(photo by Daniel Perales)
A review of the S/ART/Q group show Process, at G.WIZ — The Science Museum, Sarasota, Fla.
By A. Charles Kovacs
S/ART/Q, a new group of contemporary artists, has produced its second major show, Process, now open at G.WIZ. As documented on their web site, this is a gathering “of local contemporary artists providing cultural leadership for Sarasota County through exhibitions, fund raisers and community outreach projects.” This group includes “painters, sculptors, photographers and new media experts.”
Clearly, there have been other art movements in the area, and a long history of the visual arts through the presence of the Ringling College of Art and Design. In fact, most of the artists in S/ART/Q are graduates or instructors at Ringling College, many with advanced degrees, national fellowship awards, and international reputations; many of the individuals in this group have had exhibitions at galleries in New York and Europe.
However, the show provides more than the title implies, for this group has established a presence in Sarasota that is rare and welcome. The defining thrust of Process, now showing at the G WIZ, provides the viewer insights into the procedure of creative generation in an attempt to “…demystify Art as well as the techniques used to make it…[by providing] The finished artworks… exhibited alongside these process pieces, bringing the experience of the viewer full-circle.” Through on-site demonstrations of the artist at work in interactive and hands-on involvement of the viewer, each S/ART/Q member takes a turn at showing how they do their work, the techniques used, and offering an opportunity for the visitor to try their hand at the process.
More, each artist shares a common commitment to the area and the contemporary art scene that transcends the popular street fairs one encounters seasonally in Sarasota. This is a group of serious and dedicated artists with cutting-edge sensibilities typically only seen in major art centers or in the pages of national art publications. This exhibition strikes with visual cohesiveness and profoundly centered techniques and materials found in European and American artistic traditions.
Conceptually, each artist reflects a critical understanding of technique in an elemental way. For example, Havelock’s drawings rely heavily on the daguerreotype. As starting-point and reference, these historic records are only seminal for his evolved finished pieces. His insistence on the purity of line and form that is both minimal and elemental. We see a similar historic focus through the primary forms and techniques used by all the artists in the show. Their creations, their art, relies on a keen mastery of technique expressed through a very refined conceptual lens. Moreover, the emphasis on purity of technique doubly reinforces the linear framework of drawing as the primary or core foundation for their finished pieces. We see for example in Schwartz’s paintings of the Hob Nob Café the preliminary drawings are rendered with an analytical precision and exact rendering that one might initially assume the hand of a draftsman. Throughout the show there is an insistence of linear structure that is a unique American trait, evidenced through the history of American art from the Hudson River School, the precision of Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler, the Ashcan School of the early 1900s, the abstract movements of the 1960s, through the photo-realism of the late 1900s and early 21st century. In all the S/ART/Q artists and historical movements cited above, the linearity and compositional definition of space and form is profoundly evident as an American characteristic. Finally, all of the works in Process affirm reality as a reference, subject, or inspiration; this is doubly evident from the pieces’ titles.
It seems clear that these artists are influencing and inspiring each other in remarkable ways. It is rare to find a group of practicing artists who, while uniquely expressing their styles, share a common vision of a redefined formal approach that assumes advanced proficiency of their craft.
This shared vision may stem from their common experience of the Ringling College of Art and Design, the emphasis of core or foundation classes for all students, or a trait that all these artists share as teachers in this process. Whatever the sources, their commonality through technique lays at the core of a possible definition of both a school and a movement: a shared vision and understanding of art and a mutuality of visual influence in a cohesively defined way. We have before us such a potential school or movement for contemporary art in Sarasota. Moreover, if Ringling College decides on a graduate program in Fine Arts, they may have a potential of inaugural faculty in this group.
I strongly encourage you to visit this show before it closes and see not only the revealed potential of these individual artists but of an art movement. Note particularly that quite a few of the works have already been sold: a local collector with an eye towards talent has already snapped up some of the best works before the show opened.
A brief overview of Process reflects only a small sense of the visual accomplishments of its artists for indeed, they all deserve a fuller catalog and analysis.
Joseph Arnegger
Arnegger brings to the group a unique combination of the painterly with the graphic. His vertical triptych entitled A Hero Says What is a large multi-panel work, possibly the largest in the show, which uniquely captures both commercial and painterly aspects with a linearity that defines and recombines forms with graphic clarity. His bold inclusion of lettering with a hint of the figural presents visual and color harmonics that draws the viewer into the special ambiguity implicit in the forms. His other work, The Anatomy of a Happy Accident, has visual echoes initially to the French Impressionists in the flounced dress of the female reclining figure. This piece again shows his masterful combination of lettering, form, color, and figure as he presents a piece with strongly defined spaces in a tentative floating composition hovering between completed elements. Moreover, both his works show the process of creation through the inclusion of the telltale drips from his loaded brush. That inclusion brings the viewer back to the picture’s surface and so negates and highlights illusionary space.
James Evans
Evans’ large piece is at once sculptural, objective, subjective, and engaging. Entitled Real: Break this piece produces in wood, PVC, and other mechanical elements a large three-dimensional construction that is as impressive as it is mechanically useless. The dichotomy between functionality and objective engagement draws the viewer into the complexity and mastery of the process of construction with a yearning desire to understand its functionality. The resulting humor derives from the stark realization that the well done construction is critically built but serves the sole purpose of defining space internally and externally within the piece, and for the viewer, as one circuits seeking a way of comprehending the elusive utility of this massive sculpture. If your thoughts wander to the sketchbooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, you are on the historical track to understand this unique sculpture.
Brian Haverlock
Haverlock’s works uniquely combine elements of defined graphics, daguerreotypes, and print materials with a linear purity that is as rare as it is defined and lyrical. With an effect of reductionist simplicity, his images are childlike in their economy of line, tone, and form yet profoundly serious in their intent. His large She Who Dreams of Popsicle Shops, while echoing the familiar poses a daguerreotype, distills the elements of a purity of linear approach in a refreshing and immediate way: his lines are sure and direct. The same approach is seen in his Portrait of a Man Wearing Helmet and Horse where overlapping horizontal parts of the drawing contain elements both of his linear purity and profound attention to meticulously applied graphic details that are the hallmark of his earlier works. The detailed inclusion in some of his works of words, sayings, and sentences – some within cartoonlike bubbles – are a unique addition to his work.
Tim Jaeger
Jaeger’s signature images incorporate his defined iconographic reference to roosters. His never-ending fascination with this avian species brings to mind Francis Bacon’s reliance on images of popes as a source of artistic inspiration and formal generation. In all of Jaeger’s works, the ever-present reference to this avian species is at once both delightful, comedic, and familiar. His combination of painterly elements with defined iconography such as his CS #4, hark back in many respects to some of the works of the Abstract Expressionists in its vibrant almost ecstatic forms in uniquely combined “action paintings.” The initial formality of the inclusion of recognizable elements – the bird – becomes secondary in the progress of his work: they are carefully balanced, almost compositional color constructions.
Brandon Maupin
Maupin’s work hovers in the exhibition like a quiet pool of colored, balanced compositions with total clarity and harmonics that belie both a complex composition in painterly lines. His The Boar (process piece) and the Boar, Totem/Moment Series both exhibit a critical mastery and craftsmen-like combination of elements that intrigues and draws the eye in to the explosive force implicit in the act of creation. There is a delicate and profound subtlety in his work that is intensified by the small size.
Daniel Miller
As a video artist, Miller’s work is perhaps the most ephemeral in that it captures documents the other members’ creative processes in their studios electronically. His camerawork, close-ups, and editing effectively reflect aspects of the modes and techniques within the creative process for each of the exhibited artists. Moreover, Miller is responsible for the outstanding website of the group providing critical and necessary Internet presence. Finally, his documentary gives rare glimpses into other works by the artists in the exhibition that are not currently on display.
Ricky Otto
Otto’s work while linear has a preponderance of color that both enhances and defines his composition in an almost sculptural manner. His Fence has an impasto technique that is definitional, compositional, and oddly lyrical in its application and formal definition of space, texture, and form. There is a clear historical echo in his work of Van Gogh and that Postimpressionist movement where the process of creation and the fierce application of primary color reflect the artist’s visceral engagement with reality. Otto’s work relies on a sense of reflected reality as we realize through recognition combined with an abstract emphasis of elements in the Fence panel. There we engage transitions from the flatter applied paint at the top towards the weightier sculptural layers of paint in the lower strokes below.
Daniel Perales
The unique quality of this artist’s portraiture and large photography has clear historical echoes in Western art. The smaller changing electronic images, large Giclee print entitled Blue One, as in the other framed photographic variants in the proof sheets, rely heavily upon Dolci’s Madonna. The unique and profoundly sensitive and personal approach of this artist produces both a haunting and attractive melodic combination of the older artist’s forms in new ways using contemporary media.
David Piurek
Piurek’s work uniquely combines sculptural forms with aspects of primary elements in mounted compositions. His Babel Wheel is a refreshingly new combination of both historical references to the Biblical Tower of Babel in mandalas-like spiral compositions that use traditional gold leaf in refreshingly new ways. His work bridges that which is cultural and that which is painterly through an elemental understanding of the nature of both and of how they are combined. More, the inclusion of gold leaf in its light capturing and reflective placement, and the profoundly evocative sensibility this precious metal has, takes his work to a high-level of cognition while redefining historical and visual contexts. Moreover, historical references surpass the limitations in his new combination of elements that also have mathematically enhanced universal implications.
Jeff Schwartz
Schwartz combines the familiar with the definitional evolution of remembrance and effect. Using the Hob Nob Café as the primary inspiration, his paintings evoke the local and familiar iconic nature of this landmark combined with painterly elements in unique ways through technical variation of color, linear intensity, and formal and graphic modulations. Much like a Bach fugue, his works play on the visual elements of the recognizable in recombined ways. Moreover, as evidenced in Hob Nob Storm Effect, the process of exhibition — painting — and its effect, the drips from the loaded brush, redefine both the spatial and visual elements.
Nathan Skiles
Skiles’ constructions rely upon the familiar, specifically cuckoo clocks, yet he combines the recognizable in profoundly humorous deconstructions. His Unfinished Clock 1 and Unfinished Clock 2 show both a reductionist and constructionist approach of the dimensional elements of the clock. Using all the elements of this well-known timepiece, he analyzes in one of his wall assemblages the manifestations, graphic, and sculptural elements of this popular Germanic item. In that regard, his work critically crosses between constructional sculpture and defined historical analysis, all with the formality of a scientist yet with the combined effect of a child: His work both amuses and seriously engages perception, cognition, an exposition in a reflective manner. With the delight of discovery, one realizes that none of these clocks works or keeps time.
Sabrina Small
Smalls’ work has a quality that is at once profoundly subjective and uniquely objective as it combines a delicacy of linear sensitivity of drawing, and an emotional quality that is reminiscent of German expressionism. Her work shows a graphic mastery that engages through her very personal forms of organic elements. One of her larger works, Seated Dandy, uses color to emphasize the form and exposition of her delicate, hair-like lines that have organic implications that only the artist can really fathom. Her smaller pieces, such as Bust #1, shows a degree of preciousness through its diminutive size that is at once vulnerable and enticing. In all her works, including her assemblage of Victorian styled furniture with an improbably positioned light, she exhibits profound sensitivity, a wink of a smile, and personal insights.
Tom Stephens
Stephens’ works are a unique expression of color, paint, form, and patterns that are combined compositional displays reminiscent both of repeat fabric patterns, tribal art, and an echoing of computer-generated forms. His heavy and deliberate impasto applications of oil and acrylic paint have a jewel-like effect that in some of his larger works, such as Coat of Many Colors # 36, progresses from a barely perceptible application at the bottom to the heavy impasto, almost sculptural, build-up dimensionality at the top. One is drawn into his compositional patterns and lingers over the brushstrokes and the deliberate yet seemingly spontaneous application of paint that grows upon layers and yet oddly harmonizes its final effect. His smaller works Coat of Many Colors #24 have a preciousness that draws the viewer and encourages a lingering attention to surface and pattern.
A. Charles Kovacs completed his PhD course work in art history at Harvard. His paintings are in various private collections in Europe, Canada and the U.S. He works at Ringling College of Art + Design as the Director of the Center for Career Services and has published several monographs and essays on career and art topics.
Filed by Daniel Miller at 12:43 pm
