Flash Forward

Recently SPACES Gallery (also a member of the COSE Arts Network) unveiled its new exhibit Flash Forward, an installation dedicated to promoting the work of younger artists who have chosen to remain in the NE Ohio area to forge their arts careers. 

 

I feel it is important to celebrate the work of these artists quite simply because they are, for the time being, swimming against the current of what is popular and trendy for graduates of art and design schools and music conservatories: move away to Brooklyn or Manhattan and “make it big in the arts.”  This out-migration of young, college educated creative adults age 25 to 34 is a large problem in this area and other Rust Belt cities—between 2000 and 2006 Cleveland topped the list of decline in this demographic with a loss rate of 31.72 percent.  While I can see some allure in moving to a large metropolitan city that is full of art music experiences and opportunities (not to mention good restaurants open after 10:00pm), I have also seen the reality of otherwise talented, creative people ending up working two non-arts jobs just to pay for rent on a 500 square ft. apartment.  My feeling lately is that if you are really serious about creating original art, then it is in your best interest to have a quality of life that affords you every opportunity to dedicate time and resources to your art. 

 

More about how Rust Belt cities can transform to support creative industries can be found in CPAC’s From Rust Belt to Artist Belt white paper.

 

The following is a review of Flash Forward, written by another Arts Network member, Carol Drummond of Drummond Design for Cool Cleveland

 

    

Flash Forward @ SPACES Gallery 1/30 This exhibition showcases contemporary artists who have gone to college and continue to create right here in Northeast Ohio. Feed your creative mind by partaking of our own locally grown visual produce. In this constellation of local and newly ignited art stars, some work shines brighter than others.

 

Kelly Urquhart & Jaime Kennedy create some meticulously rendered and digitally-collaged images of birds superimposed onto man-made instructions. For instance, one work combines the natural act of drawing something from the natural world–a bird–with man’s attempt at copying nature–instructions to assemble a kite. Also, their whimsical and oddly-eerie images of houses for birds, demonstrate how the natural world of birds might incorporate items cast off from humans into their efforts to build themselves places to live.

Amy Kreiger’s large portraits demonstrate her ability to render expertly the facial forms of the unusual characters in her work. Using digital media–myspace–she elicited photographs of people who felt the images they submitted to her accurately depicted their individual personalities. She then renders these on canvas or kraft paper, first with paint, then refining them with colored pencils, bringing out what she feels are their defining features, whether it’s part of their body, or a put on prop; an unusual hairstyle, eccentric clothing, etc.

The three brightest lights in the room are first, Jon Cotterman’s unbelievably delicately constructed glass works. When making stemware, he explains that the elements of each are made individually, then assembled, so rather than assemble the stemware, he puts the individual pieces into a framework of glass rods, like the toys that come connected by their plastic extrusions, for home assembly. Secondly, you might think Jennifer Schulman had a tortured childhood, only venting it now through her twisted takes on toys. Rather than depicting her own struggles, this arts educator explores the secret struggles of her subjects through familiar children’s games, distorted to pull the viewer into examining these hidden conflicts.

Lastly, Yumiko Goto’s works of ceramic abstracted plant configurations constrained by human materials; metal, concrete block, etc. displays to us her take on the fight between the human desire to control nature and the natural world’s valiant efforts to grow back through the spaces between, breaking up the obstructions put in its way.

Ann Hanrahan’s brightly colored, but less interesting paintings which depict explorations of repetitious patterns and Peter Philip Luckner’s video-manipulated paintings that remind me of a future-planet world of super-bright landscapes, are less than stellar, maybe in time these two will reach their zenith.

Like Dorothy, you can stay right in your own backyard to explore such cosmic concepts through these artists depictions of nature vs. manmade, the effect of the troubled adult world has on our children, and objects out of context. Flash Forward is on view @ SPACES Gallery through April 3, 2009.

Changes in the Nature of the NEA.

 

One of the areas where I would like to see change as a result of the new presidential administration is in federal support and funding for the arts, and namely a reform in the way the National Endowment for the Arts supports individual artists and new, modern art. The NEA is, in my estimation, very conservative in its support for the arts, and also very reticent to go out on a limb and support individual artists or galleries and museums that push the envelope of art. This can be traced back to the controversies surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center in the early 1990s, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ from 1989 and the NEA Four, whose NEA review panel-approved grants were vetoed under questionable circumstances.

 

While in my mind there could never be too much funding for the arts in this country, the government has actually done well to keep NEA funding intact in the face of conservative Republicans who want to eliminate the program altogether. Although we may never reach the peak funding level of $176 million as it was in the early 1990s, George Bush did sign into law H.R. 2764, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 which included $144.7 million for the National Endowment for the Arts—the highest level of NEA funding since 1995.

 

I don’t necessarily know how President Obama could rectify this situation, nor do I think it should be a priority of his in light of the other national issues he must face early in his presidency. What I would like to see is the appointment of a minister of the arts, or another figurehead that could advocate on behalf of artists and arts groups. What I would like to see is the support of artists and museums, detached from any moral or religious oversight that has been the norm for the past 20 years. The controversies surrounding the artists mentioned above arose when Senators such as Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms were unable to separate the artists’ freedom of expression and right to artistic statement from their own conservative views about religion and sexuality. In addition, the Republican majority Congress led by Newt Gingrich in the mid-90s also created a climate where the NEA was discouraged from supporting  individual artists or any controversial material in fear of losing its funding. Ideally over the next few years, NEA funding will remain the same or increase, but more importantly relax its practices to allow individuals and galleries to present art, music and dance free from institutional censorship, about which the public can create its own informed decisions and opinions.