Chuck Close used lozenge shapes, paisley swirls and concentric doughnut rings of color to build a kaleidoscopic image of his subject in "James." Photo Courtesy of Pace Prints/Chuck Close

Contessa impresses with wide range of Chuck Close’s work

By Dan Tranberg

Commercial galleries outside of New York and Los Angeles don’t often succeed in expanding the common knowledge of big-name artists. But the current exhibition “Chuck Close: Recent Work,” at Contessa Gallery through Nov. 1, is an exception.

Contessa co-owner Steve Hartman spent the past two years gathering an impressive and diverse collection of 65 works by Close, produced over four decades. This is a monumental accomplishment for a commercial gallery that does not have the resources or staff of a major art museum.

The works at Contessa include one-of-a-kind pieces and rare limited editions as well as recent prints that have never before been exhibited. The result is a knockout show that proves Close, at age 69, to be continually increasing his range by delving into new media, formats and techniques.

Close is internationally renowned for his systematic straight-faced portraits, which he began making in the late 1960s. The first of these was based on a black-and-white photographic self-portrait, which is included in the show in the form of a contact sheet of 12 exposures.

Reproduced as a limited-edition print, the contact sheet is a fascinating piece of history. It marks the pivotal moment from which the whole of Close’s life’s work evolved.

Similarly, an extraordinary 1978 etching, titled “Self-Portrait, White Ink,” printed in white ink on black paper, serves as an early example of Close’s thoroughly inventive approach to materials. It also establishes a sense within the show that once Close committed to the strict limitations of his art, he was set free to push the boundaries of each medium, technique, and process he chose to use.

Of the many processes that Close has taken hold of, perhaps none presses the abstract nature of his work more than his paper pulp pieces. Made by fusing countless blobs of tinted paper pulp, they emphasize an extreme contrast to the slick photographic images on which they are based.

Several paper-pulp works dating from the early 1980s are among the many standouts here, especially “Georgia,” from 1984. Based on a black-and-white shot of the artist’s daughter, the image possesses a sense of playful tenderness, which stands as a perfect counterpoint to the pulp’s coarse, mealy texture.

Throughout his career, Close has worked in an incredible variety of printmaking processes, many of which are represented here. But one work serves as terrific demonstration of one of the fundamental principles of Close’s art: the optical blending of color.

“Self-Portrait, Scribble Etching Portfolio” from 2000, made up of 25 individual prints hung side-by-side in two stacked rows shows how Close dissects an image in his mind and then reassembles it. The group includes 12 one-color prints, 12 prints that combine two or more colors, and a final print in which all of the colors merge miraculously to form a full-color image.

All of Close’s color prints rely on this technique. In some, individual colored marks are deliberately brash and bold, creating optically dazzling patterns that only come together as continuous images from a distance of 10 feet or more.

Others make use of finer marks or textures that can only be perceived up close. This is especially true of Close’s recent tapestries, in which hundreds of colors of thread are used to form images that, from more than a few feet away, appear to be in black-and-white.

By far the largest works in the show, Close’s tapestries are produced on Jacquard looms, which are commonly believed to be important precursors to the computer. In the early 19th century, they became the first commercial machines ever to use punch cards to manage complex sequences of mechanical operations.

Given his attraction for systematic processes, it’s fitting that Close would latch on to such a technology. The loom’s warp and weft, though more complex, are perfectly analogous to the vertical and horizontal lines of the grids that underlie his paintings and prints.

The tapestries are among the newest works in the show, and they represent an important progression in Close’s work in which a technological system essentially takes the place of the hand-drawn grid as the method by which he translates a photographic image.

In a funny way, the same can be said of Close’s recent daguerreotypes, five of which are included in the show and are among its many gems.

Perfected in 1839 (the year generally used for the invention of photography) by French chemist and artist Louis Daguerre, the daguerreotype was the first commercially available photographic process. It produces a negative image on a mirror surface, which interacts with light in such a way that the eye sees it as a positive image.

For Close, the daguerreotype is yet another restrictive and optically challenging process through which his photographic portraits become activated. As with all of the processes evident in this exceptional show, his use of the daguerreotype demonstrates that Close is an ever-evolving master for whom imposed limitations continue to open endless possibilities.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on September 28, 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

"Clinamen" by Douglas Max Utter, 1988

By Dan Tranberg

From one perspective, the bulky physicality of paint belies its use as an optically transformative medium. The flawlessly smooth paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer epitomize the perfection of the painted surface as an illusionary skin, invisible as a mirror.

But from Post-Impressionism on, the physical reality of paint has provided another means for artists to register information on canvas. Veteran Cleveland-based painters Randall Tiedman and Douglas Max Utter clearly know this; their outstanding joint exhibition at the Arts Collinwood beautifully demonstrates how paint can be used to record a kind of psychosocial complexity beyond the visual realm.

Tiedman has made a major breakthrough in recent years with his brooding, multifaceted landscape paintings, which he calls “inscapes.” He produces the works purely from his imagination, which opens up endless possibilities for rendering the landscape as a metaphorical minefield. His densely layered landscapes invite viewers to mentally drift in and out of dimly lit pockets within seemingly boundless vistas. If these were real spaces, they would be difficult to traverse on foot. In the mind, it’s easy to imagine floating over them, pausing to investigate each little world.

In Tiedman’s dreamlike places, the laws of physics have been suspended. Broken and fallen structures merge with visions of landfills, chemical plants, sports stadiums and office towers. Like Piranesi’s famous 18th-century etchings of imaginary prisons, they can be seen as epic visions of the apocalypse. And yet, some details — like what appears to be a series of crisp red and white banners — suggest an enduring world in which life goes on.

Up close, Tiedman’s newest paintings reveal that his loose and expressive use of paint has been deftly carried from his figurative works into his landscapes. Surprisingly long lines hold the brash imprint of a straight edge, lending gritty energy to already rough terrains. Rough patches of black and umber seem to bear actual weight as they simultaneously depict shadowy recesses in his strangely beautiful world.

Utter is represented here by pieces painted over the past 25 years, including some of his strongest works: “Clinamen” from 1988, “Cleveland Rain” from 2000, and “Mother and Child” from 2002. Collectively, they show the tremendous range and nuance of his ongoing forays into unconventional paint applications.

Whether poured, puddled, sprayed or splattered, the paint in Utter’s work is neither passive nor gratuitous. Often coupled with delicate brushstrokes, his bold blobs of cracked paint bring his figures into a realm of pure psychological drama. While the subjects themselves are often friends or family members, they become mythical figures, poetically entangled in life’s emotional thickets.

“I look for ways to produce images that are like the imprint of real things on physical materials — like photographs or footprints — in order to explore the perception of psychological presence,” writes Utter in a statement for the show. Such imprints bring tactility into the equation of how his works so eloquently communicate. Unfettered by the limitations of a purely optical form of representation, he creates paintings in which a sense of touch is powerfully evoked as a passageway into a distinctly sensual form of human experience.

This article appeared in The Cleveland Scene, September 23, 2009

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

Artist Seth Rosenberg, shown here in his painting studio in downtown Cleveland, relocated to Northeast Ohio from Washington, D.C., in 2005.

Artist Seth Rosenberg wins Creative Workforce Fellowship after shifting from abstracts to figures

By Dan Tranberg

Originally from Connecticut, artist Seth Rosenberg lived in Washington, D.C., for 24 years before he and his wife moved to Cleveland in 2005. He spent two decades as the owner of a framing business and art gallery, and then gave it all up to become a full-time artist.

Now, at 57, Rosenberg leaves his home in Pepper Pike each morning and heads to his painting studio, a huge fifth-floor loft space just east of downtown Cleveland with a postcard view of the skyline.

When he first arrived here, Rosenberg, who has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in sculpture, was making highly patterned abstract paintings. Then, a year and a half ago, he reinvented himself as a figurative painter.

The shift in his work has already paid off. Earlier this summer, based on a portfolio of his new paintings, he received a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. Nineteen other visual artists also got the grants.

The award was more than an affirmation that Rosenberg was on the right track; it also allowed him to replace his 10-year-old computer with a spiffy new laptop.

In Washington, Rosenberg was influenced by the city’s strong history of abstract painting. A group of prominent painters known as the Washington Color School had emerged there in the 1960s, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis and Sam Gilliam.

Back in the late 1970s, when Rosenberg was finishing up graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington seemed a logical next step. So, he moved there.

He later became good friends with Gilliam, whose painting studio was located next door to Rosenberg’s framing business.

Despite his exposure to well-known abstract painters, Rosenberg said that a lifelong interest in historical figure painters, such as Edouard Manet, ultimately motivated him to switch from abstract to figurative painting.

He also became interested in the painting style and the theatrical drama of the American Social Realists of the 1930s, which he came to know through prints he framed at his Washington framing business.

Rosenberg’s current paintings are based on dense amalgamations of images from diverse sources, including old scientific illustrations, antique graphics and recent photographs. Many also include words and numbers painted in a variety of typefaces, sometimes appearing to be cut out from newspapers and magazines.

The overall result is a barrage of visual information, which viewers must sift through to construct any number of narrative readings.

Many of his works resemble collages that have been enlarged and translated into paintings. Some images fall back in space and become ornate patterns, while others lunge forward.

As he continues to develop his paintings, Rosenberg is still getting to know the Cleveland art scene. He is not yet represented by a local gallery.

If the dozens and dozens of paintings in his studio are any indication, it would seem that he is as prolific as he is determined to carve out a place for himself in Northeast Ohio.

With a major award under his belt, all he needs now is time.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on August 23, 2009.

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*Subsequent article, September 4, 2009:

Memorial service at MOCA for artist Seth Rosenberg, 57

By Dan Tranberg

Seth Rosenberg, a greatly admired Cleveland painter who, earlier this summer, was awarded a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship through Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, died Tuesday, Sept. 1 of a heart attack. He was 57.

Rosenberg moved to Cleveland in 2005 from Washington, D.C., where, for more than 20 years, he owned and operated District Fine Arts, a framing business and art gallery.

In recent years, he and his wife, Jane, had become highly active patrons of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, where a memorial service will be held Sunday, Sept. 6.

“My heart is incredibly heavy with sadness,” said Jill Snyder, executive director of MOCA Cleveland. “Seth was perhaps the most generous artist I have ever known. He was just the most lovable person on earth.”

In the few years since he first got involved with the contemporary museum, Rosenberg became known for his passion and enthusiasm for the MOCA community. He even hosted museum events at his spacious painting studio in downtown Cleveland.

Rosenberg’s paintings, two of which will be on display Sunday at MOCA, drew upon the tradition of American Social Realists of the 1930s, whose heroic visions of working-class American life helped to galvanize public awareness of social and racial injustice.

“Seth believed intensely in social justice,” Snyder said. “He was a real humanist.”

Snyder said that Rosenberg and his wife were both deeply committed to the Democratic Party. Snyder believes that Rosenberg’s idealism was at the root of his art.

“He was earnest to the core,” Snyder said.

Rosenberg is survived by his wife, Jane, and son, Eli, of Rocky River; and his 91-year-old father, Bernie Rosenberg.

The memorial will be at 11:30 a.m. Sunday (with a luncheon reception to follow) at MOCA Cleveland, 8501 Carnegie Ave., in Cleveland.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on September 4, 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

The work of photographer Nancy McEntee, shown here in her home in Fairview Park, Ohio, draws upon the history of the family snapshot.

Photographer Nancy McEntee looks deep into meaning and conventions of family portraits

By Dan Tranberg

One thing Nancy McEntee never tells her subjects before she photographs them: “Smile.”

But in many other ways, the work of this Cleveland native plays off the common conventions of traditional family snapshots. She often uses her suburban home in Fairview Park as a backdrop and her 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, as a subject.

McEntee is one of 20 artists who received a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship this summer through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture.

Unlike many contemporary photographers, she has not given herself over to the digital age. She still shoots with a Hasselblad, a Swedish medium-format camera that produces a square image. She still uses black-and-white film. And she still spends endless hours printing in a darkroom.

She also collects old, anonymous family snapshots — the kind found at flea markets and antiques shops — and uses them both as inspiration and as a teaching aid.

As an associate professor of photography and photographic history at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she has taught since the early 1990s, McEntee often gives her students found photographs and asks them to analyze the images.

McEntee’s sensitivity to the nuances of casual family portraiture is abundantly evident in her quiet and frequently subtle images of her daughter.

One ongoing series shows Elizabeth and three of her girlfriends posing in the back yard. McEntee first photographed these girls in this way when they were 5. Each year since, she has photographed them again in the same configuration.

Such rituals — common among families who shoot, for example, an annual holiday portrait — reveal unspoken intricacies of personality and interpersonal dynamics.

McEntee is interested in the idea of using the photograph as a document of transition and change. Another series produced over many years shows her elderly father with no shirt, revealing a chest-long scar from open-heart surgery that fades with time.

McEntee studied photography at the art institute, graduating in 1984. She later earned her master of fine arts degree from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in New York. In 1993, she was a visiting professor of photography at the Lacoste School of the Arts in Lacoste, France.

Her husband, Jonathan Wayne, teaches photography at Cuyahoga Community College’s Western Campus, where he is co-coordinator of the photography department.

McEntee’s photographs are in many private and corporate collections, including Heineken in Amsterdam, University Hospitals in Cleveland and the Center for Photography in Woodstock, N.Y.

They also have been published in an array of books and magazines, including “The Cleveland Bicentennial Book: Images of the Heart,” edited by Diana Tittle; The Photo Review; Photo Forum; and Northern Ohio Live.

Unlike the candid snapshots of amateur photographers everywhere, McEntee’s photographs are produced with a keen awareness of the mindset, assumptions and conventions behind casual family portraits.

Ultimately, the images she produces are not snapshots at all, but rather works of art that draw upon the history of a practice so common that it is rarely ever questioned.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on August 16, 2009

Artist Michelle Muldrow uses the sun porch of her Cleveland Heights home as her painting studio. Photo by Dan Tranberg

Painter Michelle Muldrow finds her inspiration in industrial environment

By Dan Tranberg

A recent transplant from San Francisco, Michelle Muldrow has already established herself as one of Cleveland’s most outstanding painters. Earlier this summer, she was chosen by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture as one of only 20 local artists to receive a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship.

She works in her Cleveland Heights home, where a breezy, light-filled sun porch serves as her painting studio. Her paintings from years past, both large and small, adorn walls throughout the house as newer and still-in-progress works spill out of her studio into an adjoining hallway.

At 40, Muldrow is a professionally accomplished artist with a nearly 20-year exhibition record. She is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles, where she will hold a solo exhibition later this year. Locally, she has signed on with Bonfoey Gallery.

Her first solo show in Northeast Ohio will open on Friday, Sept. 11, at Heights Arts Gallery in Cleveland Heights.

Muldrow lived in San Francisco for 15 years before moving to Cleveland Heights in 2006.

She studied painting in both high school and college, and was already showing in commercial galleries when, some years ago, she decided to make a career switch from art to music.

“I always thought you couldn’t make a living as an artist,” she says, “then, eventually, I realized you can’t make a living as a musician.”

While living in San Francisco, Muldrow spent a decade as a member of various rock bands (including Blood Roses and Moth Macabre), until she became “burnt-out on the whole music scene.”

She says she also realized she was more of an introvert — and that painting was more suited to her personality.

When Muldrow first arrived in Cleveland, she set up a studio at Hodge School (a former elementary school converted to artist live-work spaces in the 1980s) in Cleveland’s St. Clair-Superior neighborhood. But she soon began to feel the neighborhood was unsafe.

She has less space to paint at home, but she has compensated by making smaller paintings.

Muldrow’s current work is done in gouache — a traditional water-based paint that’s more opaque than watercolor — on extremely heavyweight paper, which she stretches temporarily on hardwood panels.

Her highly skilled paintings of barren, unadorned structures, such as highway overpasses and commercial office towers, are often infused with dramatic flourishes of unexpected color, lending urgency to otherwise ordinary views of everyday scenes.

She is interested in questioning the possibility that landscape painting is a historically obsolete art form. At the same time, she uses the conventions of her medium and format to consider aspects of the post-industrial landscape that have clearly become dated and potentially outmoded.

Completely devoid of people, Muldrow’s paintings often suggest that the structures they depict have become ruins. Still fascinating and often colorful, they pepper the landscape like trees or wildflowers. Their original function is all but lost as they become integrated into their surroundings.

While Muldrow is still getting used to the light in Cleveland, which she says is “more purple” than it is in San Francisco, it seems that her move to Cleveland was fortuitous.

As she gains recognition in the region, Northeast Ohio’s peculiar post-industrial landscape appears to be serving her equally well as both subject and inspiration.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, August 8, 2009

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

Up close, Mark Fox's untitled 2007 cut-paper assemblage reveals the way in which the artist physically combines cutout flat drawings to create complex three-dimensional matrices.

Artist Mark Fox draws on the accidental to create abstract drawings

By Dan Tranberg

Ohio native Mark Fox is known for his delicate and airy wall-mounted assemblages, made from hundreds of small, quirky cutout drawings that are attached to each other using tiny strips of linen tape.

Like lace, they create playful shadows as light passes through them and dances on the walls beyond.

Examples of these works can be found in the permanent collections of such heavyweight institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

But Fox’s current solo exhibition, titled “If Therefore,” at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, shows Fox, who now lives and works in New York City, to be exploring another direction.

The show features more than a dozen new drawings on single sheets of paper, which began in Fox’s studio as makeshift dropcloths.

Through his process of making tiny cutout drawings, these sheets of paper, presumably placed on studio tabletops, accumulate a variety of marks: overspill, stray brushstrokes and random doodles. Fox then uses the accidental markings as starting points for new works on paper, which echo some of the qualities of his assemblages.

The exhibit includes two cutout assemblages from 2007, encouraging comparison with the drawings, most of which are from 2009.

As drawings, Fox’s newer works take on a range of issues that are unique to two-dimensional art — and this is where they become interesting.

This detail of Mark Fox's 2008 mixed-media drawing "Ack" demonstrates how the artist groups imagery using a collage-like sensibility, even when working on a single sheet of paper.

While his cutout assemblages rely on the interplay of actual light and shadow within three-dimensional space, his new drawings cannot. As if to compensate for this, he creates bold and dynamic relationships between light and dark shapes in his flat drawings.

In many of them, an accumulation of darker images forms an overall arch shape, which stands in contrast to an equally complex grouping of white and off-white shapes or to relatively large areas of stark white paper.

On the whole, this approach works beautifully.

The flat drawings, all of which are 22 by 30 inches, display a more subtle range of spatial relationships than the cutout works. Moreover, the individual shapes tend to merge together in the drawings, suggesting that the varied assortment of marks is part of a more unified (albeit chaotic) system.

Fox’s assemblages are commonly interpreted as comments on our culture of seemingly boundless accumulation. His drawings are less concrete than that, in part because the things that accumulate in them are mostly abstract shapes.

At times, the open-endedness of the drawings makes them appear like Modernist abstractions. American Modernist painter Stuart Davis comes to mind.

While Davis tended to use dead-flat shapes, his rhythmic abstract compositions often featured a similarly chaotic mix of geometric and biomorphic forms, which he unified, as Fox does, primarily though his use of color.

But Fox’s drawings clearly belong to the present day. The sheer eccentricity of his many various doodle-like marks seems to speak of a pluralistic and multifaceted world in which an overwhelmingly dominant sense of order would feel like a sentimental remnant of the past.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer,  July 12, 2009

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

"Edifice" by Amy Casey, 14 x 16 inches, 2008.

2009 Cleveland Arts Prize Winner:

Amy Casey

By Dan Tranberg

In the 10 years since she graduated with a degree in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Amy Casey has become one of Northeast Ohio’s most visible emerging artists.

She has held solo shows in Chicago and Los Angeles and has participated in more than 25 group exhibitions nationwide.

In addition to being honored with an Emerging Artist Award for those under 40 from the Cleveland Arts Prize, she recently received a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship through Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture.

Born and raised in Erie, Pa., Casey moved to Cleveland to attend Cleveland Institute of Art. After graduating in 1999, she moved to Chicago, where she worked as a security guard at the now-defunct Terra Museum of American Art.

“It was a don’t-know-what-you’re-doing-after-school’ type thing,” she says.

She returned to Cleveland a year and a half later and settled into a wood-framed bungalow in Tremont, where she continues to live and work, making quirky, highly detailed paintings that draw heavily upon local landscapes.

Despite her success in other cities, Casey says the local community remains important. “I still want to be part of the art scene here,” she says. “I make it a point to continue showing in Cleveland.”

In part, that’s because she feels that the Internet has made it easier for artists to gain exposure beyond their own region. “Someone from Denmark contacted me the other day,” she says, “and a student in Singapore found me through my website.”

Casey said the gallery that represents her in San Francisco also found her online.

“It’s completely different now, with the web,” she says. “There are more possibilities than ever. Cleveland may not exactly be a hot spot, but that’s good because I can get work done.”

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on Sunday, June 21, 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

Christian Wulffen and his work "Couch" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

Putting the nature of things into perspective: There’s more going on than meets the eye

By Dan Tranberg

The art of Christian Wulffen is all about deeply questioning the identity of and meaning behind everyday materials, objects and experiences. In his solo exhibition “It Is, It Is Not,” on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland through Sunday, May 10, he presents 17 pointedly austere works – drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations – all of which stand as purposeful visual puzzles.

Given the generally stark appearance of Wulffen’s works, which make use of standard grids for their composition or configuration, it is easy to mistake some of them for simple design experiments.

“Couch,” for instance, is a plywood form that vaguely resembles a piece of experimental modern furniture. In place of standard cushions, recent copies of The New York Times are tightly strapped into place as if for the sake of convenience: If reading material is like a cushion, why not let it be a cushion?

However, in the larger context of Wulffen’s work, it becomes clear that the point is not convenience. Rather, it’s a question of considering the particular attributes of objects (such as couches and newspapers) and experiences (such as sitting and reading) and gaining something deeper than a superficial understanding of how these things function in the world.

Like all conceptual art, Wulffen’s work requires a degree of mental labor on the part of the viewer; without it, nearly all of his pieces will undoubtedly come off as dry and cryptic. An essential aspect of his artistic strategy is to encourage viewers to question what they are seeing and to consider it in comparison with experiences in their everyday lives.

This condition creates great challenges in understanding and appreciating some works in the show that make oblique references to the ways in which art is presented and received.

Christian Wulffen, Billboard: Page 44/45 of Zum Beispiel oder Spielen exhibition, Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst, en gros und en detail, Wall Wulffen, , Color photograph on vinyl, Approximately 10 x 26 feet (3 x 8 meters)

A series of extremely large (10-by-26 feet) photographs on vinyl, for instance, depict former installations of Wulffen’s own work. One shows an open exhibition catalog from one of Wulffen’s European shows sitting on a wooden surface with a photograph of a wall installation spread across two pages. Another is a straight shot of one of his installations made up largely of photographs mounted to a wall.

Both of these billboard-sized works raise questions regarding the way in which visual information is mitigated by media, a “meta” issue that will be likely lost on many viewers.

That’s not to say that Wulffen, or the show’s curator, Megan Lykins-Reich, should dumb down the work. But, considering the large number of pieces in this show, a more edited grouping would probably have made for a more lucid presentation.

Difficult as some of them may be to understand, Wulffen’s works are compelling examples of how current conceptually based art still effectively serves to question our perceptions and our understanding of everyday life. Like many great works of literature, comprehending them requires much more than a casual reading.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer on February 19, 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

"Lattice 2" by Andrea Joki, Mixed media on paper mounted on linen, 43"w x 50"h

Multiplicities

By Dan Tranberg

Crisp dark lines emerge from misty gray washes, forming skeletal structures that resemble scaffolding or netting. But just as easily as such images appear, they almost fade from view as deeper layers of information come into focus. In the newest works on paper by Andrea Joki, networks of lines and shapes coexist like stratum, alternately revealing and concealing themselves. Simultaneously primitive and complex, they stand as the latest manifestation of her elegantly reductive process.

In Joki’s earlier works, such as her Specimen Series, graphite, acrylic paint, and Mylar are used to create scrim-like sheets, loosely draped over washy ink drawings, producing shallow pictorial spaces in which a variety of discreet painterly processes interact with one another. One suggestion with these works is that a series of organic systems are simultaneously at play, each contributing to a visible dynamic that echoes any number of natural phenomena. Some resemble multitudes of microscopic organisms while others recall underwater images of seaweed and jellyfish.

Like many artists working today Joki’s methodology has roots in the 1960s, extending from the eccentric process-oriented drawings and sculptures of Eva Hesse and the systematic constructions of Sol LeWitt, through the work of such younger artists as Terry Winters, Ross Bleckner and Tara Donovan, whose manipulation of their respective materials leads to the formation of alluring organic structures.

Joki shares with these artists an emphasis on process and a practice in which experimentation with materials leads to the discovery of parallels between what happens on her sheets of paper and what occurs naturally in the world. Among the limitations she puts into place is a severely restricted color palette of mostly warm and cool grays, keeping the primary focus on the structures she creates. In doing so, she emphasizes contrasts and similarities in systematic relationships.

One system of mark making reveals the particular characteristics of another. The more-or-less-orderly structure of a grid-like form, for example, might expose an underlying chaotic network of watery lines or a vast expanse of paper soaked in subtle washes of pigment. Each layer has its own set of properties and rules, recalling LeWitt, and each has its own references to actual visible structures.

Joki’s titles corroborate the idea that her imagery, much as it appears to occur almost naturally as a result of a given process, is intended to make some connection to observable things in the world. Hence, titles such as Fault Line and Lattice. Other titles more clearly point to occurrences or phenomena, as in Pulse, White Out, and Flight Path. In either case, the implication is that Joki is drawing poetic parallels, tapping into fundamental aspects of the ways in which visual information is read and interpreted.

Her painting demonstrates that Joki’s distinctive sensibility is not a stylistic one. Rather, it is marked by a sophisticated awareness of the ways in which image, idea and process intertwine. Much as they can be appreciated for their delicate beauty, her newest works show her to be mining a rich, historied terrain in which both similar and disparate systems, shrouded or exposed, simultaneously exist.

This essay was published on the occasion of Andrea Joki’s solo exhibition Reservoir at the William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, February/March 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.

"Roswell Site" by Neil MacDonald, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in.

‘Dreamland’ paintings beg you to find meaning

By Dan Tranberg

Neil MacDonald’s paintings begin with an interest in the way that disparate information leads to confusion. As a result, his complex and meticulous paintings are perplexing at first glance; in many of them, it’s hard to know exactly what is happening.

That’s part of the point.

In the solo show “Dreamland: Recent Paintings by Neil MacDonald” at the Akron Art Museum, MacDonald, who lives and works in Stow, presents eight large paintings, all of which employ his characteristic technique of fracturing images culled from television, print media and the Internet.

He uses a simple grid pattern in his painting process, lending each canvas the appearance of an overly enlarged digital photograph that has become pixilated.

The Akron show features works from two different series, which somewhat complicates matters.

"Roswell Festival," a 5-foot-wide oil on canvas, is one of eight new works featured in the exhibition "Dreamland: Recent Paintings by Neil MacDonald" at the Akron Art Museum

Four paintings from MacDonald’s “Roswell” series borrow imagery from the culture of UFO enthusiasts. A 5-foot-wide canvas titled “Roswell Festival,” for instance, draws on the well-known 1947 incident in which the Army collected metallic debris thought by some to be remnants of a flying saucer and by others to be fragments of a fallen weather balloon. The site of the event, just north of Roswell, N.M., is now the location of an annual UFO festival.

In his Roswell series, MacDonald effectively uses the story of the Roswell incident to emphasize the way that conflicting information can lead to wildly diverse ideas and a fragmented “picture” of reality.

To some, the story of Roswell is about a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of space aliens; to others, it’s an example of the way that some people will draw the most sensational conclusions from a minimal amount of information.

Either way, MacDonald’s use of Roswell comes to represent the way we individually process information and reach conclusions that we believe to be true.

Because it contains recognizable images, the Roswell series is in some ways easier to grasp than MacDonald’s other group of paintings, collectively titled “Apophenia.” The term refers to the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.

In this series, MacDonald begins with photographs of television screens showing disintegrated, unrecognizable images. As a result, the paintings show abstract patterns within the faint confines of a rigid grid.

Again, these paintings resemble digital photographs that have been enlarged to the point that the pixel pattern totally obscures the image. But, because there is no decipherable image to begin with, the viewer is left to try to make sense of apparent nonsense.

In the context of the Roswell series, MacDonald’s “Apophenia” paintings expand on the idea that incongruous information leads to varied interpretations. More generally, they raise the compelling possibility that all interpretations are subject to perceptual trickery in which the mind sees patterns and draws conclusions no matter what the “reality” of the situation may be.

MacDonald, who graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1982 and went on to earn a master of fine arts degree from Kent State University in 2001, has exhibited at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Art in Cleveland, the Butler Institute of American Art and the McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and Cleveland’s Spaces Gallery.

Through this impressive display of work, he asserts himself as one of the region’s most intelligent and ambitious painters – one who clearly deserves far wider recognition.

This article appeared in The Plain Dealer, February 1, 2009.

© 2009 Dan Tranberg. All rights reserved.