Smart Art

“Illumination,” Shalya Marsh’s exhibition in the Doshi Gallery of the Susquehanna Art Museum, is the farewell show in the Kunkel building on Market Street in Harrisburg, the current location of the Museum. The Doshi Gallery for Contemporary Art, which was founded in 1972 by Maya Schock, provides an exhibition place for established and emerging Pennsylvania artists to showcase their work and develop their art by engaging and educating the general public. The gloomy, rainy evening of the show’s opening brought a small crowd into the Museum to learn about the meaning behind the neatly arranged ceramic pieces by the artist.

Shalya Marsh graduated in 1998 with the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics from the State University of New York at New Paltz. She currently lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and actively participates in the art education of youth and adults in the area. Her commitment to help emerging artists created “Windows,” a project that utilizes empty shop windows in Lancaster city to showcase works of art. Her ceramic pieces are exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the country and praised with positive reviews from several publications.

“Illumination, “ which features beautifully solid pieces of highly patterned clay-work, is about communication and the limitation of human languages.  Marsh tries to point out the inevitable losses that occur while sending and receiving words, sentences and full messages to one another. She taps into ancient writing and counting systems like cuneiform and connects them with modern communication practices like the binary code of computers. By connecting past and future Marsh creates intelligent and aesthetically pleasing ceramics.

The square-shaped tiles and their rectangular arrangements provide the framework to a tidy feel, even to the round and elongated protruding pieces of the show. The lively organic textures and patterns of the works draw the visitors to recognizable surfaces of corals, bubbling lava, cheese, bee hives, craters, cinnamon sticks, grass and other objects and living things we encounter in our everyday lives. The forms take us to the world of ancient civilizations of the Sumerians, Mesopotamians, the   Mayas or the Egyptians.  The dominant terracotta colors and the familiar but somewhat mysterious forms help the viewers connect with the works immediately. Earth colors of cream and smoky black work harmoniously to differentiate the individual pieces within one composition but at the same time pull the entire show together. 

Marsh uses red earthenware clay, earth pigments and slips to create her intriguing pieces and arranges them into lines of decodable texts. She provides ciphers for the visitors and actively engages them to find the concealed texts within her work. Some pieces have more than one code designed into them, hiding the multiple layers of the artist’s messages.  Some of the letters repeat themselves in the form of relief, print and negative space; others form interesting 3-dimensional sculptures with Morse code incorporated into their design.  The different forms and shapes complement one another and create a coherent body of artwork precisely set in the gallery.

“Illumination” is a worthwhile visit to the Susquehanna Art Museum.  In the Doshi Gallery the old medium of ceramic work is brought to a refreshing composition of pleasing sculptures and wall plates with a twist of decipherable text. Shalya Marsh shared some of the text during her gallery talk, I decoded some myself, now it’s your turn to come and see what you can read. Can you break the code?

An Unfortunate Show with Great Artworks in York College

What Are They Up to? The York College Faculty Biennial Art Exhibition

The York College Faculty Biennial opened in the York College Galleries on November 4th with an evening of pleasant music and light refreshments. Despite the rain, the exhibition enticed a lot of curious visitors.  The show is a great opportunity to further strengthen the bridge between students and faculty and shed light from a different angle on the individuals exhibiting here. Visitors of the exhibition met the diverse face of visual art represented in the multiple media of the works. Installation, painting, sculpture, jewelry, drawing, illustration, photography, and printmaking are all part of the show, so there is a good chance that everyone will find something close to their interest, like or dislike.

 The Brossman Gallery showcases seven artists works neatly arranged on the octagonal walls. As we step in on the right we see three oil paintings by Ophelia Chambliss. She uses the powerful juxtaposition of light and dark. Her limited color palette of black and white shades and earth colors give a lively presence to her work. Crescendo (2010) very well conveys the dynamic movement of dancers to a gradually increasing volume of music.

A political tone is evident in the three woodcut prints of Matthew Clay-Robison. The beautiful colors and interesting abstract forms of Drill, Baby, Spill (2010) and Slick Contaminant (2010) woodcut prints’ subject matter is the ugly scene of oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The prints wavy lines also recall the material, wood, used in the process of making these pieces. These works evolved from Clay Robison’s three-year series of abstract work dealing with the structure of disease processes.

The dominant wall of the gallery is occupied by the projection of colored zigzagging lines of the installation and performance work of Laure Drogoul. Apparatus for Orchestral Knitting invites the visitor to participate in the work. By knitting, the participants compose the sounds that change with different speed of the needle work.

Pinki’s Tussle (2010) is the last of several black and white drawings with ink exhibited by Ry Fryar. Gentle black lines form the sinewy slim body of four whippets. In this piece Fryar introduces pink and brown colors to the dominant black and white hues of the other illustrations. The placement of this colored work brings alive all of his black and white pieces on the wall. The interaction between the dogs and the seven works create a dynamic circle of play and tension of flee or stay.

 The Cora Miller Gallery received the difficult task of showcasing the sundry works of 16 faculty members, and despite its efforts the limitation of space resulted in an unsuccessfully crowded arrangement of unrelated works.  The close juxtaposition of several media and styles suffocate the individual works and instead of complementing one another they disturb each other’s entity.

 Entering the Gallery Rebecca Quattrone’s sculptures of defenseless female torsos greet us.  Proibito Cinque (2010) is a clay sculpture of a lightly curved beautiful female body bathed in golden bronze and fastened to weather and termite damaged wood planks. The shoulders of the statue are slightly pulled upfront like a body crunching from pain, not necessarily physical but emotional pain. The cracked opening under the right breast and the fracture following the left breast’s line further conveys the vulnerability of the female body.   Two other sculptures by Quattrone are placed close to Proibito. They both reflect the same theme and forms but use different materials to communicate the vulnerability of female soul.

The installation Water Doilies (2009- ongoing), on the back wall of the gallery, takes the visitors to the launching of embroidered plastic shopping bags on a body of water. JoAnne Schiavone used found materials: plastic bags, plastic bottle caps, artificial sponges and created her ornamental pieces that she then laid on water as a protective shelter. But, is it protection or abuse of the natural waters? By using plastic bags Schiavone poses several questions about human impact on nature, in this case the ecosystem of oceans, rivers and lakes.  Several of the crocheted colorful flower-like forms are “floating” in the gallery on transparent plastic bases, while a projection on the wall carries these three-dimensional pieces further into the floating images of embroidery.   

Two similar works CGXXXII (2010) and CGI (2010) are Joseph P. Cassar’s contribution to the show. The abstract forms of these collages play with color and imagination. The artist applied thin layer of gouache to parts of the works to bring together, contrast, emphasize or deemphasize the forms and colors, creating a harmonious whole of very different hues.

On the most hidden wall of the Gallery neatly arranged into a rectangular form are 12 drawings by Kristin Kest, titled Fables (2010). The surprisingly risqué illustrations are Kest’s interpretation of well-known fairy tale and folklore characters like Little Red Riding Hood.  Her skillful drawing of slightly repulsive figures kindles one’s interest in the stories behind Kest’s work. Her drawings place these characters into modern life and rebel against the history of teaching young women of moral life through these familiar faces and fables.

The show, by providing only the titles of the works, gives the viewers the freedom to interpret the art works and stimulates conversations of subjective understanding. This exhibition is a great way to show the students and the general public what our professors are up to outside the curriculum. The show will be on view until December 1, 2010, and hopes to see you in the Galleries.

The Static Change of Art & Nature: The 50th Anniversary of Storm King Art Center

Storm King Art Center is closing this weekend for the season. It is not too late to catch their 50th anniversary exhibition.  

I always loved travelling in the off season, but when we entered Storm King Art Center I was convinced that we chose the best time of the year to experience what this park has to offer, art in an always-changing environment. The wonderful hues of fall and the slow downward dancing of leaves transformed the park into a magical place. From every turn, bush and tree something new, spectacular and unknown greeted us. On the fields, the large scale sculptures of Mark Di Suvero, Alexander Calder, Alexander Liberman hovered over us as giants of a strange land.

Storm King Art Center is about a 4-hour drive from York, Pennsylvania, and is a great destination of a short vacation, road trip or field trip. Taking up 500 acres of land in Mountville, NY, Storm King is one of the largest sculpture parks of the world.  Ralph E. Ogden and H. Peter Stern‘s idea of an exhibition place for Hudson River paintings became a reality in 1960. However, the destiny of the museum was influenced by two life-experience of Odgen: visiting an Australian marble quarry, and David Smith’s home where he saw Smith’s sculptures placed outside in his yard. This was the moment when the vision of a sculpture park was born in the minds of Odgen and Stern. They purchased 13 works from Smith and started to carefully place them into the environment where they most complement their surroundings and dialogue with nature by emphasizing its always-changing lights, elements and life. Since its conception 50 years ago, the park slowly grew into a major exhibition place where internationally known artists’ works have been experienced by thousands of visitors each year. The park has works by Andy Goldsworthy, Mark Di Suvero, Alice Aycoc, Maya Lin, Alexander Calder, Sol Lewitt, Charles Simonds, George Rickey, Nam June Paik, Claes Oldenburg, Isamu Noguchi and many others.

This year Storm King Art Center is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the exhibition 5+5: New Perspectives. This exhibition invited works by ten artists, five who are new to the park and five who already had works exhibited in the center.

The museum building’s patio provides the starting point of the exhibition with Alyson Shotz’s Viewing Scope (2006). The work consists of several stainless-steel telescopes of different diameters that are bound together and fastened to a rotating base. The piece itself is aesthetically pleasing but its function, to encourage people to view the designed landscape of the park through lenses that distort, fragment, stretch and alter it in many different ways, is what makes it fit into the park’s theme, change of nature.

Shotz contributed another work, Mirror Fence (2003) to the exhibition. It is a 130-foot-long picket fence placed between a trail and a grassy field. The fence reflects the grass and surrounding trees and plays optical tricks by disappearing and reappearing depending on the angle the viewer looks at it. It evokes questions about art, reality, borders, freedom, and possession. Is it a fence or art? Is it dividing or uniting? Is it about territory or boundary? Is it about us? And what happens if we breech over it?

Near the viewing Scope is one of my favorite pieces of the show, John Bisbee’s Squall (2010). Disheveled curls of partly rusted iron spikes hold tightly together to form ten 40-inch wide spheres piled on top of each other outlining a pyramid of giant embroidered globes. Squirrels and birds hop on and into the balls, becoming part of it for a while. Moving around the piece changes the background and therefore its color and feel; it can become a space capsule against the blue sky, loosely rolled hay with the background of green trees or cannon balls with the stone of the French Normandy-style museum building behind it.

Also on the Museum Hill, carefully placed to frame the Maple Allèe of South Fields, is Ursula Von Rydingsvard’s giant cedar work, Luba (2009-10). Luba is made of cut up cedar planks glued together and molded with a chain saw into a17.5-foot high towering wide funnel-shape sculpture with a seemingly natural growth on its side forming a narrow opening and allowing the view of the road below through the work. Its material let this work truly blend with nature and complement the nearby trees. Hand-placed graphite colors the top of the work smoky black, just like her other work by the artist For Paul (1990-92/2001), which is located about 50-yards downhill from Luba.

Adjacent to Luba stands al di la (2008) Mark Di Suvero’s imaginatively curling rusted iron and shiny stainless steel sculpture. This work is much smaller (9 feet high) than his other pieces in the park: Pyramidian ((1987 /1998), Mozart’s Birthday (1989), Mon Père, Mon Père (1973-75) or Old Grey Beam (2007-10), which is part of the current exhibition The common thread in all of his work is a natural-force-driven moving part.  Al di la, unlike his other works, is full of curves and surprises. It rotates and moves up and down and resembles the head of an insect holding a steel tube with its tentacles as it attentively observes the landscape and the viewer with its high-reaching feelers.

Old Grey Beam is the antithesis of al di la; it consists of straight lines of four painted steel beams and tightly pulled wires arranged to enclose several triangles against land and sky. While al di la blends in to nature with its rusty brown color, Old Grey Beam’s orange hue and 45-foot-long central beam draw a strong contrast between nature and itself, screaming for attention amongst four other works of the artist placed in the nearby grassy fields.

After Rodin, Klimt, and Brancusi Darrell Petit further evolved the magic of Kiss (2008). His 17 and 15 feet tall raw marble slabs gently touch each other on the top conveying a sensual, tender kiss that the proximity of nature makes romantically real. The weights of the pieces (19 and 25 tons) create a strong physical feel and the support of lovers.  Its roughly touched surface and nonrepresentational entity brings visions of sacred ancient places like Stonehenge to mind, but at the same time is able to take the viewer into an intimate lush-filled place of lovers. Kiss is part of Darrell’s ongoing series of art making in quarries around the world.

A short walk from Kiss takes the visitor to Andy Goldsworthy’s 5 Men, 17 Days, 15 Boulders, 1 Wall (2010) that he created for this special occasion of the park. His new wall, which he built in the same manner as Storm King Wall (1997-98) with 5 British wall builders, recalls the waving line of his earlier work and winds around trees in close proximity to its counterpart. For both works the stone was gathered from the area and was stacked without any adhesives allowing the elements to change and form them. But, they are not simply walls; they are the recalling of ancient building techniques, the history of the land they stand on(the first wall was built along an old farm wall), and questions about boundary and freedom.

For this special occasion Alice Aycock recreated in the park Low Building With Dirt Roof (For Mary) (1973/2010) (the original one was built on a farmland in Pennsylvania). Laying low in the hillside of Museum Hill is a building made of stone, wood beams and earth covered with grass. The house is 30 inches high at the peak of the roof and resembles to the ancient Mycenaean burial tombs or contemporary roofs of Scandinavian houses. This work brings the attention to the relationship between nature and human beings from ancient times to today’s world, and perhaps, its construction, to form an artificial horizon when viewed from just below its entrance, will unite the viewer with nature.

Those who missed the Big Bambú, Mike and Doug Starn’s large scale installation on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, could get a small taste of it by walking into Stephen Talasnik’s Stream: A Folded Drawing (2009-10). Although the scale of this work does not even come close to the Starns’, its structure and material (bamboo) is quite like the previous one. Grabbing the hill side, Talasnik’s work blends into nature and still provides an exciting visual ride for the spectator. Inspired by Hershey Park’s rollercoaster, the sculpture is made of 3000 bamboo poles fastened together by zip ties to hold negative space together. Visitors can explore the sculpture from inside by following the dirt steps made in the hill side, as part of the artwork.

 Chakaia Bookers’ Foci (2010) uses pieces of tires worked into an awkwardly placed elongated oval form that guides the eyes up to the sky. Booker’s work calls to her other sculpture in the park but has no relationship to it as it is placed very far from A Moment in Time (2004). The found object the sculpture created from and its downward waving side view give interesting perspectives, but do not make up for the unfortunate placement of the work.

A different approach to art is evident in Maria Elena Gonzalez’s You and Me (2010) in which the artist created a conceptual work that places viewers on top or near to adjacent art works. You and Me needs the participation of visitors and encourages to find the 16 platforms (15 round painted steel discs and 1 one-person balcony, made of I beams) she placed into the park to give a view of one-another on or nearby artworks by standing on corresponding number of discs to complete the work. The map provided to find the platforms is confusing and the project takes too much time and away from experiencing the rest of the park.

The map of Storm King Center also could hinder ones experience. The sculptures are not systematically numbered and are hard to locate with the map. Perhaps, wandering around with an audio guide, which can be rented for $5/day, is the best way to explore the park. Rental bikes are also available, but they cost $40/day and restricted to some areas; child seats are not available and it is not allowed to bring your own. Visitors of the park on cold days should be prepared that only the museum building is enclosed but seating is not available there. Persons with difficulties walking are encouraged to take the tram (free with admission) that runs every 30 minutes. The tram can be used by the general public during the off-season.

Storm King Art Center has a lot to offer families, students, retirement groups or anybody who is interested in being part of nature and art. Guests can ride the waves in Maya Lin’s Storm King Wavefield, (2007-2008), have their pick-nick by the lake viewing Roy Lichtenstein’s Mermaid (1994) or can be part of a Japanese myth in Isamu Noguchi’s Momo Taro (1977-78). Enthusiasts of nature, art or nature and art will find their visit here very special and compelling and will have the desire to return another time when nature and art will show their very different faces to them.

5+5: New Perspectives closes on November 14, as the 2010 season of Storm King Art Center comes to its end, but some of its pieces will be on view through the next season starting on April 1, 2011. The new spring will bring fresh colors to the park and its permanent collection of American and European abstract sculptures.

Clarence Morgan in York

“Notes and Ideas,” Clarence Morgan’s exhibition opened on the 30^th of September, following a lecture by the artist. During his talk Morgan shared hundreds of his paintings with the audience of about 75-100, and led us through his journey from his student years to the present.

 Clarence Morgan is an established painter who has held solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in the past ten years. Morgan grew up in Philadelphia, studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine arts and is currently teaching painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he also served as the chair of the Department of Art in the past six years . His exhibition, Notes and Ideas was shown at two institutions in Beijing, China as well as at James Madison University prior to arriving at York College.

Morgan’s lecture focused more on his advice to students than it did on himself and his work. His philosophy about art and its teachings was relevant not only to art students but students of all disciplines. He skillfully discussed issues important to him through his art and raised awareness of the often misunderstood nature of abstraction.  “Art is the way that opens up the door to imagination,” Morgan said.  He also emphasized the importance of the often undervalued art departments in colleges and universities. According to him, art is not something that is there for sheer entertainment, but art stimulates the senses, poses important questions about personal or global issues and contributes to lifelong learning and developing. Morgan concluded that the role of the professor in art is to “pedal hope” of the students and guide them through their own journey of becoming themselves.

The professor mentioned that abstraction provides new ways of thinking and “greater possibilities for our imaginations.” He emphasized the importance of travel and the life-changing experiences that inevitably come with it.  He showed the evolution of his work from figurative through geometric abstraction to organic abstraction, and how his experiences with Islamic panel works, Turkish rugs and African textile laced into his art and influenced the paintings of this exhibition. Morgan encouraged students to travel and expand their world by experiencing other cultures and keep striving to become always changing individuals.

Clarence Morgan’s titles are not meant to guide the viewer or impose any meaning but extend an invitation to the soaring of imagination.  The titles, like Mystery of Miracles, Natural Inclination, and Light Breathing, to mention a few, are open-ended conversations with the artist, the art and us. They inspire posing questions about the paintings, the artist and our lives.   The square canvases and unfinished forms placed on the edges give us the freedom to expand the works outside of the paintings’ edges into infinity and the imaginative world of our mind.

There is a refuge, from the swarming world of deadlines, papers and exams, in Wolf Hall. Here, in the galleries, everyone can have a quiet moment and escape for a few minutes or hours to be alone in the presence of great works of art. Notwithstanding, the opening receptions of the exhibitions are good opportunities to enjoy social atmosphere, refreshments, live music and friends.