.

Their current member exhibition Hot Times Cool Art is on view until 10/6/24. You can see many of the artworks on view on their website.

Oct 022024
 

Kathleen Strukoff, “Turquoise Bird”, Mixed Media, Kee Gallery

Backstreet Art District in Palm Springs consists of several art galleries and studios and hosts a monthly event on the first Wednesday of every month. For additional information and a list of all of the galleries and their current showings, head to their website.

Below are a few selections from this past summer.

Work by Ernesto Ramirez

Work by Erich Meager

Kee Gallery is owned and operated by artists Kathleen Strukoff, Ernesto Ramirez, and Erich Meager.

Work by Aurora Lucia-Levey at Tom Ross Gallery

Work by Rae Harrell from her gallery

Paintings by Martin Prew at Kevin Goddess’s gallery

Paintings by Kevin Goddess

The studio in the back of Stephen Baumbach Gallery

Stephen Baumbach Gallery hosts numerous photography exhibitions throughout the year and houses a fine art printing business.

 

Work by Gary Wexler

The studio at Gary Wexler Design

 

 

Sep 132024
 

Sadie Barnette, “Photo Bar”, 2022 (left) and Annette Messager “My Vows (Mes Voeux)”,1990, 106 gelatin silver prints, bound between glass and cardboard, black tape, twine and acrylic push pins (right)

The group exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents a variety of photography work from the museum’s collection. The artists explore new ways to take the medium further while exploring a wide range of subjects, often with a focus on capturing the past.

From the museum-

At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in an album or pictures in an archive as a source of inspiration. Drawing its title, Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, from a photograph by Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition consists of works in The Met collection from the 1970s to today that reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that these objects conjure, while underlining the power of the found object.

Among the featured artists is Sadie Barnette, for whom photographs provide a portal to illuminate the forgotten history of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco and her own father’s life as her 2022 work Photo Bar powerfully illustrates. Like Barnette, many of the artists in the exhibition seek to fortify the legacy of family histories, to emphasize the importance of intergenerational relationships, and to consider the ways in which knowledge and respect for the past can inform our current moment. Some artists such as Sophie Calle and Larry Sultan explore their own narratives to reveal the construction of desire, while others including Taryn Simon and Hank Willis Thomas examine histories that have shaped cultural and political dialogue. For some, including Darrel Ellis who utilized family pictures to negotiate the trauma of police violence, the personal is political. Deploying various strategies, these artists consider how a collection of images—like a talisman or an altarpiece—build relationships across time and can transform our understanding of the present.

Larry Sultan “Untitled Film Stills”, 1989, Chromogenic prints

Larry Sultan’s work stood out, as did the museum’s caption (below) that included quotes from the artist.

“It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion. I was in my mid-thirties and longing for the intimacy, security, and comfort that I associated with home. But whose home? Which version of the family?”
-Larry Sultan, 1992

In the late 1980s Sultan rephotographed and enlarged single frames from 8mm films his parents made during family vacations three decades earlier.

The artist later explained the genesis of the work:

“I can remember when I first conceived of this project. It was 1982 and I was in Los Angeles visiting my parents. One night, instead of renting a videotape, we pulled out a box of home movies that none of us had seen in years. Sitting in the living room, we watched thirty years of folktales-epic celebrations of the family. They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events.”

This exhibition closes 9/15/24. The museum’s website also includes images of all of works included.

Aug 072024
 

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

The Whitney Biennial ‘s 2024 edition, Even Better Than The Real Thing, presents a large group of artists, working in different mediums, with many pieces directly dealing with social and political issues. The show does have a certain heaviness to it, but with all of the issues currently happening in the world it would be impossible for that not to be reflected in the artwork.

From the museum-

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus,” as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

There’s a lot of great work to see. Below are just a few selections and some documentation from the museum.

For Lotus L. Kang’s In Cascades, (pictured above), the artist has hung sheets of photographic film from steel joists suspended from the ceiling that are gradually changed by the light inside the gallery. She refers to the exposure process as “tanning” and, like our skin, the film is changing over time with its environment. On the floor are little sculptures, as well as a a suitcase, all suggesting movement and change.

Kiyan Williams eye-catching outdoor installation Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, has the White House is sinking into the ground with an  upside down American flag at the top.

Kiyan Williams, “Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House”

Maja Ruznic, “The Past Awaiting the Future/Arrival of Drummers”, 2023

The description of Maja Ruznic‘s painting from the museum-

Ruznic has said that The Past Awaiting the Present/Arrival of Drummers “looks at how multiple things can be true at the same time: birth, violence, pain, suffering, joy, and music.” She has described the horizontal format of the painting as inherently linear, implying a past, present, and future. The movements suggested by the figures’ feet—some in profile and others pointed toward the viewer—collapse these temporalities into a single symbolic image.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Twelve Thirty-Four “(From the “Doctor Alcocer’s Corsets for Horses” series), 2023, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas

From the museum about Mary Lovelace O’Neal

Mary Lovelace O’Neal began the series that included Blue Whale aka #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), after two whales caught her imagination as she walked on a beach near San Francisco. “And watching them, I thought, imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!” It is this sense of excitement and desire on a grand scale, the energy of the light in their spray, that she worked to capture in paint—more than the image of the whale itself.

Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O’Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction. While Lovelace O’Neal was deeply involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she resisted calls to make representational paintings that would illustrate or inspire the struggle, insisting that forging her own path in abstraction—as she does in each of the paintings on view here—was equally relevant to Black life.

 

Isaac Julien’s immersive video installation was really absorbing. The sculptures added an extra dimension to what was on screen.

From the museum-

Unfolding across five screens, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) reflects on the life and thought of Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance (played by André Holland) who urged members of the African diaspora to embrace African art in order to reclaim their cultural heritage. The installation includes sculptures by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) and Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1985), opening up a conversation about Black artists’ legacies that extends across modern history. Julien has described the work as a form of “poetic restitution,” speaking to the ways museums have collected African art. The artist refines this critique by creating a visual and sonic meditation as a “diasporic dream-space.”

In the work, Locke contemplates the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—where he was the first Black Rhodes Scholar—and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, founded by one of Locke’s interlocutors, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), played by Danny Huston. Barnes also debates a skeptical Locke on his heritage, a sequence that distills many of the questions that the installation raises: Who gets to define Black modernism? Who has the authority to speak? How do men negotiate power, or queer desire?

Cannupa Hanska Luger “Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (from the series Future Ancestral Technologies)”, 2021

From the museum-

Cannupa Hanska Luger proposes: “This installation is not inverted . . . our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive. The work here, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”), celebrates Native technologies by using the shape of a tipi—a word that the artist has also turned into an acronym, standing for Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI). Luger looks at the complex structure as an example of the innovations created by his ancestors of the Northern Plains tribes. Luger’s materials, such as deadstock fabric, found objects, and clay, reflect the artist’s commitment to sustainability and reuse.

One of Suzanne Jackson’s works

Work by Suzanne Jackson

From the museum about all of the unique creations by Suzanne Jackson

Suzanne Jackson made these suspended paintings without canvas, slowly building up many layers of acrylic, detritus, gel medium, and objects from the natural world, including seeds from her garden in Savannah, Georgia. Jackson has been experimenting with acrylic paint since the 1960s. “It’s painting another way,” she explains. “I don’t call it collage because it’s not another material. It’s all paint—acrylic on acrylic. And it’s suspended: paint suspended in space. . . . The paint becomes an armature for itself.” This “armature” is not fixed, however; Jackson thinks of the paintings as living things and is very open to the fact that they are malleable and will reshape. The layered paint seems to have a kind of agency and an ability to change independently. Looking at its iridescent quality up close creates an afterimage—a lasting mental image that continues even when a viewer has shifted their gaze away.

Two of Eamon Ore-Giron’s paintings from “Talking Shit”, Mineral paint and vinyl paint on canvas

From the museum-

These three paintings are part of Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit series, in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures. Reflecting on a famous sculpture of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) traced an evolution from “goddess to demon, from demon to monster, and from monster to masterpiece.” This line of thinking resonated with Ore-Giron, who recognized that symbolic figures are continuously reimagined as cultures shift and collective and personal identities are redefined. The series title Talking Shit reflects the artist’s desire to explore this idea and a living ancestral past in ways that are open, informal, and personal.

In these works, Ore-Giron focuses on Andean folklore. He has pictured Amaru, a powerful, protean creature related to water and the underworld, as a zigzagging abstracted dragon. To depict the mythological rainbow made by the creation god Viracocha, Ore-Giron represented the celestial phenomenon as a double-headed snake moving through the sky.

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

From the museum about B. Ingrid Olson’s photographic and sculptural installation-

This installation intermixes two series, Dura Pictures and Indexes. Each work in the Dura Pictures series presents one photographic image physically embedded within another, what the artist describes as placing a “moment in time within a different moment in time, just like memory does of the past in the present.” The photographs were made in the artist’s studio and record B. Ingrid Olson’s own performative interactions with handmade props and assorted materials, such as mirrors or printed matter set within constrictive ad hoc spaces. The images alternate between showing a first-person vantage point with a torso or toes breaking into the picture plane, and offering a mirrored reflection of the artist, often only partially seen.

Proto Coda, Index is a single artwork with thirty constituent parts—each is a replica of one of the thirty reliefs made by the artist between 2016 to 2022. With concave interior surfaces and irregular hanging heights, the forms each suggest a container for a specific body part, like a piece of armor or a casting mold. The reliefs mark the entire length of the wall, serving as placeholders for an absent body, both fractured and multiplied.

 

Ser Serpas, “taken through back entrances . . . “, 2024

Ser Serpas’ large sculptural installation, assembled from found objects, grew more interesting when seen at different angles.

From the museum-

Describing sculptures like those included in this exhibition, Ser Serpas has said that “the act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is the aftermath.” The performance begins in a city—in this case, New York, and specifically Brooklyn—with the artist collecting discarded objects that speak to her through their color, the ways they have become worn or torn, and their structural openness to being combined. Then she works with the objects’ orifices, odd junctures, and gravity to combine them into provisional sculptures. This process yields a feeling of potential energy just at the moment before an object’s collapse. The resulting sculptures become a kind of dual portrait: first of the city as seen through its cycles of consumption and decay, and then of the artist herself through the expressive choices she has made.

It’s often difficult to see many of the videos that are part of the exhibition due to time constraints. This year the museum partnered with MUBI and you can watch eight of the films for free on their site for a limited time.

On Sunday 8/11/24, the last day of the exhibition, the museum will be free all day with events that include making creature collages with Eamon Ore-Giron (whose work is pictured above).

Jul 252024
 

Canton Museum of Art’s Spring/Summer Exhibitions include three artists who have created engaging new worlds for visitors to explore.

Ginny Ruffner’s sculptures hide colorful surprises in her exhibition Reforestation of the Imagination. Working with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, they have created digitally animated fictional plants that burst from the certain sections of the works when using their app on your phone (the museum will also loan you a tablet if you need one). Ruffner has also provided delightful descriptions for these creations, as well as her drawings.

From the museum-

Imagine an apocalyptic landscape. It appears barren, devastated, and hopeless. It is not.

In this traveling exhibition from the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner creates a seemingly bleak environment that suddenly evolves into a thriving floral oasis by combining traditional sculpture with augmented reality (AR) technology. In collaboration with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, Ruffner brings to life a colorful world where glass stumps suddenly sprout mythical flora that have adapted to their surrounding conditions in unexpected, beautiful and optimistic ways. By transforming the CMA lower galleries into a multidimensional experience, Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination calls into question the very notions of reality and fantasy, of concrete and abstract, and of desolation and hope.

Ginny Ruffner is among a vibrant group of artists bringing AR to museum installations. By using this technology as another art media, she transforms visitor experiences. The installation consists of landmasses featuring intricate handblown glass sculptures of tree stumps, with painted tree rings that function as discrete QR codes. These islands surround a landmass that supports a large fiberglass stump sprouting beautifully grotesque bronze and glass appendages. Other than the central stump and the painted shelf mushrooms and tree rings on the surrounding stumps, the scene appears colorless and desolate; however, when viewed through AR’s technological lens an alternate landscape is revealed.

Visitors can download the free app “Reforestation” on their phones or use the iPads in the gallery to bring this second reality to life. When the tree rings of a stump are viewed through the device’s camera lens, a hologram of a fictional plant appears to sprout from the sculpture. These imagined fruits and flowers have evolved from existing flora, developing dramatic appendages and skills necessary to flourish in this radically different environment. In this reality, tulips develop stem flexibility, pears contain windows to the outside world and flowers take on the form of birds. The installation includes Ruffner’s tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her fanciful flora and their remarkable, sometimes humorous adaptations, as well as 19 original drawings by the artist that were the inspiration for the AR images.

“This is nature reimagining itself,” said Ruffner. “The imagination cannot be exterminated. It just re-creates itself. To me, ‘Reforestation’ is about hope.”

The intricate porcelain works Janice Jakielski created for her exhibition Impossible Objects are reminiscent of papercut art. Through her unique ceramic process (detailed in the Ceramics Monthly article linked below) the delicate work takes traditional objects and presents them in new and intriguing ways.

From the museum-

Janice Jakielski is a Massachusetts (soon to be Colorado) based sculptor. By inventing new ways of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets she can create impossible objects of curiosity, beautiful objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world.  Using meticulous detail, familiar forms and uncertain function she coaxes her audience to draw near, closing the physical gap between viewer and object.  In this way the details of workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation. Her impossible objects were also featured in the January 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

For Laine Bachman’s paintings for Beyond Worlds, she has created detailed environments filled with creatures and color.

From the museum and the artist-

Suspended in the ether of some surreal galaxy, the worlds I create give a glimpse into flora and fauna that exist in a hidden interplanetary realm.  Each is a themed bouquet where I explore and study different species that exist in our own world.  I relish the details of their structures and include many forms of life I find fascinating. I approach each piece as a puzzle with parts that can coexist, painting a picture of a precious ecosystem that becomes more complex as the work evolves.  One may find a frog nestled below a fern or a mole napping under a toadstool. There are many creatures and plants we recognize from the past and some that have yet to be discovered. Creating these planets has been a journey to capture the beauty of nature and elevate small moments that may otherwise go unseen. Though they reside in the mire of a newly formed galaxy, they are truly a celebration of our world and the life that exists within it.”- Laine Bachman

As a young child growing up in a once flourishing town in the Rust Belt of Ohio, Laine Bachman always had an affinity towards drawing and painting. Her parents encouraged her creativity from the beginning which led to her attending art school in nearby Columbus, receiving a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in painting in 1997.

Often inspired by myths and folklore, Bachman infuses the worlds she creates with archetypal imagery, underlying themes, decorative motifs, and meticulous details. Working in watercolor and acrylics, her paintings are full of creatures and landscapes, real or imagined, that are all part of the larger story behind her work. Bachman’s work, recognized as Magical Realism, is greatly influenced by Henri Rosseau and his flat, lush, and detailed landscapes and also by surrealist Frida Kahlo.

Representations of life, death, beauty, innocence, and evil are depicted in Bachman’s work.  Whether it’s animals, insects, birds or favored objects, they become symbols of different expressions.  As owls are a symbol for wisdom or butterflies can represent a transformation, it’s this kind of idea behind the creatures that helps them tell a part of the whole story.

The works expose unique environments in which to explore and pay homage to the various forms of life that Bachman finds fascinating and mysterious in nature. Vast landscapes are used to showcase these life forms, showing the spaces between and the surfaces above and below. The worlds she creates are hidden and untouched by man, and give the viewer a glimpse into the secret lives of their peculiar inhabitants.

These exhibitions close 7/28/24.

The museum is free all day on Thursdays and tonight, 7/25, is the last of their Virtual Reality Nights. From 4-8pm you can create your own reality with VR headsets, guided by a CMA educator.

Mar 282024
 

Jazzalyn Palma, “21st st”, Oil on canvas, 2023

Rachel Augustson, “Gaze”, Ink on Paper, 2023

Ashton Burton, “…”, Oil on canvas, 2023

Cleveland Institute of Art’s 78th Student Independent Exhibition is currently on view in their Reinberger Gallery. The juried show is organized by the students and includes work from all mediums.

There are so many great pieces in this show, above and below are just a few selections.

This exhibition closes 4/7/24.

James Schaffer, “Bound”, Oil on canvas, 2023

James Schaffer, “Bound”, Oil on canvas, 2023 (detail)

Gwen Putz, “Viv!”, Monoprint, 2023

Tristen Kovacs, “897”, Spray paint and acrylic on canvas, 2023

Emily Fontana, “Untitled”, Acrylic and spackle on fabric, 2024

Emily Fontana, “Untitled”, Acrylic and spackle on fabric, 2024 (detail)

Mar 162024
 

Watercolor paintings by Katherine Strobel

There is A LOT of work currently on view at Summit Artspace for their Winter Exhibitions (see the previous two posts) and it is worth mentioning these shows as well.

In the Welcome Gallery are watercolor paintings (seen above) by Katherine Strobel, for her exhibition, Bad Nostalgia.

Her statement about the work-

People forget to take pictures of things that don’t matter because it’s impossible to photograph qualities such as the feeling of an inside joke, the sound of an exhale through the nose, or dirty silverware that must be returned to the kitchen and replaced. These things act as set, pieces for what make up the rest of our lives. This series is a catalog of work that focuses on memory and candidness of a scene or subject. The people pictured are painted from life or candid photographs which are then emphasized from a naive image to something more. When an image is exaggerated with new colors and shapes it serves to make the mundane more desirable. The paintings are watercolors with a textured surface; the texture creates a sense of play with paper elements. In my work watercolor is often indicative of memory because of its ephemeral quality and transparent layers. This is because of how impossible it is to clarify every element that makes up a color when the layers are all compressed and viewed as a complete state.

Below are works from FRESH, an annual exhibition of local artists juried by Pita Brooks, Executive Director of Akron Soul Train. The website has all of the artists included and their statements and bios- definitely worth taking a look at what is being created in the area.

Michelle Eisen, “I’ve Made My Bed”, Silkscreen on hardboard

Steven Mastroianni “Fathomable Series #24”, Unique cameraless photogram, silver gelatin print

Finally, on view throughout the building are works by local students, teachers, and school leaders for Taking Care of Our House: Communities Coming Together and Making a Difference. The exhibition is made with the organization Art Resistance Through Change (ART-C). The works pictured below are a few of the sculptures created that included the personal narratives of the artists.

It’s worth mentioning that along with these exhibitions there are artists studios and galleries also in the building and worth checking out. Summit Artspace is open Fridays 12-7pm and Saturdays 11am-5pm.

Mar 162024
 

David Kruk’s solo exhibition Nobody Here at Summit Artspace in Akron, asks questions about the state of culture (or lack of culture) we are currently experiencing. Is the difference between the Venus of Willendorf and a Funko Pop just time period and material? Using the Vaporwave aesthetic, a remix of past pop culture in itself, he explores consumerism and nostalgia. Walking around the empty spaces in his video game creation, one is left wondering- what comes next?

The artist’s statement about the work-

This exhibition will consider Mark Fisher’s concept of “lost futures” through the aesthetics of Vaporwave and Funko Pops. I am interested in how these anachronistic objects utilize nostalgia through the remixing of cultural references to engage with consumer capitalism. According to Fisher, this continual referencing of the past exemplifies contemporary society’s cultural stagnation and the erosion of collective imagination towards a radically transformative future.

The sculptures in the exhibition are intended to push these anachronisms a bit further; to undergo a life cycle of adaptation and re-contextualization. I enjoy thinking about the ways in which something like Vaporwave can function as a critique of consumer culture, questioning capitalism’s impulse to commodify everything in sight, including our identities and memories. Vaporwave was born from the internet, and its aesthetic continues to be quite popular within online communities. These communities may often be collectors of pop culture paraphernalia: such as Funko Pops, which I’ve become interested in for their cultural symbolic value. Collecting Funko Pops can provide a source of aesthetic stability for some, while simultaneously operating as totems for coping with the realities of adulthood.

Conceptually within this exhibition, I wonder about the ideological trajectory from ritualistic idol to mass-produced fandom figurine, how capitalism influences our engagement with nostalgia, how the concept of a collectible operates within the spheres of the household to the museum, and how an art object may change over time through being digested through the body of consumerism.

For the video below, available on the gallery’s website, Kruk discusses his work – from tracing images using an oven light as a child, to a growing interest in sculpture, to creating the interactive video game from the show.

This exhibition closes 3/16/24.