- April 19, 2024
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How does Hollingsworth Gallery Curator J.J. Graham find his artists?
“They find me,” he said Friday afternoon, the day before his latest show opens. The opening reception, a swank evening of conversation and contemplation of the art on the walls at Hollingsworth, is 6-9 p.m. Saturday, June 11.
Graham said the artists come to him, or he finds them through other collectors. In any event, the four artists on display are worth the visit to the second story at City Marketplace.
The four artists:
Joe Thompson
The first piece you see as you enter the gallery is a slender, wraithlike figure wrapped up in two gears about the size of dinner plates. The figure appears to either be riding the gears like a child on an oversized bicycle or caught between them in a kind of unimaginable torture.
There is something whimsical about the figures, as all proportion is disregarded in the human form. They are reminiscent of the spindly Tim Burton characters in “Nightmare Before Christmas.”
But there is also something devastating in the dark, cold, metallic distortions. Thompson, who is a self-taught artist, welded the pieces out of various types of metal, including chicken wire, wrenches, spoons, knives and nickels. And the figures give the impression that they have lived hard, long lives, much like the wrenches that have likely been in many hands and done hard work.
Thompson once managed a mobile home community, and one of the tenants who couldn’t pay rent left behind some welding equipment. Thompson told Graham that it took some months to produce anything of substance, but now, it feels like a minor miracle that this kind of work grew from an accidental inheritance of welding equipment.
There is something peaceful about the stillness in the statues. But like all good artists, Thompson doesn’t let you get comfortable, because the figures, much like the figure in the gears, also appear to be under duress. The most impressive piece is “Atlas, 2010,” which is a life-size figure made of wrenches. The figure is bending under the weight of a globe made of chicken wire, covered with keys from computer keyboards and continents of discarded cell phones.
Betty Morris Parker
Betty Morris Parker’s technique, Graham said, is to glue down paper, then tear parts of it away and “paint back into it.” The results are layer upon layer, patches of color mixed with patches of smooth white surfaces.
Many of her pieces in the show are completely abstract, without any figures or forms. They are reminiscent of rain sliding down a window.
One piece, 7 feet tall and 5 feet wide, is called “A Sabbath Day Walk.” The figure appears to draw on the mythical and, by the fragments of words printed on the paper Parker uses (including an old movie poster), to suggest a connection between the composure of an ancient Egyptian figure and the confusion of modern culture.
Jean Banas
Two of the widest images on the walls are also some of the most abstract. Jean Banas’ unframed fury of paint stretches 120 inches across. Graham calls it a gestural abstraction. He says when he looks at the painting, it seems to open up, as if there is a physical depth to the image. Banas employs a variety of strokes, from mere suggestions to fluid, saturated curves.
Karin Stoever
Along with Thompson, Karin Stoever is clearly employing human forms, and specifically female faces, in her photographic illustrations. She imposes one photograph on top of another, playing with rich and passionate color in a way that is reminiscent of sultry leading ladies of the screen in decades past.
One image is called, “Seduction.” Another is called, “From the Depth of My Soul.” The latter depicts a woman in a kind of classical ennui. The face is strikingly beautiful, but it is marred by the second image of a tree dividing the face between the eyes. It could be a picture of a woman looking out the window, the reflection of a bleak forest scene passing by.
Stoever’s images are unabashedly beautiful in a way the other three artists’ works are not, but she also appears to be exploring sadness and the double lives we all lead in our minds.
