Grid Furnishings Exhibits Oberlin College Student’s Award-Winning Work
May 4 – June 30
Grid Furnishing will open, Indra’s Net an exhibit featuring the artwork of Matthew Gallagher, graduating senior at Oberlin College, grand award winner and one of seven winners in the sixth annual Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts competition sponsored by the Association of Independent College and Universities of Ohio (AICUO), May 4th during Gallery Hop.
Phase Two
March 28 – April 28 2013
Joanne Easton, Cincinnati OH
Empathetic thinking is the common thread behind my work as an educator, artist, and designer. I am interested in the relationships of people, places, histories and nature. My work uses layers to build reveal and explore these conceptual complexities and connections with the physicality of materials,
patterns and color. For example, my current graphite series exhausts my body as I work, while I both create and discover connections. This experiential process acts both as research and as intuitive mark-making.
I am influenced by the places I visit and where I am from. Most memories link back to growing up in Australia. For me, these memories revolve around my family, my childhood home, and the Australian landscape – especially its colors, the patterns in eucalyptus bark, rocks, tree branches, and acts of unpeeling flower buds, bushwalking, and playing in sand and creek beds.
These elements are woven into my work through exploration of marks.
The process of making the marks, knitting and weaving, counting, and meditating, gives each mark its character and each mark is made with intention. The marks are energetic metallic lines that retain a sense of
mineral earthiness and rawness. And so, the marks appear vigorous and delicate, simple and beautiful.
The materials used in my work also exhibit intrinsic symbiotic relationships that make the energy and moment of making pronounced. The simple tools used of paper and graphite become both elegant and familiar. These are some of the ways I hope the qualities of the marks and materials evoke a relationship between the engagement of the artists’ mark-making
and the viewer.
Joanne Easton is an artist, educator and designer from Oakland, CA, Sydney, Australia, Chicago, IL and Columbus, OH. She currently lives and
works in Cincinnati, OH.
Meditations
November 26 – January 26 2012
Zach Coneybeer, Columbus OH
In his newest body of work, Meditations, Zach Coneybeer presents several dynamic abstract compositions born of the formal elements and principles of artistic creation. The works begin with no specific concept and develop out of the creative process. The paintings, however, are not akin to Automatism, where the work is created by chance and accident, but by specific and premeditated choices in the creation of each painting. He aims to create a specific quality of painting that is object and image, illusion and thing, void of subjective content. To Coneybeer, each painting is objectively a distilled composition of color and form, where the content is left for the viewer to decide. Coneybeer argues that fragmentation and desire, memory, and association mediate all visual interactions. Thus, the painting itself becomes what you see and nothing more, but the experience is how you react physically and emotionally to it. Meditations is a presentation of both process and experience where geometric landscapes of color invite the viewer to respond in his or her own individual way, ultimately adding the viewer as the final component of the work.
Zach Coneybeer was born in 1986 and is originally from southwestern Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from Denison University and currently lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.
Delayed Present Tense
August 29 – October 28
Brian Reaume, Columbus OH
Brain Reaume is a self-taught artist that uses nature’s effects on society and the human impact on nature as inspiration. Reaume studied women’s literature and is a writer at heart, his paintings and installations are as much about his verse as they are visual. “my goal is to tell a complete story through my work, be it abstract painting or sculpture I aim to intrigue the viewer, draw them in and open their perspective. my work has a voice and welcomes dialogue with those who take the time to delve into the layers.”
“the work that I create is intended to speak: asking the viewer questions while answering others. I want there to be dialogue, a continuous conversation so the art grows with and forms a relationship with its environment and the people surrounding it. I create work, whether 2D or 3D that one feels as if one could enter, walk into and find another world all the while finding reason for their current. I am the life that i live.
Summer Beauty
July 2 – August 27
Lisette Lichtenstein, Worthington OH
Lisette Lichtenstein is a New Orleans native who has been living and working in Columbus for the past several years. Her work has been commissioned for both corporate and private collections. Lichtenstein graduated with a degree in Art from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her work explores themes of color, movement, emotion and technology while working in mediums which include both encaustic, and oils on large sheets of aluminum. … more »
Medium Rare
May 1 – June 30
Erin McKenna, Columbus OH
Erin McKenna was born in 1989 in Columbus, OH. She attended the Fort Hayes Commercial Arts program in high school. She is a 2012 graduate of the Columbus College of Art & Design. She also completed the New York Studio Residency Program in 2011. Erin’s work often references the body in a metaphorical way whether it is through material or language.
Recently, Erin was named the 2012 Grand Award winner of the AICUO Awards for Excellence in the Visual Arts and was nominated for the Windgate Fellowship award and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Award. Last year she started a Fine Arts Student critique group at CCAD to promote conversation, exchange of ideas and constructive criticism among students.
I am exploring materials and their relationship to the body. The materials I use are personal and included fabric, jewelry, panty hose, nail polish, lint, and hair. In this work, the body is the ultimate relationship to things even when it has become abstracted. I am showing the body as the common denominator in how we think about things because it is something we are all familiar with. We all relate things in size and feeling based on our body and our body’s relation to other objects. My work is a metaphor and personification of material. I am making these inanimate things into something more personified by form and texture. Just like the body, materials are both functional and vulnerable. When I work with materials, especially fabric, I find myself testing the boundaries and pushing their limits. The frailness and delicacy of fabrics are similar to the quality of our skin and hair. Ultimately, by experimentation I am personifying materials and trying my best to make them come alive.
Taylor Hawkins, Columbus OH
Taylor Hawkins was born in 1990 in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended DuPont Manual high school and was in the Visual Arts Program. He is a 2012 graduate of the Columbus College of Art & Design. Taylor’s paintings touch the intangible relationship between subjects and their depictions, and the physicality of the paint itself. Taylor Hawkins recently won the Workman Prize because of his merit in Fine Arts with a focus in painting. He was also one of six award winners in the AICUO Awards for Excellence in the Visual Arts. Taylors also had one of his paintings displayed in the Ohio Governor’s Office.
I am continuously searching for artists and acknowledging how open and how alive painting is. Artist Charlotte Mullins states, “Figure painting is currently experiencing a major revival… In recent decades, a painting as a whole has often been talked about as being in the doldrums, of being moribund or even dead.” I strongly agree, with the addition that not only figure, but all painting is experiencing revival. Mass media has given young artists like me a chance to see art from all aspects of the world reflecting our different cultures, making it a constant race, a race that I have indulged myself into while realizing that there are multiple ways to paint a picture. There is a freedom about painting. This race and freedom together create a struggle within my work and shape the questions, what is a valid subject to paint? What is a valid emotion to paint? How do you paint it? This struggle is a way oil paint is an active experience of a life which is very unpredictable. I am taking the reality of the paint itself and the actual experience I have seen or been through, and depicting a picture. It is a battle between painting and a battle within me. I am repeatedly discovering new ways of relating two completely different subjects. My paintings want to touch the intangible relationships between subjects and their depictions, and the physicality of the paint itself.
Michael Halliday, Columbus OH
March – April 2012
Michael is a graduate of The Ohio State University where he earned a BFA, he also studied at Columbus College of Art & Design and the Whitney Museum School in N.Y. Michael moved to California, where for many years he exhibited his abstract paintings widely on the west coast. Having recently returned to Columbus, Michael is presently represented by The Marcia Evans Gallery.
“The roots of my painting extend deep into the fertile soil of the New York School, of what has been historically labled “Abstract Expressionism”, as well as the Post, and Neo Expressionist movements that followed. It’s somehow appropriate then that I found common ground with the words of a noted art critic of this period, Clement Greenberg, when he succinctly stated “paint is paint, and surface is surface”. In so doing he reduced the issues surrounding painting to their lowest common denominator, and thereby, freed the artist from other unnecessary distractions.”
“Beyond paint and surface I am left with only my decisions, devices, and deceptions, in expanding the envelope of formalist constraints with which artists are confronted. To the degree that I am successful in bonding with the paint, I am able to get into the “zone” wherein I am able to explore the mysteries of my psyche, and tap the energy that resides therein.”Grid partnered with Marcia Evans Gallery to share the work of Mr. Halliday.
Elements of Nature in Glass and Ceramic:
Hric and Keiser
Michael Hric’s glass vessels are transformed with patterns carved in the surface color revealing textures from the natural world. Kevin Keiser’s ceramic vessels inspire people to notice the beauty in their environment; found objects, worn shapes, textures, the way objects feel and their color relationships are inspired by our natural environment.
STRUCTURE
Paintings on Canvas
November 2011 – February 2012
Brian Elston Art + Design, Defiance OH
Brian Elston is a graduate of The Ohio State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design. During his study in industrial design Brian started pulling architectural and design elements into his paintings with a fascination toward drafting, blueprints and grids. Brian’s work has been exhibited by Holly Hunt Contemporary Furniture Chicago and Los Angeles, Gallery Sam San Francisco, Tojo Gallery Chicago, Chagall Gallery Edmonton. From simple to complex we are surrounded by structure every moment in life. The structure of maps, environments, buildings and spaces provide order in chaos within communities of living.
Simple structures such as the square, triangle and circle are the basis for graphics, products, buildings and environmental design. They become objects in our life that we mentally relate to provide us with order, direction and vision.
The paintings reflect visual experiences with architecture, maps and graphic patterns in urban environments. “As an observer of the world around me, I focus upon architecture, Bauhaus design, minimalism, things that catch my eye and objects I am drawn to visually. Things that have simple structure, design and form stimulate my visual senses. Visual experiences living in Chicago observing design, architecture and urban art are also reflected in my body of work.”
Leah Kandel, New Work
Nov 28, 2010 – Jan 30, 2011
Leah is a Columbus native and recent graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she pursued a double major in Art Education and Studio Art with a painting concentration. Leah’s paintings have been shown in exhibitions in Cincinnati and Columbus and have been published in Miami University’s Art and Literary magazines. Leah is currently working at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and continues to develop her artwork.
“My work provides a simplified, contemplative surface that allows viewers to notice specific qualities of the work, mainly texture and the subtle nuances in brushwork and tonality. Texture also plays an important role aesthetically in contradicting typical perceptions of clouds and sky. I want viewers to see past conventional ‘landscape painting’ and start to think about the psychological connotations of this contradiction; I want the viewer to start to question his or her own perceptions.”
