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.