Midwest Painters Demonstrate Realism and Its Discontents

By Jud Yalkut

Taking its cue from Sigmund Freud’s treatise on psychology and civilization, the current exhibition by the Midwest Paint Group tackles the place of realism and figurative art in contemporary times. Curated by Glen Cebulash, Chair of Art and Art History at Wright State University, Realism and Its Discontents confronts artists’ commitment to what they term “Post Abstract Figuration” and its new configuration in the face of most contemporary gallery art tendencies. The exhibition runs at the Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries at Wright State University through May 6.

Guest artist Gabriel Laderman (December 26, 1929 – March 11, 2011), who agreed to participate as guest artist in this show before his death, was a New York-based painter who had studied with such primal abstractionist figures as Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. Eschewing his earlier tendencies in that direction, by the 1980s his work was figurative and even narrative, sometimes even based on the Inspector Maigret detective novels by Belgian author Georges Simenon.

Laderman was a friend and mentor of the Midwest Paint Group starting in 2004, and he wrote an essay for their 2005 exhibition in which he stated: “It requires your attention because it is unlike most figurative work seen in galleries today. You need to concentrate on the experience of each painting and get into its world of forming and emotion.”

Laderman’s three works in Realism demonstrate his observational mastery in oils with his immaculate studio study “Still Life as Order and Chaos,” his stoic and dramatically silent “Two Dancers Resting,” and the translucent “The Card Player” with her distant stare (all from 1983-84). He believed that “working without history is a kind of visual starvation” and that the Midwest Paint Group “included a sense of the abstract construction of the forms and colors and their rhythm in light and space.”

Curator Glen Cebulash, whose own work has beautifully deconstructed the figurative into interacting planes and color forms in both painting and collage, opines that realism “is a fascinating and slippery concept and one that confounds as much as it clarifies.”

The overlapping of realism and abstraction is nowhere as pungent as in the work of Galesburg, Illinois artist Lynette Lombard, whose oil “Ox-Bow Tree and Lagoon” (2010) poses a thick white gestural trunk against planes of blue and orange, and whose work “Waverock” (2009) takes the viewer from expressionist fervor towards the cogent essays as to how realism can effect abstract economy in such works as “Cliff and Sea, Spain” and “Chicago Railbridge” (both 2010). Deborah Chlebek from Yellow Springs, an Adjunct Instructor and graduate of Wright State University, has simplified her message with bold dark strokes in such pieces as “Ellis 96” and increased atmospherics in “Ellis 97” (both 2011).

Color and pattern dominate in the luscious still lifes of Chicago’s Megan Williamson, with boldly contrasting wrap-around foldings in “Paper Still Life” (2011) and overall curlicues with an evanescent glass object in “Still Life with Glass Bottle” (2010). Bob Brock from Kansas City, MO, approaches an abstract Corot-like feeling in his “Linda’s Lake” (2011) and then lets soaring linear structures capture “Trees at Unity Village” (2011), beautifully augmented by a suite of drawings in the gallery corridor.

It may be somewhat significant that most of these Midwest artists are teachers in various institutions, an indication that such support is vital to artists who don’t live in large urban centers. University art departments have progressed through changes of genre, from abstract expressionism to conceptual art, but the “realism” factor is one that constantly re-emerges. Approaching photo-realism are works from such artists as St. Louis’ Michael Neary, who injects bizarre elements like a skeleton in a basket and a Shiva behind lemons in his “Vanitas: Talk to the Hand” (2010), or the permutations through smaller studies to the large dominant canvas “Backyard Summer” (2010) by Jeremy Long from Ithaca, New York with its edges of magic realism reminiscent of Peter Blume.

Tina Engels of Chicago paints her soft-edged “Still Life with Shell” (2011) in a careful arrangement with dried flowers; Amy MacLennan from St. Louis paints broad gestures in “Lilac Study Gold” (2010) and makes her “Ethanol Plant, Peoria” dissolve into the landscape. Philip Hale from Wilmington, Ohio portrays a row of red vehicles on a hilly small-town corner in “Taxi Paradise 5” (2011). Timothy King from Chicago, working in pastels, converges trees around “Winding Road, Elgin, Illinois” and descending steps in the wind-blown “Loyola Lakeshore, Chicago” (both 2011). Ron Weaver, from both Arizona and Maine, captures the white cloud bank over suburban spaces seen through a large window in the oil and acrylic “The Light” (1990).

Apart from any dialectical exchanges about the validity of figurative reality in our contemporary times, there is a true joy in simply appreciating the direct approach of articulating paint on canvas to reveal form, color and inner space. As David Carbone of the University of Albany, New York wrote, relating to his friend Gabriel Laderman and his vision of the Midwest Paint Group: “He saw your efforts both as an act of courage against the marketplace and valor in the cause of authentic perceptual expressiveness.”

(The Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries are located in A132 Creative Arts Center of Wright State University on Colonel Glenn Highway in Dayton. Gallery hours are 10a.m. – 4p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 10a.m. – 7p.m. Thursday, and Noon – 4p.m. Saturday and Sunday. (937) 775-2973.)

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

[Image: Jeremy Long’s “Summer” (2011), oil]

The Passing of an Ever-evolving Artist

By Jud Yalkut

John C. Hibbitts was an original in the Dayton area scene. His work and his behavior were mutually unpredictable and oscillated between personal mythic gestures and raw explosive energy that miraculously coalesced into potent eloquence. His work moved from the static into the kinetic, focused for a long time in independent filmmaking before returning to his inborn talent on the visual picture plane.

That plane was periodically punctured into new realities, ripped and reassembled, constructed and attacked, creating multilevel phenomena that begged to escape their framed confines. But through all these manifestations, Hibbitts returned continually to an intensity of focus that burned through mere facades into penetrating consciousness. That intensity was often so all-consuming that it threatened his own sanity and equilibrium in the world as he plummeted between heights of exultation and the lower depths of virtual self-destruction.

In commemoration of the life and work of John C. Hibbitts, a one-day memorial free exhibition and reception will be held on Sunday, April 22nd (which would have been his sixty-second birthday) from noon-2p.m. at the Color of Energy Gallery at 16 Brown Street in the historic Oregon District. Fifteen dimensional works from the last six months of his life will be exhibited, all of which may be bid upon in a silent auction, along with selected major pieces from private collections. Also, a short selection of his extraordinary 16mm films will be screened.

Hibbitts was born in Jenkins, Kentucky in 1950 right by the state line of Virginia, moving with his family at an early age to Dayton, Ohio, where he graduated from Orville Wright High School. He married his wife, Sue, in 1973 and lived in Fairborn, Ohio while majoring in Art at Wright State University, which is where I met him during the film classes I taught there from 1973 to 1977. Hibbitts continued his visual art but gravitated more and more into experimental filmmaking, continuing to earn his Masters degree as graduate assistant to Richard Myers, then teaching film at Kent State University. This interest continued while Hibbitts served as an assistant in the film program at Antioch College in Yellow Springs.

Almost inexplicably, Hibbitts joined the U.S. Postal Service and worked as a carrier for twenty years, mainly in North Dayton and eventually in Huber Heights, until what could have been fibromyalgia and attacks of manic depression made this work pattern untenable. One result was the end of his marriage and the loss of his home in the country outside of Medway, Ohio. However, he continued painting throughout this time, and his daughter Emily, when in second grade, wrote a poem: “My Daddy is an Artist, I like it quite well. He paints a lot of pictures to put in his gallery to sell. When he paints, I like it. It makes him smile, and that’s all that matters because they’re his own style.”

Hibbitts did indeed open several small, itinerant independent galleries during the short-time height of the now defunct Santa Clara Art District in Dayton, all under the sobriquet of the “Hungry Eye.” One of these spaces was upstairs in the building that housed the early offices of the Dayton Voice, which has now become the Dayton City Paper. Later, as he experienced bouts of homelessness, he availed himself of donated studio spaces graciously supplied by Mike Elsass and later on the second floor provided by the proprietor of the Color Purple Gallery on East Third Street downtown.

Hibbitts’ early work moved from abstract post-Cubist self-portraits and structural abstract compositions into calligraphic iconography that recalled the free improvisations of Mark Tobey and Bradley Walker Tomlinson. Always lurking in the perimeters of his brain was the iconic figure of Jackson Pollock with his expansion of and escape from the picture plane. As Lee Krasner Pollock described her husband: “Whatever Jackson felt, he felt more intensely than anyone I’ve known,” and this epitome of extremes pertained equally to Hibbitts and his work. The Surrealist notion of psychic automatism was central to both their developments, coalescing into mythic structures that plumbed archetypal forms and evoked ancient passions, with Native American iconography gradually encroaching upon Hibbitts’ mentation and spiritual vision.

An important midpoint influence on Hibbitts’ development was an intense study of the techniques of the Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies born in 1923 in Barcelona. Hibbitts acquired at great expense the three volume catalogue raisonné of the artist who moved painting further into mixed media bas-relief with actual gouges and incisions, advancing the picture plane towards the spectator. Hibbitts poured paint into surfaces that peeled like snake skin or built up layers of latex paint which he carved through, or ripped stained canvas into leather-like textures which he bound together in myriad ways around a stretcher frame.

Hibbitts’ creative flame blazed brightly, sometimes threatening to consume his very being, and in later years unbalancing his mind and his stance, until he inevitably smashed his head in a fall into concrete near his short-lived apartment in East Dayton on February 19, 2012. He left self-portrait drawings so intense that they wore through the paper they were on and miraculous constructions of found and discarded materials, fragments of a culture which so often denied him a home and respite. His mortal body was gifted to the Wright State School of Medicine Anatomical Gift Program, and memorial offerings as well as the proceeds of the sale of these last works will be given to the homeless program, The Other Place.

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

A Duel Exhibition at the Rosewood Gallery

By Jud Yalkut

The airy but incisive vision of the delicacy of branches and bird forms in the snowy whiteness of space of Paula Willmot Kraus’ “Under an Ohio Sky” is in sharp contrast with the fragmented and rough aspects of post-Constructivist figural sculpture by Emily Trick in the dual exhibition running through April 13 at the Rosewood Gallery.

Kraus’ encaustic coated inkjet on rice paper represents another exploratory approach to this photographic media, just as Trick’s amalgam of construction materials like plaster, chicken wire and rough wood deconstruct the human form into pure physicality.

Paula Willmot Kraus has fused a practical concern for life on Earth with a metaphysically pure sense of meditative revelation in a body of work that has traversed from platinum and silver gelatin prints through subtly colored C-prints, and now into almost painterly representations that echo the Sumi modulations in Zen meditational images. Her sense of observation is highlighted by her bachelor of Science/Biology degree from Pennsylvania State University, augmented by her Masters of Arts degree from Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs. She is now an Adjunct Professor of Photography at Wright State University, where her immaculate mastery of divergent photographic processes must be a welcome addition to the curriculum.

The images in “Under an Ohio sky” were inspired by a winter walk through a landscape transformed by a heavy blanket of snow where the “snowy silence was interrupted by a flock of birds feeding on the frozen berries of a tree.” The silhouetted forms captured against a white background invoke the delicacy of oriental calligraphy in Kraus’ series such as the “Branches” and the “Bird Studies” in this show.

“I approached these images much as a painter might,” notes Kraus, “but with the subtraction of brush strokes rather than the addition of ones … Printing on rice paper and coating it with encaustic completed the reference to Eastern imagery.”

In such pieces as “Branches 3” and “Branches 5” (both 2012) the linear definition of each branch and the subtle textural gradation contrasts with ghostly background soft-focus branch structures, and is highlighted by the carefully defined clusters of desiccated berries. The advent of the birds is memorialized in the long horizontal composition of “5 Persimmony Robins” (2011), whose orangey-red fluffy breasts are mirrored in the crimson flecks of pecked berries in the snow.

Then the extensive series of “Bird Studies” fulfill Kraus’ vision of images “able to transcend the concrete and suggest the energy that lies within them.” The modulation of tones in the feathery wing structure of the bird flying over an extended bare branch in “Bird Studies 8” (2010) is pure poetry, and the “Redwing Blackbird” dominates its perch of the upper branch of a leafy configuration of ink-wash-like tonalities suggesting the progression of the seasons through a maple universe.

Pairs of birds face in opposite directions in “Bird Studies 4” and “Bird Studies 2”

(both 2010) as they perch on separate levels of conjoined branches. A “Bird Studies 11 Triptych” presents a panorama that flows from shaded branch configurations to the presence of two birds, each in the last two panels, and each panel a complete composition of its own. Images of winter robins and other birds are perched among delicate shadowy growths (2011), and two studies of the aureoles of “Queen Anne’s Lace” (both 2012) are bridges between the seasons that capture Kraus’ “underlying synergy of subjects.”

Emily Trick is a sculptor who is also a master of the ceramics art, which has been fused into much of her work over her career. Now an Adjunct Professor of Sculpture at Wright State University, Trick received her B.F.A. from the University of Dayton, her M.F.A. from the University of Dayton and did a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2011. After her earlier explorations of structures in clay she progressed into figurative work fired in gas and wood kilns.

“Having lost a parent at a young age,” says Trick, “I grew up thinking much about issues surrounding loss and bereavement,” leading to work “that deals with conflicts and tensions between physical and intangible, representational and abstract.” Gestural manipulations became part and parcel of her symbology and she “gradually began to break the figure into fragmented surfaces held together by an idea of the figure rather than by its direct representation.”

The current six “Figures of Rhetoric” emerge out of an amalgam of common materials around wooden and wire frameworks, in which straw, plaster and burlap are bound together into almost inhuman presences. The turn of a plaster ankle, or a miniscule “Head” (2012) atop a slender wooden pillar emerging from an angled wedge of wire, foam and burlap recall a famous sculpture by Giacometti.

“Wedged and Taped” (2012) is the most restrictive piece with its “torso” captured by bands of black tape and rough plaster between a tall vertical wooden “V” with molded legs standing on a small wooden cross. “Wrapped, Bent to the Left, Left Foot Forward” (2012) would be self-explanatory but for its fragments of lower leg, hip and thigh disappearing into a rough Constructivist wrapped mélange of disparate wooden verticals.

The inner structure of a blasted anatomy reveals itself in the most human but headless “Forward” (2012) with its stepping and gesturing extremities, punctured by a mesh-formed left thigh and lower torso and flashes of red at the knee and the chest. These

elements in Trick’s terms successfully “turn the figure into something found or invented.”

(The Rosewood Gallery is located in the Rosewood Arts Centre at 2655 Olson Drive in Kettering. Gallery hours are 8a.m.-9p.m. Monday-Thursday, 8a.m.-6p.m. Saturday, and 9a.m.-3p.m. Saturday. (937) 296-0294 or visit www.ketteringoh.org.)

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

Paula Willmot Kraus, “Redwing Blackbird” (2012), mixed media photograph.

The Dayton Art Institute

By Jud Yalkut

Ever since benefactor Julia Shaw Carnell funded the 1930 building project for the magnificent museum structure on the hill overlooking the city across the Great Miami River, it has been a treasured landmark for the Miami Valley area as well as a timeless cultural icon. The building was designed in an Italian Renaissance style by the architectural firm of Edward B. Green and Sons of Buffalo, New York, known for their design of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

Inspiration came from an amalgam of ideas about the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, designed by Giacomo da Vignola, whose staircase is reverently duplicated by the institute’s grand double staircase down to Riverview Avenue.

Dayton photographer Jane Reese, who lived and worked adjacent to Riverview Avenue, observed that Mrs. Carnell was a saint who opened “the door of heaven to many people of this city!” The New York Times of the era referred to its site as a “little acropolis” and called the building “one of the most significant examples of Renaissance design in this country.”

A 1987 Master Facilities Plan called for new galleries for the now burgeoning collection and a temporary exhibition wing, after the lamented demise of the Institute’s Art School program, but no action was taken until 1992 when the Board of trustees and then new Director Alex Nyerges engaged the architectural firm of Levin Porter Associates. This resulted in the completion of the original conception for the Institute of an octagonal structure, completing Green’s original plan, with two new wings and a magnificent central rotunda accented by the swerving and sensual ironwork railings of Dayton sculptor Hamilton Dixon.

Key to the ambiance of the Institute were the two Cloisters, now with the Contemporary Gallery looking out through refurbished wrought-iron grills to the open air Italian Cloister, and the now beautifully glass-ceilinged Shaw Gothic Cloister accessible through the Medieval European galleries, with the original stonework of the arches being restored. But as any venerable structure over the years requires care and special attention to preserve its look and amenities, a welcome influx of grants have now been offered to renew the Institute’s complex and its necessary attention to detail.

Much needed building repairs will be enabled by a generous grant of $45,000 from The Dayton Foundation, who requested that DAI consider its long-term strategic needs and “prepare a letter that would help the new leadership team of Executive Director Michael Roediger and Associate Director Jane Black begin with a solid foundation.” Being respectful of coming events, Black noted that the museum intends on “moving forward with repairs that protect our incredible collection and return items to the galleries that have been taken off view.”

Roediger also sees this as assisting in “new, innovative programs and exhibitions being planned for DAI.” There are also requests for repairs to plaster damages in some galleries due to roof leaks, including leaks to a lower gallery caused by drainage issues in the Italian Cloister. A $75,000 challenge grant from the Berry Family Foundation will also help with repairs, and Roediger adds: “the Rip and Denise Hale Family have made a gift to help restore the Italian Cloister.”

All of this is really good news for the DAI.  But even with the recent news that so many resources have become available to help with the restoration process, the DAI has still more aspirations for repair work in the future, including upgrading the parking lot, reworking the front steps and the front doors, restoring the steps of the Grand Staircase that dominates the hillside view of the Institute and restoring the chapel ceiling-entrance to the Italian Cloister.  Fortunately, a generous gift from the Virginia W. Kettering Foundation has enabled the beginning of work on the copper roof and the repair of a number of skylight leaks and ceiling damages as well.

These accomplishments and further aspirations collectively come together to form a renewal program titled “Community Investment: A new day, a new dawn, your new DAI.”  Donations towards the cause will be matched dollar for dollar by the Berry grant

(Anyone wishing to donate towards the “Community Investment” program should contact DAI’s Development Department at (937) 223-5277, extension 239, or online at www.daytonartinstitute.org/annualfund.)

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

Kin Killin’ Kin and Attack

By Jud Yalkut

The masterful African American artist James Pate was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but raised in Cincinnati where he earned a scholarship to attend the Art Academy there through a Corbett Award. After attending Central State University and continuing to self-educate himself, he has since been a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence grant and two Montgomery County Individual Artist Fellowships.

Widely know for his idiosyncratic Techno-Cubism style which fuses immaculate realism with spatial abstraction, Pate has, since 2000, worked on a powerful series of large charcoal drawings which decry the horrible problem of violence among black youth and the resultant terrorism. “In the middle of producing the first piece,” he writes, “I decided that as a personal, private protest I would continue to compose a rendering as long as these insidious acts continue.”

The Kin Killin’ Kin series has resulted in twelve outstanding pieces now on view at the EbonNia Gallery in Dayton through February 29, and the entire series has been given integral life by being acquired by the prestigious African American art collection of Arthur Primas. Curator Willis “Bing” Davis began discussing the exhibition of these works in 2008 in which “a master visual artist… had directed his artistic vision to one of the most critical social ills of our time … youth violence.” Mounted at the gallery in the fall of 2011, the suite of monumental charcoal works was visited by numerous church, school and governmental units ranging from youth groups to university art classes, with great demand encouraging its 2012 extension.

Writer Janyce Glasper has commented eloquently on Pate’s work: “Moving poetry, these realistic, fairly large charcoal drawings engage not just the viewer’s eyes, but the actively processing mind. One can almost taste the salty tears from visceral sadness … Touch the lifeless body that no longer has a heartbeat … In the aftermath of senseless bloodshed, there is nothing a viewer can do.”

Pate equates the senseless killers as Black equivalents of Ku Klux Klan terrorism with African American community realization that we “in a strange fruit kind of way, are doing the business of the KKK with our Black-on-Black violence.” The artist stresses this comparison with the depiction of “brothers in pointed hood in the ‘hood’.” In “Your History” the “king of the drug trade” aims a magnified drive-by gun at a traditional Yoruba head from West Africa, and “K, 2 Da K, 2 Da K, II” treats misguided leadership among black males in hooded robes, baring burning crosses and threatening guns. Bullets are masked in small rectangles as they are suspended threateningly in space.

The heroics of black union soldiers are symbolized in “Defenders of the Corner” but perverted by the current tendency to defend the corners of the drug trade. Pate questions: “What happened between the Civil War era and the present day that causes this degree of dysfunction?” Basing “Ku Klux Sphinx” on the legendary shooting off of the nose of Egypt’s Sphinx by Napoleon’s troops, Pate shows the debris falling onto a young girl jumping rope, an instance of “the innocent bystander as victim.” He relates this also to bombardment by debris of the victims of 9/11.

“3K” honors Pate’s favorite DJ, Jam Master J of the group Run DMC, gunned down in his studio and here pictured on the jersey of a masked current DJ, while giant gun hands protrude into the foreground from passing cars with hooded drivers. “Your History II” captures the mutual destruction of competing gunmen against a background drawn from scenes dating back to the civil rights era. “Your History III” plays on the double meaning of noble history and the water soaking of protestors against “the slang phrase that signifies the ending of one’s life.”

Pate further equates the senseless killer with a fractured Sphinx-nosed “Adolf Jackson” with Hitler’s equal determination to terminate the black race as well as the Jews, and also decries the onslaught of music with violent lyrics which encourages the mobster psychology in “K 2 Da K, 2 Da K” with a hooded background character declaiming into a mike while holding a gun to the temple of another.

The large oil painting “Turn of Endearment” projects hope around a multi-faceted character that progresses in rainbow tones away from a life of despair to the embracing of a youth with the definition of Sankofa (“looking back at their rich ancestry in order to receive the guidance to move forward”).

A concurrent series by Pate, which decries violence towards women called Attack, with rich monumental black nudes threatened by military warplanes, is showing at the Works on Paper Gallery of Sinclair Community College through March 7. This series also allows the viewer to appreciate the prodigious feeling and technique of this master artist whose works enhance the lifestyle and consciousness of our community.

The EbonNia Gallery is located at 1135 W. Third Street in the Wright-Dunbar area of Dayton. Gallery hours are 11a.m.-5p.m. or by appointment at (937) 223-2290. The Sinclair Works on Paper Gallery is located on the fourth floor of Building 13 at the corner of Fifth and Perry Streets in Dayton. Gallery hours are 8a.m.-8p.m. Monday-Thursday, 8a.m.-5p.m. Friday and 8a.m.-3p.m. Saturday. For more information visit www.sinclair.edu/arts/galleries.

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

Raw Power at the Dayton Visual Arts Center

By Jud Yalkut

The art of Dayton’s Issa Randall presents a Dramatic Moment as the raw power of street art that confronts the subtleties of the gallery space. Previous contemporary corollaries exist with the deconstructed and reassembled graffiti billboards referenced in the work of Mark Bradshaw, but in his recent work Randall defuses racial and cultural tensions into photomontage juxtapositions which mimic moralistic endeavors, and in other pieces literally burns in starkly iconic figures of unidentified victims of society’s brutality.

Randall’s exhibition at the Dayton Visual Arts Center, running through February 24, is part of the annual collaboration with Sinclair Community College and the Ebonia Gallery for the 19th “REACH (Realizing Ethic Awareness and Cultural Heritage) Across Dayton” conference, which this year features guest artists, a community art project of collaborative relief prints organized by Willis “Bing” Davis, and a studies conference on the theme of “In the Spirit of Developing Character” at Sinclair.

Randall received his B.A. in Communications from the University of Dayton and his M.A. in Photography from the University of Arts, London, UK. While there, he encountered Peter Ainsworth, an artist and Lecturer in Photography at Nottingham Trent University, who penned the guest essay for Randall’s DVAC exhibition. Ainsworth cites the “direct ability of photomontage to express a biting exposé of modern life” and references the sharply satiric work of Dada artists like Raul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, and John Heartfelt. Randall himself absorbs the Dadaistic ideas of anti-art in his means of destroying the images scavenged from society as a form of “cultural cannibalism or cultural recycling.”

The unknown heroes of Randall’s imagery are “the passive victims of oppression,” now openly uprising around the world, or those proposed by revolutionary philosopher Noam Chomsky as “Unpeople,” rejected by society and subjected to unspeakable violations. Randall bemoans the constant honoring of “the captains of industry and the victors of war” and the little time spent “honoring the struggles of the victims.”

These “Unpeople” are delineated in roughly burnt outlines on layers and layers of reconstituted newspapers amassed by coats of the very wheat paste used by street artists or propagandists. These make a “tablet” which Randall then sets on fire to form the chaotic background, out of which he scrapes ashes to form figures, which in turn become the multi-paneled hanged “Unidentified (Male),” or the bent and hooded “Unidentified (Detainee)” and the bound and hung “Unidentified (Woman),” all 2011.

Ainsworth points out that “the torn newspaper ultimately renders meaningless any message in the original text as the actions the artist depicts float within a sea of disjointed words.” The gross assimilation of cliché and persuasion that characterizes the output of both the self-aggrandizing political rhetoric and the boisterous advertising world are subsumed into the texture of the main event, which is the recognition of injustice. “This action,” Ainsworth adds, “has an uncomfortable parallel in relation to images depicting people lying dead on the streets of an unnamed space: Afghanistan, Syria or Dayton, Ohio.”

Randall is an active artist of protest, like Mexican muralists Sequieros or Orozco, echoing the prolific skeletons of Posada who inherit all walks of human life, and the immortalized atrocities, the oppression, torture and execution of prisoners in Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings, as Ainsworth references. The four suspended dark figures of “Unidentified (Males)” are universally the “Strange Fruit” of lynching, the vanquished and the oppressed opposition, those considered dispensable to the success of the ruling forces.

Photographic techniques are employed in the elements comprising the wall-bending compositions which Randall self-applies as site-specific to the gallery walls. The earth-moving apparatus with its gigantic claw arm plows through the detritus of an industrial world in which hidden figures are concealed for dear life in “Progress” (2010) (from an edition of six varied compilations of photocopies). Wrapping one large corner is an amalgam of two large photocopy compilations, one entitled “Don’t Burn the Trash” (2010) with its fleeing man, upturned dumpster and flaming conflagration, and the other “Threat” (2010) with a Billy club-wielding policeman confronting angry black rioters.

Waves of flame and swirling words of paper pursue a screaming figure in the sweeping “Die of Nothing but a Rage to Live” (2010), as the explosive but meticulously arranged photocopy sheets echo the walls of a metropolis replete with protests and revolutionary postings. Each corner of the large gallery space is involved in this complicity of panoramas of violence. Approaching the front window is the “Nice Arm” (2010) montage of a projectile-tossing orange-T-shirted individual with white masked face and head bandana seemingly threatening the window itself. As Randall has written: “To destroy the image of what is or isn’t art, is to change those notions of what we call art… If we destroy ‘common wisdom’ then we can make anything.”

The Dayton Visual Arts Center is located at 118 N. Jefferson Street in downtown Dayton.

Gallery hours are 11 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday. The rear gallery has a fascinating DVAC Member’s Show called “Character Studies” juried by Randall and DVAC director Eva Buttacavoli. There will be a reception Thursday, February 23 at DVAC from 5-7 pm with a gallery talk by Randall at 5:30 pm, followed by a reception at Sinclair’s Triangle Gallery in Building 13 from 7-9 pm. The REACH Studies Conference will be from 8:30 am-4:30 pm at Sinclair’s Ponitz Center in Building 12. Registration and information on the website (www.daytonvisualarts.org) or call (937) 224-3822.

Reach DCP visual art critic Jud Yalkut at JudYalkut@DaytonCityPaper.com.

By Jud Yalkut

Seated Gypsies'

The Visceral Gallery in Centerville devotes most of its shows to the fine artists in this immediate area, but also allows for out-of-town artists in Ohio whose work achieves the gallery’s high standards. Such an artist is Douglas R. Fiely who hails from northwest Ohio in the small village of Stryker, near where he presently teaches printmaking at Defiance College where he has had a full-time position since 2001 after teaching high school classes in Stryker for thirty years.

Much of Fiely’s work in painting centers on “people, places and things” from his immediate environment, the one which he knows best. He is proficient in ceramics with slipped carved pieces and is a master printmaker (for which he has been known statewide for many years), but it is his paintings which are featured in the current exhibition at Visceral through November 17.

Fiely was born in 1950 “in a tilted house overlooking Grand Lake in Celina” where his father was the proprietor of a “landing” with several cottages and two bait shops. His interest since early years was divided between music, particularly of 60s vintage and Bob Dylan, and art which came to dominance when he became an art major at Bowling Green University in 1968.

His sophomore year there culminated in a second place award for an intaglio print called “Guard at the Gate” and his print work continues in his studio with his own press and collaborations with some Oregon poets from Seizure Press. He still plays, and sings with his acoustic guitar, having retired the electric guitar previously used with the rock group Hip Waiters.

Fiely states his philosophy as: “The life of an artist is a careful balance between freedom and control, between choice and planning, between memory and careful observation.” This patient sense of observing an

d visually commentating is immediately apparent upon viewing Fiely’s varied paintings.

He paints portraits, many of them lithe women whose slender necks are reminiscent of Modigliani, and still lifes with incised lines relating to the carving and preparation of printing blocks. His women are often in groupings in which lines of delineation seem to flow from one figure to another around clothing, sleeves and body curves as in the fluid lines of “Blues Sisters,” the four pensive figures in a row of “Serendipity,” and the scarved trio of gesturing “Seated Gypsies” with a flute and magical fingers.

Fiely turns the art of still life into an observational dialogue, as in the deeply etched olives and inverted conical cocktail glasses in “Gimlet Serving,” the purple trio of eggplants and the hanging red chilies of “Still Life with Eggplant,” the horizontal spread of a bowl of oranges with milk jugs and upright frilled onions in “Still Life with Oranges,” and the vertical compartmentalized black shelf full of terra cotta and blue-and-white porcelain.

“Three for Sushi” unites the two genres with the three graceful figures standing at the head of a serving table replete with dishes of fish and shellfish awaiting their careful dissection for preparation. Female figures continue to hold sway as they sit at a table before “Three Plates,” or singly sit at tables for their servings during “Fruit Salad Day” and “Morning Coffee,” or demurely sit with hands crossed over a plate of fruit in “Blush.” Seven women are compartmentalized within stacked window segments in “Window View,” and single portraits are personalized with their preoccupatio

ns such as the white-bearded “Painter with Pint,” the blue-bloused “Duchess with Beer,” “Vic with Killians” with her brown sweater and pendant necklace, and the pig-tailed “Hope with Mug” in her pink summer dress.

These portraits seem to define Fiely’s milieu and his community, as though one can easily enter this communal pub of village life and actually meet these characters. Landscapes with strong delineating black outlines import local structural features into Fiely’s world as we confront the worn white buildings and paired gray silos of “Grain Elevator,” the rowed “Houses on Sessions Street” with their gabled porches and telephone pole crosses, and the red complexes of “Red Barns” seen at a distance over three levels of fields and its neighboring also-red single “Summer Barn.”

This rural paradise which is the stomping grounds of this prolific painter is also full of burgeoning plant life. “Red Tulips” sway in the breeze along with their wide-bladed leaves, black and white “Springtime Birds” perch on swerving branches within a calligraphic abstraction, “Grey Birds” perch and peck in a horizontal composition while other birds sit on different tan and gray vertical levels in “Bird Stack,” a forest of green leaves supports sprays of pale “July Yellow Hollyhocks,” and vertical vine-like plants reveal themselves as “Wild Onions and Lilies.” Not to be forgotten is Fiely’s long term love for fishing since his lakeside youth, memorialized by the stylized forms of stacked “Blue Fish,” the curving arcs of these sea creatures with one skeletonized in “Fish Table,” and the small boat marina of “Fishing Channel.”

The Visceral Gallery is located at 65 West Franklin Street in Centerville. Gallery hours are 10 am-6 pm Tuesday-Saturday. (937) 409-0069.

Reach DCP visual arts critic Jud Yalkut at contactus@daytoncitypaper.com