THE BANK
42 N. Third Street, Newark, Ohio
September 9–October 16, 2022
Opening Reception: Sept 9, 5PM–8PM
Fridays 5-8PM and Saturdays 1-3PM
(no hours on Sept 30th)
Curated by Leslie Roberts
Each artist in this show is dedicated to particular materials, and each artist intently subverts or stretches those materials’ properties and typical forms.
A sculptor once said, about wood and metal,
“I always try to make something the way IT wants to be made,
not how I want to make it.”*
These eleven artists have a less obedient spirit. They know what their component stuff wants to do, and they persuade it to do something else. Media include rags, sand, plaster, wood, ceramic, paper, discarded books, and wool. An artist may wrestle with a substance, or patiently coax it. They may displace it. Or dissect it. Or disguise it. Or connect it. They bend material to purpose
and desire.
Vadis Turner melds ribbons and curtains into muscular forms. Lisha Bai casts striated “canvases” from colored sand. Mandy Cano Villalobos makes secular devotional artifacts from bundled household rags painted imitation gold. Alex Paik transforms bits of hand-colored paper into luminous, wall-spanning networks. Amanda Love tears discarded books down to spines that stand like sentinels. Kevin Umaña pieces together ceramic shards in relief-like hybrid paintings. Ruth Jeyaveeran stretches and rolls wool into delicate vessels. In images made of dyed paper pulp, Jeff Wallace turns reclaimed books into records of personal memory. Alisa Sikelianos-Carter fuses photos of braided hair into mystical “crowns” that inhabit a resplendent world of Black ancestral power. Tracey Goodman floods a room with plaster to create a scenario of ominous absurdity. Sean Desiree uses wood inlay, not on a tabletop, but to map the Bronx project where they grew up. With the proceeds from sales of related works, Desiree funded a grant to support artists living in public housing. The show is installed in a former bank. It’s an expansive space, generously lent, and exuberantly occupied, by pieces that are, sometimes pointedly, in dissonance with the building’s former use. Visually opulent works embody the opposite of material wealth. This once-institutional space presents views of home, society, and self that are anything but traditional. These resolute alchemists re-see, reimagine, and literally alter their worlds.
—Leslie Roberts, 2022
*Robert Guillot (1953-2020): A Green Chair, 2020
