This four-person exhibition is over, but you can check out the artists' work at their web sites. This review was in the Kansas City Star, June 13, 2012.
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| Chameleon, by Marcus Cain |
Fiendishly disturbing, “The Hillbilly Kama Sutra” is also often predictable.
St.
Louis printmaker Tom Huck’s inelegant suite of linoleum cut prints,
“The Hillbilly Kama Sutra,” is a study in, among other things,
disparities. The prints at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art are beautifully
detailed, drawing influence from the historical thematic print series
of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier.
Huck’s suite maps out in
graphic detail humans, skeletons and other beings — costumed and
otherwise — in multiple stages of violent sexual activity. Yawn.
If the results are wince-inducing and mostly grotesque, this printmaking
process is strikingly intricate, which is, of course, part of the
point. Huck has said he wants “to make bad things beautiful.” By setting
up the age-old and stale don’t-want-to-look-but-can’t-help-but-look
paradox, he creates a disquieting print suite with indeterminate and
perhaps simply gratuitous purpose.
Anne Austin Pearce and Marcus Cain are 2012 Charlotte Street Foundation visual artist fellows.
Pearce’s “Undertow” feels like a sea change. Having finally shed the
fragmented body, these new paintings surpass her previous work. Painted
on paper and framed, the giant 84-by-54-inch paintings “Inverted” and
“Overlooking a Well” are staggeringly accomplished.
Using water as
a metaphor for her thoughtful examination of “the unnamable corridors
of emotion,” Pearce’s free-flowing works suggest sophisticated yet
enchanted underwater fairylands. Now untethered from the human form,
Pearce is free to utilize space with more authority and creative
freedom. The movement in all of these works feels completely alive and
complicated in ways that her previous work did not.
The five
paintings of “Disruptive 1-5” enjoy a velvety surface. The flowing
paint, partially absorbed into the wood panel surface, has a magnetic
effect, pulling us along. “Undertow” is an apt title for Pearce’s
metaphysical paintings inspired by water and its energy.
Marcus
Cain continues his interest in stippling. Abstract paintings with little
quirky eyes could feel banal, but Cain’s earnest soulfulness keeps
cliché at bay. His carefully plotted paintings radiate dense precision
and yet something unknowable and mysterious. Cain’s meticulousness
embodies a sense of order out of disorder and control over chaos.
While Cain notes that he approaches the world with “wonder and dread,”
we can’t help but find the wonder in each of his delicate, but
definitive paintings. The dots radiate energy; the paintings pulsate and
vibrate. Painted as sheer dynamism, shadowy faces and heads emerge from
the space of these paintings as if in transformative states of being
and becoming.
Kent Michael Smith also has the ability to stay
true to a particular process or theme, yet continually advance it in
engaging ways. In this latest group of paintings suspended in resin,
Smith works in the round and has also begun to use larger geometric
acrylic shapes within all the paintings. Where those geometric forms
have been smallish in the past, they are now large and commanding,
giving the works a new feeling of heft and difference.
While his
backgrounds are typically gestural, as a counterpoint to the strict
geometric forms that float suspended above, in two of the works he has
scraped the paint off of his studio floor to create the background.
These multihued scrapings add an alien depth to his already hypnotic
works. The scrapings are dense, a little dirty, and he layers them so
they become a contentious and unfamiliar surface upon which his sharp
geometric forms smoothly ride.
My advice? Hightail it to the gallery for a jam-packed free ride with four artists doing what they do best.
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