The Paradise Institute. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. 2001. Mixed media with video, 13:00 minutes. Interior view. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Markus Tretter. 

If you have not experienced it yet, make a point to check out Janet Cardiff’s and George Bures Miller’s The Paradise Institute on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio through June 9, 2013. For anyone unfamiliar with their work, Cardiff and Miller create immersive experiences using various combinations of sound, “real” objects, film and site. The most consistent and potent element in their work is their use of sound as a means of playing with perceptions of time and place.

First presented in 2001 at the Venice Biennale Canadian Pavilion, The Paradise Institute is disconcerting in its ability to shift the viewer’s sense of reality. One enters an irregularly shaped plywood crate only to find the space expands to contain a completely believable twentieth-century movie-house including velvet upholstered seating. The movie attendees take their seats in a high, central balcony in the rear of the theater. In truth the mock theater contains only 17 full-scale seats with the remainder of the theater existing as a product of forced perspective and very careful model construction.

Once seated you as the “moviegoer” slip on a pair of headphones. This action at once connects the individual to the film and dislocates them from the other living and breathing audience members, as the layers of sound emanating from the headphones convincingly correspond to presumed audience noise and the movie soundtrack. Added to this aural experience your “friend,” who has apparently accompanied you to the theater, supplies an additional layer of dialogue. She leans in and whispers in a deep raspy voice. The effect is palpable. You jerk to the right, startled by the proximity and intimacy of her voice.

On screen a thirteen-minute Hitchcockian psychological thriller unfolds. The layers of sound and dialogue seem synchronisticaly intertwined. The characters of a male prisoner and a female nurse exude a charged sexuality that takes on Freudian implications, as the male character’s “dream” seems to mirror your own sense of an altered reality. In fact the collapse and disruption of space and time; the layered and poetic use of visual and spoken signifiers, combine with the believability of the experience to take on the qualities of a lucid dream. It creates the sort of dream that one ruminates over for hours after waking but whose meanings remain so dense and complex as to defy a single interpretation. Yet it is all an illusion, a construction of the artists’ making. Once fully realizing this unnerving fact, the complete immersion into this experience erodes our normal boundaries between fiction and reality.

The Paradise Institute runs through June 9, 2013.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
11400 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

The Paradise Institute. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. 2001. Mixed media with video, 13:00 minutes. Interior view. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Markus Tretter. 

Arrival. Tom Parish. 2011. Oil on linen, 60 in x 66 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Tom Parish has spent more than two-thirds of nearly eighty years of life creating illusionistic oil paintings. Although Parish, Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, remains in the Detroit area to live and paint out his remaining years capturing the visual poetry of Venice, Italy, he rarely exhibits a group of paintings in the Motor City. Fortunately the Ellen Kayrod Gallery in mid-town Detroit has eight of Parish’s large paintings of the Venice Landscape on display. Educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Parish’s various art-scene influences run the gamut, but his internal homing device always seems to keep his beacon on illusionistic imagery cloaked in mystery. His body of work spans two thematic periods. From approximately 1960 to 1990 he painted foreign-like structures in an industrial landscape viewed from above. Then from 1990 to the present he has led his audience on a poetic journey through the Venetian landscape. Capturing perspectives in light doubled by reflections from undulating forms of water and architecture, Parish produces magical realism, to use a literary term, manipulating and imagining reality in such a way as to share with the viewer his romantic interpretations.

In the painting Arrival, Parish sets up his way with water to lure the viewer into his composition. Bringing the viewer forward, he delivers on a favorite theme, a kind of elegance that the sea and salt dispatches over time. The bricks of a canal wall become the backdoor to a simple abstraction, part and parcel of an overall realistic landscape image.

Va Diretto. Tom Parish. 2006. Oil on linen, 60 in x 81 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Va Diretto capitalizes on a Venetian footbridge used by pedestrians to cross a small internal canal. Giving equal weight to the light and its reflection, Parish’s juxtaposition of red brick with the blue and white of the traghetti docking poles, serves as an invitation to the courtyard behind the brick arch. Letting our eyes rest on the walkway, we imagine the water taxi has just left, and realize how much we long to travel there.

Sinking over the centuries due to natural processes, building on closely spaced wooden piles and the pumping up of freshwater from an aquifer deep beneath the city Venice remains in a state of rebuilding. In the painting Grattacielo Veneziano, Parish seizes on a construction site along a canal and plays with the contrast of the water and its reflection against the semi transparent protective tarp covering the renovation. Here the mystery appears straight forward, and less subtle.

Occasionally drawn to open water paintings in his earlier work, he depicted luxury boats departing on a sojourn we could only imagine. Water, light and reflection dominates the painting Memoria. The spacious composition, depicting an older Vaporetto, creates a moment in time where we peer in on the action through a lens of nostalgia.

Through Parish’s eyes, Venice, a once marshy lagoon built on an archipelago of islands, transforms into place with quiet moments of architecture and light that we yearn for.

The exhibit runs May 3 – June 21, 2013.
Ellen Kayrod Gallery
4750 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, MI 48201

Grattacielo Veneziano. Tom Parish. 2012. Oil on linen, 72 in x 70 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.

UNIVERSE. Mark Schatz. 2013. Found cardboard, found objects, scrap wood, paint, EMT (electrical metallic tubing), hardware, H 96in x W 156in x L 270in. Photo Courtesy of artist.

Mark Schatz’s aspirational title, Universe, directly links to Buckminster Fuller and his writings. Fuller began to refer to the universe without the THE saying, ”We are a part of Universe.” Born in Denver, Schatz grew up in Michigan and spent twelve years in Texas. He now serves as the Foundation Coordinator at Kent State University. Universe, opened on April 26, 2013 at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio and represents Schatz’s third exhibition in the Buckeye State.

Schatz, often using maps in the process of relocating his life, finds fascination in them in particular for what cartographers choose to exclude. He says that maps get their coherence through omission rather than inclusion. Denis Wood, a cartographer of Boylan Heights, intriguingly ignores all but the jack-o-lanterns, street signs, streetlights, fences, or sidewalk graffiti in his maps. Schatz omits life but leaves its physical residue similar to an abandoned honeycomb left below a hive’s continual progression upward. At times one views a city from the ground level only to, with a simple walk around Universe, observe from a vantage point of flying high above the metaphorical clouds. The structure in the gallery, loosely based on a geodesic dome, exists in a state of flux. It neither folds nor unfolds. The strange form presents contradictions of interior / exterior, of up / down / of, high / low.

UNIVERSE. Mark Schatz. 2013. Found cardboard, found objects, scrap wood, paint, EMT (electrical metallic tubing), hardware, H 96in x W 156in x L 270in. Photo Courtesy of artist.

Continuing to edit as a subversive cartographer, Schatz manifests his vision of humanity’s built environment and allows every viewer to project into the emptiness and the void. Carl Sagan said that we are stardust. Schatz seems to say that we are cardboard moving boxes. Both realizations help us comprehend our connection to and existence as the void. Structures resembling hives or asteroids reiterate the sense of Universe as cardboard or personal ephemera and detritus. The decision to either view the environments from the bottom or the top allows for the subversion of the political north.

Schatz pays attention to important formal details and demonstrates superb material handling and sensitivity. Colors on the linear structure wrap around poles and always continue past corners, keeping the viewer in motion. Rather than use modular forms placed into a planned system, he produces the structures in place allowing the sections to naturally merge and flow into each other. Graphics and handwritten words on cardboard moving boxes span from one sector to the next. Tract housing follows the contours of the cardboard hills. In the distance, urban cores beckon with glowing LED’s and their accompanying nightlife. Mountains of sculpted white foam grace the “top” of the map creating a perceived hierarchy. Sitting atop these hills, sometimes entombed in geodesic domes, stand a number of large colossus figures. Schatz finds fascination in the seemingly universal desire of humanity to fabricate large-scale effigies when time, technology and funds permit. What causes this desire? What makes the land on the metaphorical hill valuable?

UNIVERSE. Mark Schatz. 2013. Found cardboard, found objects, scrap wood, paint, EMT (electrical metallic tubing), hardware, H 96in x W 156in x L 270in. Photo Courtesy of artist.

The cities and housing clusters in Universe remove us from the everyday and through the use of banal materials offer a detached glimpse of our scurrying ant-like behavior and habits. Schatz permits to viewer to assign value to the urban, suburban or rural. Standing atop or below the shifting cardboard tectonics, we can project our lives and aspirations into the restaurant districts, the harbors, the ports, an isolated cabin on a floating boulder or a graphite smeared plain. Each of us brings our individual chaos and ideas for how to place our sofa in the dome of Universe.

Universe runs from April 26 to June 1, 2013 at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The exhibition in the Euclid Avenue Gallery is free and open to the public.

The Sculpture Center
1834 E. 123rd Street
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

UNIVERSE. Mark Schatz. 2013. Found cardboard, found objects, scrap wood, paint, EMT (electrical metallic tubing), hardware, H 96in x W 156in x L 270in. Photo Courtesy of artist.

Shirin Neshat at the Detroit Institute of the Arts. Photo by Ron Scott.

The Detroit Institute of Arts currently hosts a mid-career retrospective of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, best known for her photographic work. Years in the planning by Rebecca Hart, associate curator of contemporary art, the exhibition combines photography, film, and video installations dealing with identity, gender, and politics. This first major display of her work in ten years contains two photographic works, Women of Allah, The Book of Kings, along with eight video installations.

Recent polling indicates that Americans have an overwhelming dislike for Iran as evidenced in a March 2013 Gallup poll. When asked, “What is your overall opinion of Iran?” 87% of the respondents said unfavorable. So why would the DIA mount an exhibition by an Iranian American artist in light of current dislike by so many? In addition to mounting the exhibition of Shirin Neshat’s work, the museum also presents a series of lectures and films, all designed to offer the community an opportunity to participate in a conversation about socially engaged art. What we are seeing is the museum as educator.

To understand the exhibition, one needs to know of the artist’s birth in a small religious town, Qazvin, in the northwest region of Iran. Raising their daughter in a time of a progressive climate for women and the arts, her well-to-do parents sent Shirin to the United States to study in 1979, coinciding with the Islamic Revolution that brought the current regime into power. Kept in exile in the United States, she spent her adult life as an artist studying the personal and the political.

Speechless. Shirin Neshat. 1996, 54 in x 36 in Courtesy of the artist and the Gladstone Gallery, NYC and Brussels.

Neshat explores the relationships of women to the militancy of Islamic fundamentalism, depicting weapons, and portraits of women overlaid with Persian calligraphy. In the work, Speechless (1996) Neshat portrays an Iranian woman in hijab, the barrel of a gun, and many lines of calligraphy in Farsi from Persian literature. Black wooden frames hold the large black and white photographs, printed using a resin coated paper. More recently, The Book of Kings, inspired by the political wave of uprisings throughout the Arab world last year, explores the underlying socio-cultural structures and conditions as they relate to the control of power. Displayed on three walls, forty photographs measuring 45 in x 60 in reveal lines of Persian calligraphy covering their surfaces, only discovered in most cases upon close inspection. The body of work titled, The Book of Kings, stems from the ancient Shahnameh, an epic tragedy written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. The Book of Kings tells the historical and mythical past of Greater Iran from the creation of the world until the 7th century Islamic conquest of Persia.

Roja. Shirin Neshat. 2012. (From the Book of Kings Series), Silver gelatin print, 45 in x 60 in, Courtesy of the artist and the Gladstone Gallery, NYC and Brussels.

Living and working in New York City at the time of 9/11 Neshat struggled to process the tragedy that took place only blocks away. A growing and rampant anti-Muslim sentiment caused her to question whether the United States accepted her and other Muslims. Seemingly in response, Neshat collaborated with Shoja Azari to develop the novel Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsiur, into a feature film by the same name. The film won Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice film festival in 2009.

Screened at the Detroit Film Theater in conjunction with the opening of the exhibit, the film profiles four women in Iran in 1953 when a British-American coup removed the democratically elected government. The magical yet realistic story explores the lives of these women from a social, psychological and political point of view as they eventually meet in a metaphorical garden. The most memorable woman Zarin, an unusually thin prostitute, flees a brothel to find refuge at a women’s public bath, where she scrubs her body raw in an attempt to cleanse herself from the imprint of the men who have used her. Shahrnush Parsiur, imprisoned for the text, writes openly about women’s sexuality and discontent. First published in 1989, the novel and film remain banned in Iran.

Munis. Shirin Neshat & Shoja Azari. 2009. Video still from Women Without Men, Courtesy of the artist and the Gladstone Gallery, NYC and Brussels.

This exhibition represents a progressive move by the DIA, potentially controversial, but more importantly, educational. In each photo gallery, signage helps the viewer decipher the symbolic elements in the photography. Part of the GLOBAL IMAGINARIES / Individual Realities series, the Detroit Institute of Arts offers a platform for artists and communities to share ideas and conversation that provide an ethical, cultural, and political framework to better understand our world.

The Shirin Neshat exhibition runs from April 7-July 7, 2013 and does not have a special exhibition fee.

C-House. Barry Underwood. 2013. Archival Pigment Print, mounted on Dibond, 60 in x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

The Cleveland Clinic Arts & Medicine Institute celebrates its newest commission. Cuyahoga, a series of twenty photographs by artist Barry Underwood. This work stands as only the latest example of Underwood’s prodigious talent and the latest step on his remarkable career.

What is art to be if not exceptional, extraordinary, removed from the everyday realities that bow our heads and remind us of our mortality? What is art to be if not a volley launched in our insurrection against the limits of this material existence?

Taking a cue from theater and film, Barry Underwood transforms the world into a place of surprise and unfettered possibility. Accomplished not through digital chicanery but through a force of will that smacks of Herculean effort or Sisyphean endurance, Underwood’s photographs are the visual equivalents of literature’s Magic Realism. Here we have stumbled on a place where the physical fabric of space and time fold and tear to reveal other dimensions and parallel realities. This place teeters on the edge of the sublime and pulls us over into what it promises.

Horseshoe Lake. Barry Underwood. 2013. Archival Pigment Print, mounted on Dibond, 60 in x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Teams of assistants achieve the magic behind the curtain, always within the deadlines of place and condition. Over the course of his career Underwood has trudged into frigid waters; climbed up and over the rocky crags of gasp-inducing mountains; spent long nights within the treacherous confines of a construction zone; and stood with cameras and lights on the daunting and often artic-blasted streets of Cleveland. In making work, Underwood deals with the very real and often very perilous circumstances of his locations. It is not hyperbole to say that these projects, executed with a ticking clock in mind and with the same demands of a general taking troops into battle, present more than the metaphorical risks of art-making. Producing these works requires meeting the same challenges faced by the crew of any major film production – including securing financing, meeting the logistics of moving material, people and equipment to locations distant and inaccessible as well as directing the execution of the shoot itself – but Underwood accomplishes these feats not through the resources of a major commercial company, but through the industry of an individual artist.

Generosity marks this work. It transcends a mere image of the extraordinary and becomes rather a document of a remarkable event. It is, in other words, the evidence of a truly transformative moment. This work does not present a world altered through metaphor or idea but in fact through human endeavor, – the same effort, the same vision and the same ambition that brings any great art into being and which makes its contemplation worthwhile.

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm, the Cleveland Clinic Arts & Medicine Institute opens Cuyahoga in a public event with the artist. This free event requires reservations. Reserve your spot at:

http://eventful.com/cleveland_oh/events/art-talk-barry-underwood-/E0-001-055330682-5

Lane Cooper has the pleasure of working with Barry and other great colleagues at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Cornfield, Sirna’s Farm. Barry Underwood. 2013. Archival Pigment Print, mounted on Dibond, 60 in x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Storm. Lauren Semivan. 2013. Archival inkjet print. 50 in x 40 in. Courtesy of the David Klein Gallery.

In her large-scaled digital prints made from eight by ten inch 35 mm film, Lauren Semivan achieves the timeless, slightly sinister elegance more often found in good poetry than visual art. Her emotionally driven work feels as rhythmic and painstakingly assembled as a sonnet. Her formula consists of a catalog of random objects, lamps, bones, shells, a model ship, all placed against a drywall backdrop draped in gauzy layers of transparent fabric on which she draws and paints. Occasionally a figure, the artist herself, slips surreptitiously into the frame. Her face always remains obscured in veils or veiled in her own hair, blown sideways as if in a wild wind. She wears full-skirted, ladylike clothes. The feminine touch extends to everything Lauren captures within her frame. Even the bones meticulously arranged on a small table, resemble a collection of precious jewels. These humble objects have potential for universal significance, leading one to wonder about their meaning to the artist.

Lauren’s work does not utilize digital manipulation. Blurring distinctions in the layers of space, the artist arranges all the bright, eerie atmospheric effects, the drips and slashes on the backdrop, and the floating veils. She then captures everything in real-time into one piece. Lauren refers to her photographs, indirectly, as “events,” and they carry a strong sense of narrative as well as movement. At first glance, the graphic marks and flowing fabric resemble trickling water or mildew stains, an intentional mock-up of decay and neglect that casts the bits of furniture and snippets of photographs within the frame in an older, more melancholy light, accentuated by the rich black and white palette. Yet this degeneration has a lively dynamism to it. Everything in Lauren’s compositions appears to flow in tandem toward one edge of the frame, diagonally, horizontally. Indeed, an event captured the moment before all is swept away in sublime finality.

If Emily Dickinson had made dioramas, they would look something like Lauren Semivan’s work. My first impression walking through her show called to mind one of Dickinson’s poems, from which I borrowed the title of this article:

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself-
Finite infinity.

Lauren Semivan’s work at the David Klein Gallery continues through April 27, 2013.

The David Klein Gallery
163 Townsend Street
Birmingham, MI 48009

Low Tide. Lauren Semivan. 2013. Archival inkjet print. 50 in x 40 in. Courtesy of the David Klein Gallery.

Archive. Lauren Semivan. 2013. Archival inkjet print, 50 in x 40 in. Courtesy of the David Klein Gallery.

On March 23, 2013 the David Klein Gallery, under the direction of Christine Schefman, opened a solo exhibition of photography by the conceptual artist Lauren Semivan. Her work combines objects with drawing, miscellaneous materials, and images of herself in a studio setting. She captures the setup in her studio using an Eastman view camera. Without manipulation, she scans the eight by ten negatives to make large inkjet prints. Semivan works as an artist making photographs, versus a photographer making photographs. The work recalls Man Ray, who recognized early on that photography could capture the effect of object-based art on a two-dimensional plane.

Bathed in an abstract expressionistic backdrop, Archive directs our attention toward a landscape snapshot in a way that Kenneth Josephson might do in a “photo within a photo” photograph. The scale of surreal objects, set against an immaterial backdrop, brings forward the power of her poetic sensibility.

Wind. Lauren Semivan. 2012. Archival inkjet print. 40 in x 50 in. Courtesy of the David Klein Gallery.

In an era when millions of photographic images flood the Internet and media outlets, Semivan takes her audience technologically back in time, to when the Eastman view camera captures its imagery on a large negative. In doing so, the black and white archival inkjet prints separate from the masses through photography that conceptually imitates painting. In addition to the David Klein Gallery, the Bonni Benrubi Gallery represents Semivan in New York City.

The David Klein Gallery
163 Townsend Street
Birmingham, MI 48009

A Long Way to Go. Lori Kella. 2013. Giclee print, 22.5 in x 40 in. Courtesy photo.

Lori Kella’s mystical landscapes in her recent show, Looking West at the William Busta Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio, offer a glimpse at unobtainable worlds. In giclee prints of intricately created dioramas, piles of crumpled paper become the highest peaks of mountains or the deep strata of the earth’s crust. It seems as though the act of looking at these worlds will also cause them to go away.

At first glance the images appear to depict quaint American landscapes. Most of the prints have small objects and seem cute and entertaining. A solitary farmhouse appears calming, a lone bicycle in the plains suggests a grand adventure, birds swoop past the changing leaves of autumn, and bison graze across the fields. Digging into the images one finds a vulture examining a pink fleshy substance on a remote gravel road. Although majestic and peaceful while in silent flight in the American west, the vulture here exists on the ground in its most vulnerable and awkward state. Strange dark clouds give a clue of something amiss.

All is Quiet. Lori Kella. 2012. Giclee print, 30 in x 40 in. Courtesy photo.

The clouds permeate most of the images, transforming what first seemed like prosaic landscapes into scenes of anticipation and terror. Are the bison peacefully grazing or huddling together to plan an escape from impending doom? As the opaque clouds envelop the mountain range in the distance of the unseen adventurous cyclist, in A Long Way to Go, we worry for their safe return. Suddenly brown plants seem less like a fall harvest and more a product of a scorched and abused landscape. A ray of hope shines from the left of the lone farmstead, framing a newly installed wind turbine. The red glow, possibly coming from the fire producing the clouds, could also signal that the turbine serves as a mere stopgap for the hemorrhaging of the mythical small farmer. Now less romantic the fight for survival comes to the forefront. Even the title, Farm at Twilight, signals a passing or impending change.

Again the title, Autumn Harbinger, suggests that the once peaceful birds flying over autumn trees now frantically try to escape the ever approaching dark clouds from the left. We begin to feel urgency and hope for their getaway. Infrastructure and vehicles imply the presence of humans, but we never see them. As the unseen pilots of a firefighting helicopter dump a miniscule amount of relief onto a forest ablaze in, Majestic Efforts, we do not hold out much majestic hope. Further nails in the coffin come from the lighting felled tree in, Lightning Break. The landscape falls apart.

Autumn Harbinger. Lori Kella. 2012. Giclee print, 30 in x 30 in. Courtesy photo.

Other images reveal the hidden landscape and underground effects of human activity. In Public Land the dark clouds consume the top of an oil rig that extends deep down into the earth in search of treasure. Beautiful colored paper represents the strata and a green pipe continues the quest horizontally. In All is Quiet, a system of blue pipes twists and extends underground. Who maintains this equipment? Two deer stand above listening to the quiet, completely unaware of the tremendous power below. The dark clouds swoop from behind. Humanity’s most heroic efforts seem no more monumental than a child’s ant farm. We live within the thin lacquer on the globe unaware of context in our daily lives.

One image, Arent Road, does not have foreboding clouds, but the anticipation felt for a bunny attempting to cross a road stands in. The viewer sees the furry creature lit by headlights from a car they might occupy, unable to know or change the outcome. Perhaps this depiction of a human in the driver’s seat traveling along the great American road toward the clear night sky represents us the viewer. Are the foreboding clouds behind us? Can we escape and choose our destiny? The rabbit waits. Kella seems to offer a choice. Either act as agents of change or remain caught helpless staring at the onslaught of a brightly lit steel beast.

Looking West ran from February 15 to March 16, 2013 but for now much of the work remains up in a different section of the gallery. Often William Busta subtly moves around work to other display points in the gallery while new shows open. This offers a hybrid experience between an ever changing commercial gallery and the repeatable enjoyment of a museum collection. A new show, A Vanishing Wilderness: Works from the 2012 Wyoming Artists Expedition, on display from March 16 to April 20 also includes two of Kella’s works.

William Busta Gallery
2731 Prospect Avenue
Cleveland OH 44115

Arent Road. Lori Kella. 2012. Giclee print, 30 in x 30 in. Courtesy photo.

Ken Arthur. Photo by Carole and Glenn Swope.

Driving up the long drive to Ken Arthur’s home one immediately senses his artistic eye that sees beauty in unusual things. Pin blocks of several baby grand pianos, rescued from instruments given to Arthur over the years, make up part of the fence on the left of the road. This just begins one’s introduction to his intricate mind and clever eye.

On an old farmstead, he and his wife, artist Linda Chevalier, created a semi-underground green home. In the farmstead’s “playgrounds” his fertile brain recognizes and transforms odd pieces into meaningful works of art. Arthur finds objects which awaken in him memories of past events or friends, or new visions of what this gathered material can become: bone, wood, stone, ceramic, glass, leather, metal, paper, and plastic; and, of course, his collection of remnants of a dozen pianos.

His Piano Man Project, now at the Sandusky Cultural Center until March 24, 2013, realizes his vision of what a collection of old piano hammers and actions, from three pianos, could become. In these articulated piano actions he saw human structures. Starting with a box nominally six or seven inches by twelve to fourteen inches, most with a glass cover, and an assembled Piano Man hanging inside, he encouraged creations of actions, settings, and attire for his piano men.

While the opening of an art show often celebrates the expressions and creativity of one person’s talent, the Piano Man Project also celebrates Arthur’s ability to bring together a sizable group of like-minded artists to share his vision. This included people he knew who did art work, but never had a chance to get their pieces out there. People could to express themselves, people who never exhibited in an art show, never worked in three dimensions and who never participated in a collaboration. Each brought her or his artistic integrity and commitment to the project. They gathered around Arthur’s theme and his recognition of the human form in these found objects and added their own flesh to the bones he provided. His challenge to his 75 friends unleashed a torrent of ideas. Even though the various pieces of the project remain mere mixed media, the dynamics extend beyond material limits.

Left: Juicy John. Keith McMahon. 2011 – 2013. Mixed media, found piano pieces, Photo by Carole and Glenn Swope. | Right: Piano Man’s Worst Nightmare. George Whitten. 2011 – 2013. Mixed media, found piano pieces, Photo by Carole and Glenn Swope.

The project invited mixed ideas, mixed viewpoints and mixed generational thinking. Arthur created one Piano Man in a bottle; a couple of other younger artists developed their piano men with circuit boards. One depicted a mime trying to escape from a glass box. Liz Burgess, a fiber artist he met at a show in Mansfield created one of the most unique collaborations. Eight people from that show joined Arthur in his project. Burgess raises silk worms and uses the silk in her artwork. She first attempted to re-create some silk worm habitat around her piano man, but not satisfied with the result, she collaborated with her silk worms, turning them loose in her assigned box and letting them create their own habitat.

Arthur’s ability to, like a pied piper, call to his friends and release their tremendous creativity around his delightful theme, including a man in a carefully-crafted duck blind, a long-nosed Pinocchio, and a bull fighter in a brilliant red cape, showed the genius of the project for us. Some emphasized the piano man itself, like the one who kicked the glass and cracked it. Others used the figure to emphasize scene and color and a creative theme. And, of course, one had to exist outside the box, freely sitting on its outer edge.

Many gallery openings bring people to eye the works of art in depth, moving from piece to piece in contemplation but basically alone. We likened this exhibit to an orchestra, with the various pieces, visitors and artists interacting. Artist talked with artist, sharing inner thoughts about pieces. Visitors listened to serious, and lighthearted, discussions about what prompted an artist’s particular reasoning for his or her expression of Arthur’s “piano man” theme.

However, this project just scratches the surface of Ken Arthur’s uniqueness. A self-taught artist, he has exhibited in over a dozen different galleries or cultural centers, including many invitations from academic institutions. While Arthur produced many of his installations in areas of North Central Ohio, he has also exhibited at the Sculptural Center in Cleveland, at the Mt. Vernon Nazarene University Art Gallery, the LeFevre Art Gallery at the Ohio State University in Newark, The Dairy Barn Southeastern Ohio Cultural Arts Center in Athens, the Bead Society of Columbus and the Bead Museum in Washington, D. C.

Left: Not a Shred of Evidence. Willow. 2011- 2013. Mixed media, found piano pieces, Photo by Carole and Glenn Swope. | Right: Man in a Bottle. Ken Arthur. 2011 – 2013. Large plastic water bottle, found objects, Photo by Carole and Glenn Swope.

In a concept entitled Winter Count Ken drew on the Native American practice of, not marking birthdays by month or day, but by reflecting “… each winter with an image drawn on a buffalo hide. As a man grows, additional drawings are added as a history and record of years past (including) the passage of the people I loved and the promise of rebirth.” Arthur continues, “For the mechanical side, the common thread is the hammer. I believe that, without exception, everyone has used a hammer.” You can see the panels from both sides, uniquely combining art and industry, with natural things on one side and mechanical things on the other.

His goal to create an assemblage a day for forty days extended to sixty-eight days. He grouped seven favorite pieces in his living room to represent seven religions of the world and grouped sixty additional pieces into three panels. In an old circular grain bin, turned into his gallery space, he placed one orphan piece. When we first visited Ken and Linda, one of the grain bins housed his workshop on the ground floor. The circular building also held his gallery at the top of a stairway that curved around the interior. Since then, Arthur refurbished a couple more grain bins on his farm for gallery space and added a new workshop, which also houses studio space for Linda.

Visiting an exhibit with Ken offers a different experience from a regular museum visit. His infectious good humor and excitement about his work, which so readily inspires other artists, motivates the spectator as well. Unlike many galleries that have limited appeal, Arthur’s exhibits attract all kinds of folks of all ages. Part memoirs, part discovery, part feelings for the people he knows, the work often elicits a response of, “I can do that.” Indeed, some of his Piano Man Project boxes come from people who requested a box and some piano hammers so they could exercise their own imaginations.

In our opinion his work needs a wider exposure and agree with Priscilla Roggenkamp, assistant professor of art at Ashland University, who said that his Winter Count panels deserve a showing in the Smithsonian. The gallery at Ashland University will host his Piano Man Project in May 2014, and will include perhaps twenty more pieces that did not make the latest opening.

The Clock. Christian Marclay. 2010. Single-channel video, Duration: 24 hours, © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the artist; White Cube, London; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The Wexner Center for the Arts sports a new temporary clock tower on its building—the banner promoting Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film The Clock. The work debuted at London’s White Cube Gallery in 2010, won the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and has toured major international art venues to serious acclaim for the last few years. It has as yet not been shown in the Midwest, however, creating something of a coup for the university museum in Columbus. The Wexner has a long collaborative history with Marclay, though, dating back to 1990 when the artist created an architecture and sound piece on the exterior of the newly built museum. Using hammering devices that struck Peter Eisenman’s metal beams every hour, this earlier work also happened to be called The Clock, so it is fitting that Marclay’s latest iteration on the theme come back to the same venue.

The Swiss artist’s heritage playfully emerges in his tinkering with the inner workings of a new, twenty-first century timepiece. The Clock results from Marclay’s obsessive splicing together of brief segments mined from hundreds of films, each scene dependent in some way on its characters’ relationship to time. The end result faithfully charts the exact time of day by constantly presenting watches and clocks to viewers, updating us within a matter of seconds.

This complicated work of art repels a single definitive opinion. My thoughts, appropriately, splay out like hands working over a clock face. A metaphorical “small hand” represents the fact that this work, despite its very complicated construction, is reducible to a one-liner, and the experience very often feels that way.

The Clock. Christian Marclay. 2010. Single-channel video, Duration: 24 hours, © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the artist; White Cube, London; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

On the other hand, the larger one, the film as film makes bold a historical statement. It returns us in a truly significant way to the early years of cinema, when people simply dropped into a theater whenever convenient and stayed for however long they wanted. Very short films ran on a loop as visual attractions, rather than feature-length narrative films that could only be comprehended if viewed from beginning to end. The basic experience of theater going and love of a new visual culture fueled the comings and goings of audiences. So far, I have popped in to watch The Clock at four different times, each according to various gaps in my schedule on campus. A constant flux of strangers claim and vacate their spots on one of the matching white couches in the dark room. Going to see The Clock feels like an exciting thing to do in the middle of the day, and its duration for a full 24 hours provides a generous diversion.

The most exciting space of time I have experienced so far was the five minutes just before noon. While one would expect a blast of Old Western gunfire to pepper the air just at that moment, the anticipation of noon proved even more exciting, as tensely expectant situations ticked by just before the hour. Near three o’clock you see school children preparing to leave school, but you also see adults going about their day, including the eponymous taxi driver DeNiro flirting with Cybill Shepherd at her political campaign office, making a date for four o’clock.

Because I work on a particularly underserved Soviet montage filmmaker, Esfir Shub, who created the first feature-length compilation film, I am continually aware of the rigor of Marclay’s project, both the length of the whole and the complex interdependence of its myriad parts. I find my mind wandering during the film’s less interesting moments to just how the artist could have watched and catalogued all these movies, only to find a sliver of perhaps five seconds, charted their exact time, and then placed these moments in a complex grid of found material. Old-fashioned black and white movies mingle with modern color films; giant clock towers play against tiny wristwatches; and round, calligraphic clockfaces vie with cubical digital screens’ glowing numbers. What holds these together is a rapt attention to time embedded in each cinematic moment, allowing disparate movie characters to share relationships on-screen in a way that feels oddly sentient, like strangers packed randomly in an elevator for the shared task of getting to a particular floor.

The Clock. Christian Marclay. 2010. Single-channel video, Duration: 24 hours, © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the artist; White Cube, London; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

I have heard of people staying for hours on end in the little impromptu theater. While I love that idea, I do not think my attention span could hold up against the irritatingly constant thought that interrupts all this wonderful stuff—that, ultimately, the work boils down to a very basic concept. Nor is there a narrative-driven reason to stay beyond the point of boredom. You can only say that you were lucky enough to play with time in the way Marclay provides and, in the end, that really is reason enough to go. I intend to visit on several more occasions and at various times of day, rather than pretend this is a two-hour movie and box myself into the space of a Classic Hollywood narrative film. I want to continue to watch the invisible hand of time move story lines and characters around like marionettes, if only for a few seconds at a time.

The clock is literally running out though. The next opportunity to watch The Clock over a full 24-hour span will take place on April 6. Museum entry will be free after 8 p.m. that Saturday night and until 6 p.m. the following day, which is the official closing day of the exhibition.

The Clock. Christian Marclay. 2010. Single-channel video, Duration: 24 hours, © Christian Marclay. Courtesy of the artist; White Cube, London; and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York