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by J. Isaac Spradlin
Two spires, six major parks, 15 boxing rounds, 20 disco balls, and counting.
Those were the highlights of the kickoff reception for the Gill Holland book Louisville Counts! A Children's Counting and Art Book at the Green Building. The event was part of the September First Friday Gallery Hop.
The combination exhibition/silent auction showcases the 22 works that local artists contributed for the book to illustrate fun facts about River City for young readers. Among the works shown, the most visually arresting was Skylar Smith's clever seek-and-find composition of disco balls with colorful surfaces on a rich indigo/violet background. The text accompanying this image reads, “Most Disco balls in the USA are made on Baxter Avenue” and then invites readers to find all 20 disco balls in the picture.
Who knew that the world turns to Louisville for disco balls? (Okay, maybe you knew. But I didn't.)
Smith's work was in good company with the playfully flattened perspective of Jacob Heustis' interpretation of the Churchill Downs grandstand and dirt track, as well as with Ashley Cecil's painting of Louisville's waterfront with gently curving roads and richly pigmented features. Hanging in sharp contrast to the colorful paintings, Letitia Quesenberry's graphite image of Muhammad Ali lightly models the Champ's features with gray daubs against a white background. The artist executes these punches of pencil against paper in a compelling pointillist style that recalls grainy, bleached-out film stills of Ali.
The exhibition does have its shortcomings. For one, it's a showcase of art aimed—ostensibly—at children. Many parents brought kids along to have a look, so it seems an odd choice to hang the art so high on the walls. Sure, the auction is for grownups, but younger viewers have to climb their parents in order to have a look. The show's other hiccup is that some of the smaller digital images aren't as impressive when seen against the white gallery walls. Though this dosn't diminish the quality of the show, it does give the exhibit a hint of unevenness.
Sales of the book ($20 from Holland Brown Books or local retailers), and proceeds from auctioned artworks will support Arts Sparks children's gallery at the Speed Museum. You can visit the exhibition and bid on items in the silent auction through Sept. 25 at The Green Building Gallery, 732 E. Market St.
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Top picks from the Gallery Hop include a pair of painters for whom birds figure prominently, and a digital artist whose dense pop-culture collages glow with light from within. Read the particulars below:
Zephyr Gallery hosts Kenneth Hayden's selection of 26 bird paintings through Sept. 26. Near the gallery entrance are two sets (left and right) that show silhouettes of birds in flight against cool washes of overlapping greens, blues, and purples. These birds bank and lunge toward the edges of the canvases and deliver a certain melancholy that comes from the birds' frozen moments of lonely acrobatic grace. Each set has been edited to tease out lovely harmonies of color and line that work beautifully together on the wall—and fortunately Hayden offers a quantity discount.
Looking around the gallery-turned-aviary, which includes vivid cardinals and stark blackbirds, Hayden says he gets the Hitchcock connection that some people are making but he forestalls the inevitable psychology angle. “For me, personally, these are about painting,” says Hayden, even if he's showing crows eating road-kill. In all, his bird canvases show a knack for design that seizes on the gestures of these fleeting subjects with a colorful mix of delicate and bold brushstrokes.
Swanson Reed Gallery opens an exhibit of paintings and constructions by Rodney Hatfield, aka Art Snake's (wordplay on “Art for art's sake”). To a lesser extent than Hayden, birds figure in these densely layered and richly textured surfaces but here they share the spotlight with Thai elephants, slim trees and branches, and ghostly humanlike apparitions.
Even in peaceful-seeming compositions like Pajaro Blanco, which centers on a large white crested bird, there's a hint of unrest. The title of the painting is prominently stenciled in vaguely revolutionary capitals, and there is what looks to be an incendiary cherry (bomb?) to the right. Behind the main surface forms and images, there are suggestions of a large, sinister face glowering out from the jaundiced background hues and it casts a pall over the otherwise cheerful pinwheels of flowers and plants.
Much of Art Snake's work plays in moody colors and mist-shrouded features, and his palette invites comparisons to Chagall while his use of shape summons Klimt. But there are antidotes to the seriousness here, too, as in the painted panel A Self-Portrait of Someone Else which could be a graffiti-style take on the legendary Pope Lick Monster (Man/goat/sheep hybrid).
Art Ecology on Clay Street glows with the digital panes of J.B. Wilson's “I'm an American” series (through October 28). Here, the artist cribs images from the visual shorthand of pulp and popular culture—westerns, comic books, pinups, celebrity mags, and other stuff—and digitally re-masters them into transparent light box collages that mimic the way television images hit the eye.
The complexity of the images and the overall depth of Wilson's layering require some patience to decipher, but they also reward the attentive viewer with humorous surprises and playful suggestions and clichés. The most significant feature of these works, though, is the power of distraction that Wilson wields in this set. There's so much content to look at and so many small edits to scrutinize that the eye can't resist sliding from element to element, all in a very slick package.
Learn more about J. Isaac Spradlin at his interweb site
ispradlin.com or follow Isaac's microblog stream on twitter @ispradlin.
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Silent auction table at Louisville Counts!
Ashley Cecil's painting of Louisville Waterfront at Louisville Counts!
Jacob Heustis Churchill Downs painting at Louisville Counts!
Gibbs Rounsavall Olmsted Parks at Louisville Counts!
Kenneth Hayden's "Flocking" "The Ancients" and "Flying" at Zephyr Gallery
Rodney Hatfield aka Art Snake's "Tulum"
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J.Isaac Spradlin
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This blog features original commentary, reporting, criticism, reviews, and other writing about Louisville art, lit, culture, and what-have-you by local, recently returned writer J. Isaac Spradlin.
Feel free to contact the writer with any news, events, advance notices, rumors, or bad jokes via twitter @ispradlin or email ispradlin@gmail.com. Thanks.
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