Dayton International Peace Museum’s must-see exhibit

Recycled wood and light projection constructions at Cincinnati’s Weston Gallery

By Jud Yalkut

Photo: “Not Just a Bench” by Robert Fry  on display at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati through June 2

Three intriguing breakthrough exhibitions share the spaces of the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati’s Aronoff Center at 650 Walnut St. through Sunday, June 2. A film installation exploring the changing industrial landscape of the Midwest by Wright State University (WSU) Motion Pictures Coordinator Russell Johnson is accompanied by minimalistic light projection sculptures by Cleveland artist Kathryn Kuntz, and preluded in the street level gallery spaced by elegant wooden sculptural formations fashioned from reusable natural materials by Robert Fry from Covington, Ky.

Russell Johnson, a native of Ogden, Utah who interned at the June Laboratory of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Institute in 1981, has been a longtime professor of filmmaking at WSU since 1990 and a recipient of five Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships from 1985 to 2001. His earlier association with the Weston Art Gallery began with the presentation of his imagist film “Necropolis” in 1997 and his continuing role as founder and lead instructor for the annual “Families Create” Children’s

Animation workshop.

In 2001, three weeks after 9/11, Johnson started work on what was to be a conventional documentary on globalization starting with interviews in Washington, D.C., a project which transmuted through his own creative evolution into the installation piece called “American Pacemaker” now in the lower Weston rear gallery space. “American Pacemaker” includes portions of an interview preserved from the above aborted project with Joe Enderle, the owner-operator of a machine shop in the Northside section of Cincinnati, juxtaposed against footage of workers using the shop’s large metal lathe, made in the 1940s by The American Tool Works Company. This actual “American Pacemaker” machine, weighing about 5,000 pounds, is displayed as an “almost art deco” object in the same darkened gallery.

Based on his observations of the metamorphosis of the Ohio farming landscape into barren warehouse and retail outlets over the years, Johnson felt it necessary to come to terms with the “stark physical reality” of the profound changes in the economy and standing of the Midwest. “I consider this piece to be a documentary film exploded into its component elements,” Johnson said, with multiple screens allowing “the spatial structuring of images and of the viewer’s experience” fusing “familiar imagery and verbal rhetoric.”

The deconstructed slow pans in the final darkened gallery is a tripartite panorama drawn from four locations including: an unused distribution warehouse north of Cincinnati with row after row of closed shipping docks; the former machine shop in Northside; the decaying brick wall of an abandoned Reading, Ohio factory; and a double-layered pan revealing the destruction of old industrial buildings being hosed down to restrain dust contamination. There is a powerful observational penetration effected by this non-linear presentation of unavoidable facts in the progressive and continual visual loops which unfold before the spectator’s eyes in Johnsons’s monumental “American Pacemaker.”

In his “Redux” suite of mainly wooden scripture/structures, Robert Fry incorporates other contrasting materials like rope, stone, paint and wires to create large-scale pieces which effectively contrast the street gallery’s high ceilings and architectural ambiance. A self-employed artist and fabricator and product of Northern Kentucky University, Fry works in his second Weston assay to produce “complex interactions of gravity, control and positive and negative space” produced with “primarily abandoned and purposed wood.” Thus, like Johnson in his structural essay, he references the refurbished possibilities of the detritus of American industrial society.

“Each piece is hand carved and machined … into custom-made but mass-produced” dissimilar pieces which are composed of wood “recycled from old buildings and yards, fallen trees, floor joists, etc.” and even wood recycled from previous sculptures. Fry exults in the open ambiguity his pieces instill and confronts the viewer with monumentality in such works as the tall triangular wall of metal and cherry wood in “Don‘t Fence Me In,” the carefully fashioned uneven wooden tower on metal casters of “Neo-Henge” and the ethereally framed amalgam of soaring wood, metal and paint of “Into the Wild” (all 2013). Other pieces approach the human scale while still defying functionality like: the multi-legged ash and walnut wood “Not Just a Bench” (2011) and the double accumulated legs of “Sit at the Table” (2013), as well the blue pedestal-mounted triangular elongated and mysterious “Untitled” (2013).

Also employing wood, but in minimalistic terms referencing the shapes of Sol Lewitt and the color theories of Josef Albers, and combined with color-filtered halogen theater lights to produce positive and negative shapes and complementary colors, are the light projective works by the young Cleveland artist Kathryn Kuntz. A graduate of the University of Dayton with a masters from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Kuntz calls her show “Symbiotic Balance” based on the psychology of color.

Kuntz’s pieces are effectively installations exploring “the symbiotic relationship of complementary colors,” and she accompanies her glowing hypnotic configurations with earthy poetic notations. An open triangle in a blue/indigo trapezoid of light occasions, “If the sun were cool instead of warm this is what it would feel like, I think”; a wooden trapezoid floating within a larger trapezoid of blue light brings forth “In here the world is violet, bright, but not sunny”; and a warm pink oblique parallelogram of light encloses an inverted L-shaped wooden shelf with a pronounced shadow extemporized as “As I stand my phone slips off my lap and hits the floor with more noise than I care for this early.”

The Weston Art Gallery is located at 650 Walnut Ave. in downtown Cincinnati. Gallery hours are 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, and noon-5 p.m. on Sunday. Open late on Procter & Gamble performance evenings at the Aronoff Center for the Arts. For more information, call 513.977.4165 or visit westonartgallery.com. 

Dayton Visual Arts Center presents Disaster: A Juried Members’ Show

By Emma Jarman

Photo: “Home of the Brave” by Guustie Alavado; cast glass on wood & acrylic

The exhibit has been on display since Nov. 2, 2012 and will remain hung until Feb. 2; plenty of time to revel in post-apocalyptic bliss and appreciate the beauty of trauma. Particularly relevant, this year marks the 100-year anniversary of the time the Great Miami River rose up and overtook Dayton in the worst natural disaster Ohio has yet experienced. The theme not only gives the entered artists a highly interpretable subject — depictions are not limited to the flood — but it affords viewers the opportunity to see disaster through an artistic medium rather than beneath newspaper headlines and in images of despair so often broadcast over the local and national evening news.

“Once every couple of years we do exhibitions,” said Eva Buttacavoli, executive director of the Dayton Visual Arts Center (DVAC). “We decided to do this members’ show [at the convention center] in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the flood, in the idea that artists respond to tragedy in different ways and look at renewal in different ways.” The topic also provides a way for local artists to speak directly to the community about an event that had a cataclysmic effect on Dayton, but also about our universal concern over the human and economic toll taken by disasters, both natural and human-made, she said.

The Disaster exhibit represents the DVAC’s contribution to other flood anniversary events taking place in Dayton this year. A juried show means the pieces hanging on the walls (and one standing on a table) are submitted to be judged by a knowledgeable committee, not simply for the pleasure of the passerby. This exhibit will be juried by Deborah Melton Anderson, a DVAC representative. Anderson, a Missouri transplant who has resided in Columbus, Ohio, since 1961, has been an art quilt-maker for 25 years, pulling inspiration from antique quilts, ethnic textiles and other fabrics. For her recent collection, Tracking, Anderson used patterns found in bar codes and FedEx stamps to create designs.

“What was such a surprise to me was that nearly half of the submissions for the show were about personal disasters, not images of natural disasters such as wind, water, fire etc.,” she noted. “I had expected mostly the natural, weather-related kind of disasters.”

As one of the thousands of visitors that flock to the Dayton Convention Center during the winter months, you are encouraged to peruse and compare your opinions to Anderson’s. DVAC anticipates an audience of 10,000 people or more.

There are 24 pieces chosen for the exhibit. While disasters are typically considered grandiose or monumental in size, the collection at the convention center varies. There are, of course, the big ones: a three-dimensional tornado on an octagonal pedestal, for instance, that sits on an end table and towers overhead; a 49-inch by 61-inch oil- and acrylic-on-canvas piece, “Memento Mori” by Ben P. Norton, looms adjacent to a doorway, with magnified, heavy brush strokes and an impactful depiction of man and beast. And then there are the small ones: A 12-inch by 16-inch etching by Sherraid Scott titled, “Why do they hate us?” occupies a small space to the left and an even smaller, 10-inch by 16-inch, oil-on-board work by Edward Charney defines a spot to the right. The remainder of the pieces size up somewhere in the middle.

A black and blue, green and brown camouflage piece by Guustie Alavado does anything but blend in with cast-glass soldiers lining through and splintering across the wood and acrylic background. “Broken Levee,” a mixed media piece by Aka Pereyma, jumps off the wall with bright colors and all the vibrancy of New Orleans both pre- and post-Katrina. The Disaster contained on the walls of the Dayton Convention Center is as limitless as it is limited. Confined by the space in the room, but not much else, the portraits, photographs and paintings show all sorts of cataclysm. Terrified eyes peek through wrinkled hands; a messy bedroom; rolling storm clouds; natural disasters; the rebuilt site of the World Trade Center; a saddened woman wrapped in a shawl looks into the distance beyond her canvas.

“The quality was all over the place, artistically,” said Anderson, but all conveyed messages.”

Disaster can be an isolating experience, but in the Disaster exhibit at the convention center, the collectivity of it is comforting. It is an opportunity for the artists to share their reactions to disaster in an effective and productive way: through art.

Disaster: A Juried Members’ Show, presented by the Dayton Visual Arts Center, runs through Saturday, Feb. 2 at the Dayton Convention Center, 22 E. Fifth St. For more information, visit www.daytonvisualarts.org or daytonconventioncenter.com.

Reach DCP freelance writer Emma Jarman at EmmaJarman@daytoncitypaper.com

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