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Home > Around Town > Artlink: Fort Wear, Installation, Watercolor
Artlink: Fort Wear, Installation, Watercolor
By Dam Swartz
Fort Wayne Reader
2012-09-06
 As a small regional non-profit, dedicated to the exhibition of emerging artists, Artlink has had the burden of trying to represent the large variety of the Fort Wayne art scene within its walls. Currently on view in the main galleries are three disparate exhibitions which showcase the vibrant local undercurrent, including "Water Color 360," which includes everything from landscapes to abstraction to humorous pop realism to tattoo studies; "Fort Wear" a small sample of our fashion based makers, including nationally known couture, and locally known repurposables; and last but certainly not least, "County Fair," a rare example of an exhibition of work in Fort Wayne which is simultaneously an installation.
Watercolor rarely comes to mind in the context of hard-hitting contemporary art, yet this hobbyist friendly media is becoming an extremely popular way for artists both emerging and established to produce quick, inexpensive bodies of work to satisfy market demands and hone their craft during larger, less immediate projects. "Watercolor 360" includes some incredible gems. Maurice Papier's obsessively intricate watercolor collages blend surrealism and abstraction to produce an incredible image reminiscent of stained glass, as well as Tom Keesee's gestural landscapes in simple grayscale, which emerge from billowing wide strokes and exacting scratches and scrawls across the paper. Another highlight, Steven Skinner's pieces like "Gummy Worms #56" and "Bowling Ball #45" showcase both his technical ability (subtle control over coloring to make ribs on the worms, and opalescence in bowling ball) and his use of humor by rendering such trivial objects. Skinner's popular topics also allow the images to act as placeholders for gestalt shapes and colors registered by the human mind. As a side note, this writer cannot escape the fact that "Gummy Worms #56 also has a strong reference to a Lynda Benglis 70's poured latex sculpture, but it is doubtful that this was an intended consequence. Additionally, Nick Fabini's "Back Study" and Dusty Neals' "Arcanum both heavily influenced by those artists' work within the tattoo world are also beautiful images in their own right, and it was refreshing to see them displayed alongside some of the more traditional work.
Although the transition from "Watercolor 360" to "Fort Wear" didn't exactly exist, it was also refreshing to see such a vibrant subset of the general creative/art scene working within fashion and jewelry. With the global apparel retail industry topping $1trillion, it is clearly something to respect. Locally, we have benefitted from this explosive growth of the fashion world through Vera Bradley, which posted the largest initial public offering (IPO) in 2011. While we have seen little trickle down effect from this into an immediate boost in the number of fashion-oriented creatives (mostly because we lack schools focusing on this) there has been an organic push toward this aspect of our arts scene. "Fort Wear" highlights a number of recent start ups such as Olivia Fabian's award winning line of swimwear Ofabz; Anton Babich's Exotique Apparel; and "The Good Ones" a brand of boy's wear produced as a co-venture between Matilda Jane Clothing, and One Lucky Guitar, a local advertising agency. Matilda Jane Clothing itself is a success story, seeing explosive growth over the last few years, as the market for higher end children's clothing continues to expand. Through the use of boutiques, trunk shows, and social media, Matilda Jane Clothing has created a unique model to fit such a unique product, emphasizing the relationship that the consumer has with their pieces. This relationship based journey has taken Matilda Jane's customers (who seem to look much more like collectors in a fine art sense than customer's in a simple retailer sense), everywhere from a nostalgic past, to a bustling carnival, all with a signature sense of eccentricity.
Finally, Zach Medler's "County Fair" installation is an excellent example of how any artist, focusing in any media, can produce experiential installations that add further dimension to their work and general practice. Medler, based in Portland and West Lafayette, Indiana, is primarily a ceramicist and printmaker, with this current incarnation of "County Fair" being primarily produced through printmaking techniques. Medler considers the county fair as one of the Midwest's most important cultural events, especially for the small towns strewn throughout the region that allow their empty fields to become pop-up performance halls and entertainment districts. The intricate, chaotic, mesmerizing images produced in "County Fair" provide an appropriate sensorial feeling, but embellish it a bit and certain aspects, like the depictions of series of knives hovering over a fair-goers head, situated next to the close up images of people eating corn with closed eyes, carry a somewhat darker feeling which nearly goes unnoticed.
These pop tributes, as fun as they are, carry that message of awareness that we, as the viewer of these images, is making the choice to allow ourselves to be swept up in them with beautiful, flashy, "New!" signs, delicious food, etc. Medler's comparisons turn the county fair into an extension of near propaganda, with the masses appeased by some brief entertainment as not to push back against other aspects of their lives. In this, Medler's work gains a political depth without making a blatant statement, by using incredibly gaudy and overdone statements all woven together into a wonderful installation.
By comparing these three very different exhibitions in a relatively tight space, Artlink allows immediate surveys and provides the opportunity for many artists to exhibit their work. As Fort Wayne's arts scene continues to grow, however, it will need more versatile spaces which allow more in depth focus into an artist's work, like Zach Medler's installation, as part of an even larger exhibition. Through this further exposition of the artist's work, our scene will have the chance to produce a market for our artists work for the outside world.
For More Information:
"Watercolor 360", "Fort Wear", and "County Fair"
August 25-October 10, 2012
Artlink
300 East Main Street
www.artlinkfw.com
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