Category Archives: art

Cryptical Envelopment

The Estlunds’ “Out of Nowhere” is an invitation to embrace the unknown

["Surfacing," by Shannon Estlund; mixed media; dimensions unknown.]

[“Surfacing,” a Shannon Estlund piece to be featured in “Out of Nowhere”; oil and enamel on panel; dimensions unknown.]

While CoRK Arts District is best known as being the home base to sixty artist studios, the complex has also introduced an engaging Artist-in-Residency program. In February of this year, New York-based multimedia artist Rachel Rossin was the flagship visiting artist-resident at CoRK. Rossin’s spiritually-inspired piece “Holy See,” was an installation that combined 2,500 hollow eggs and curtains of holographic light into a fully immersive experience. The following month, Brooklyn, NY-based artist Casey James was invited to stay and work at CoRK; the North Gallery was then home to his multimedia show, “Nawth Ta South.”

“The reason for the Artist-in-Residency program was to bring in new and different perspectives from other artists and art communities around the country,” explains sculptor and CoRK main man Dolf James. The CoRK AIR program offers a modest stipend for travel and materials, a private studio for the visiting artists, and then culminates with an exhibit of their work in one of CoRK’s available galleries. “We wanted to see what they were doing, thinking and experiencing, and for them to do the same with us. Building these relationships extends the reach of our community and helps keep a fresh flow of ideas moving.” James is quick to cite Aaron Levi Garvey as the chief curator of CoRK’s AIR program. “There is absolutely no question this program would not be happening if it were not for Aaron.” James explains that Garvey is essentially the one that attracts, communicates with, plans, promotes and ultimately takes care of all the details for the resident-artist coming to CoRK. “The idea behind having the artists come to Jacksonville is to give them a studio/exhibition experience out of their usual experience,” says Garvey.

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Adhesive Forces

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The subconscious and grotesque stick together in the art of Russell Maycumber

(Russell Maycumber’s “kclub,” ink on Post-it Note; year unknown.)

Since the early nineties, Russell Maycumber has been documenting his life, travels and interior reality onto three inch, yellow squares. Introduced by the 3M Company in 1980, the Post-it Note is a small square of paper with an adhesive backing – initially introduced as an office-friendly product that could be used to jot down reminders, appointments and upcoming tasks, and then applied to any available flat surface. Yet Maycumber uses these ubiquitous pieces of sticky stationary to create images that explore memoir, humor and the phantasmagoric, creating them systematically, if not compulsively; a kind of hypergraphia barely contained in magic marker and yellow paper. The 44-year-old Maycumber admits to owning “volumes” filled with these images that date back to the early nineties. But rather than having them tucked away on some shelf in his house, the St. Augustine-based artist creates massive installations and sculptures that can contain hundreds upon hundreds of these carefully arranged Post-it Note drawings. Viewed in mass, the small squares can have an overwhelming effect: these images of chimerical creatures, people captured in mundane activities, classic automobiles, flying skulls, sexuality and playful demons seem to exist in a weird realm that splits the difference between the subliminal and the obvious. Some images feature cryptic text, while others offer little help in deciphering the odd, miniature graphic. Maycumber’s work seems to find company in the fever dream-styled imagery of artists like Francisco Goya, Edward Gorey, Max Ernst (especially the surrealist’s pioneering, 1934 collage work “Une Semaine de Bonté ,” translated as “A Week of Kindness”) or even underground comic raunch lord S. Clay Wilson. Yet Maycumber’s concepts and delivery are wholly his own, blasting these images at the viewer in the form of a mob of hundreds of pieces of visual shrapnel, aimed for the bull’s-eye of the viewer’s retina and mind.

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Class Action

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Jacksonville University now offers MFA in Visual Arts program

Northeast Florida’s current spate of artistic activity is surely due in no small part to the art and design programs offered at local colleges and universities. The Art Institute, Flagler College, Florida State College at Jacksonville, Jacksonville University and the University of North Florida all offer programs geared towards students seeking an education and guidance in creative careers in a variety of disciplines and media. These same schools certainly benefit by featuring faculty members and instructors that are as serious about their respective artistic disciplines as they are in sharing their experience and wisdom with their students.

Jacksonville University (JU) is now stepping up their game with the implementation of a Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts degree, the first of its kind ever offered by a local college. Continue reading →

Graphic Language

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Donny Miller creates provocative text-fueled imagery for the 21^st century

Donny Miller has a message for you. In fact, for the past two decades the L.A.-based artist has been creating thought-provoking images that combine clip art, self-branding and even pictures of the cosmos with messages that run the gamut from sardonic observations, to social commentary and even encouraging affirmations. In one Miller piece, a still life image of wine, cheese and fruit acknowledges, The hardest thing to do in art is something original. In another, a man and woman reveling in a cloud of confetti and party balloons are sprawled into over-sized champagne glasses, crowned with the header, Enjoy ignorance. A dark-haired woman adjusts her hair, seemingly deep in thought: I’m making new memories because I don’t like the old ones. Continue reading →

Pressing Through

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Three artists champion the power of expression with Hero or Non-Hero?

“Expression Necessary to Evolution”

Hardship, grief and loss are universal experiences; inevitable moments of being that can be as heartbreaking and painful as they are life-altering and even transformative. Yet like their positive counterparts, such as joy, love and success, these times of change can redefine us and even make us stronger. Perhaps the people we consider heroic are in a sense those who can accept these unavoidable highs and lows of life with equanimity, practicing an almost uncanny acceptance of both the shadows and light that color our existence. These same heroes become an example to others and their epitaphs are ultimately inscribed on the lives that they touch.

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Temporary Residence

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Home is where the art is with “The Apartment Exhibition”

[Installation shot of the living room of “The Apartment Exhibition.” All photos by Laura Evans.]

Five local creative types are putting space to good use. Curated by Staci Bu Shea, “The Apartment Exhibition” features individual and collaborative work by Thony Aiuppy, Sterling Cox, Lily Kuonen and Edison William. Located in Cox’s 500 square foot, mother-in-law apartment behind his Avondale home, “The Apartment Exhibition” features over 30 pieces that touch on concepts of cohabitation, tenancy and ownership as well as deeper, provocative ideas such as nostalgia, impermanence and belonging. Continue reading →

Duo Exchange

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Tony Rodrigues and Mark George join forces for an upcoming show

The friendship of Tony Rodrigues and Mark George was initially formed over the bond of making visual art. The two met in 1991while still in their late teens and early twenties, creating collages and assemblages that were fueled by their shared love of the DIY ethos of art-fueled entities like punk rock and Dadaism. Since then, Rodrigues and George have each enjoyed respective success by exploring their highly individual approaches. Rodrigues reappropriates found imagery of the past century and creates canvases by juxtaposing those same signifiers into a highly personal visual vocabulary that can be disturbing and playful, sometimes in the same composition. Along with spouse Wendy C. Lovejoy, Rodrigues has also created the popular line of TACT apparel that brings his eye-engaging sense of design to the world of fashion. Using greenhouse roofing material as his de facto canvas, George paints haunting, Neo-Pop art portraits in acrylics; his pieces can resemble road signs from a bygone era or surveillance snapshots that give the audience the sense of being voyeurs and witnesses to secretive, intimate exchanges. Yet despite their separate endeavors over the years, Rodrigues and George have invariably taken the time to work in cooperation and share ideas. These opportunities have been a chance for the two old friends to blow off steam, encourage one another and chart their growth from two art-enthralled teenaged punk rockers into bona fide, well-respected visual artists. Continue reading →

Deep in the Woods

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Sarah Emerson explores the darker ground in her engaging landscapes

[“The Overlook,” 48 x 60, acrylic and rhinestones on canvas.]

Before his death in 1889 at the age of 44, the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had devoted his short life to traversing what he called the “outscape” and “inscape” of being, celebrating the natural world around him while traveling deep into the shifting lands of his own interior terrain and recording the experience of those collective journeys.

In his poem “Nondum” (Latin for “not yet”), Hopkins ruminates on a world that is eternally in creation while seemingly frozen in its own lifelessness, a landscape both mystifying as it is morbid:

“We see the glories of the earth

But not the hand that wrought them all:

Night to a myriad worlds give birth,

Yet like a lighted empty hall

Where stands no host at door or hearth

Vacant creation’s lamps appal.”

Over the course of nine verses, Hopkins describes a place of seasons with changeful moods, “chaotic floods,” where voices moan among the reeds and “prayer seems lost in desert ways.” It is a world of shadow taunting light, where faith and direction are swallowed up like sunlight hitting the moon. Throughout the poem, Hopkins calls out to a creator who has long since ignored his creation, while drawing us a map of a boundary-less land, a ghost town now vacant of even its phantoms.

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Shape Shifter

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Lily Kuonen forges a hybrid breed of multimedia ideas with her “Playntings”

[“Want” by Lily Kuonen.]

While some artists might revisit their ideas, Lily Kuonen revisits, re-addresses, re-thinks and re-assembles both her ideas and very work in pieces she calls “Playntings.” Using familiar raw materials such as canvas and paint, the 28 year old Kuonen also assimilates tools such as vise grips and lumber into her pieces, blurring lines between studio/piece, installation/presentation and, ultimately, art and artist. Kuonen’s work is almost hyper-contemporary in the sense that she is perpetually changing and “upgrading” her art in an ongoing methodology and approach that she describes as “repurposing.” A singular (in her own words) genealogy is formed as Kuonen continually reassigns materials from old pieces into the new, her work forever evolving from the ancestral lineage of prior concepts and experimental approaches. Continue reading →

Current and Crucial

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Upcoming three day exhibit at Flagler College presents inventive new work from students

The Oldest City continues to offer some great, new art. And much of that sustained and ongoing creative force is being produced by the art and design students at Flagler College. The Crisp-Ellert Art Museum presents the school’s latest collection of work by both senior B.F.A. and B.A. students over the course of three days. The opening reception is held on Thursday, April 18 from 5-9 p.m.; the show is also on display on Friday, April 19 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. and on Saturday, April 20 from 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. at 48 Sevilla St. in St. Augustine. Thursday’s opening night reception also features a performance by local musical act Queen Beef. The contact number for the museum is 826-8530. Continue reading →