Tag: Visual Arts

After leaving the art world behind for two decades to pursue a career as a registered nurse, Jennifer Wenker, the new creative director of the Herndon Gallery at Antioch College, has returned to art with an enthusiasm that can be seen reflected in her involvement in a wide range of art organizations in Dayton and Cincinnati, as well as her own growing body of work. This return is all the more impressive given that she completed her MFA in eco art activism at the University of Cincinnati only two years ago.

Recently hired to replace Dennie Eagleson at the Herndon Gallery, Wenker comes to Antioch from Greenfield, Ohio, a small town about 45 minutes southeast of Yellow Springs. She was born in Greenfield, where her family has lived for eight generations, a connection that she feels has had a strong influence on her art.

“I’m not really a homebody,” she said, “I just kind of stayed.”

All of the art and activist organizations with which Wenker has worked are based in southeastern Ohio, including the Marianist Environmental Education Center, which is affiliated with the University of Dayton, and SOS Art, a yearly art show in Cincinnati. The organization of which she feels the most proud, though, is the SPARK! Creative Artspace, which is centered in her hometown. The group describes themselves as being committed to “preserving and strengthening the culture of foothills Appalachia as well as introducing and spreading an appreciation of the arts in all their variety.”

The idea for SPARK!, she said, was formed while she sat in the grass at one of her daughter’s soccer games making a list of all the things she loves about creating. She then shared some of her ideas in conversations with friends, talking about the ways downtown Greenfield had changed and why people leave small towns for big cities. During these conversations, she said, there was a growing realization that “our empty downtown spaces would never fill up with what they had before,” so she and her friends decided to organize a conceptual space in which they could be creative together and share resources, collaborating with existing businesses and the owners of empty shops to move SPARK!  into different locations as they became available. She describes the group as loose and amorphous. The people involved are just those who want to be, and this organization style has worked well, Wenker said. The group has put on a number of successful “pop up” events, including “artistically lighting” a barn near New Petersburg and a jug band concert and auction to raise money for a permanent location for SPARK!

“It’s really done good things for our community,” she said.

Much of Wenker’s work relates directly to the college’s commitments to sustainability and community. One of her shows from 2012, “Deeply Rooted Drifting,” centers around the development of emotional connections to place and the way people are always physically interconnected with certain spaces. Her own bio highlights that Appalachia, which she has considered her home for most of her life, has long been “a financially impoverished area rich in scrappy resourcefulness,” which is certainly reflected in her creative output and her participation in local art and environmental activist work. Other pieces connect more obviously to sustainability, incorporating and recycling paper and cardboard from her own family’s waste stream.

Wenker sees herself as both a naturalist and an artist, drawing influence for her work from her training in life drawing and pre-medical illustration during her undergraduate work at Morehead State University in Kentucky.

“I really loved the hand-drawn medical and botanical illustrations,” she said, but she lost interest in the field when digital illustrations began to replace the precise pen-and-ink sketches for which she had been trained. After several people in her family important to her had become sick, she said it felt natural to move from medical illustrations into the medical field itself, where she would spend the next 21 years.

The effects of these experiences stretch well beyond her own artwork into the way she understands her place in the Antioch community. She sees her role as the creative director as similar to her relationship to nature. She wants to be an organic part of the community rather than somebody working as an isolated individual. Her work as a curator at the Herndon is very collaborative, she said.

“We have a democratic process for how we select what might be interesting for shows,” a process that involves the Arts at Antioch Committee, which is comprised of student gallery assistants and volunteers, arts faculty, interested staff and others from the Yellow Springs community.

Although Wenker has only been at the Herndon for a short time, she’s already excited about several possibilities for future shows.

“I would love for more of the art to happen out there,” she said, gesturing toward her window that opens onto the horseshoe connecting three of the most active buildings on campus.

She is particularly interested in giving a voice to “quieter things” that may fall outside of what is generally considered to be fine art, including possibly reprising one of her shows that has already seen several incarnations, “Outsiders: An Exhibition of Work by ‘Nonhuman’ Others.” The show features found works created by “wasps, bees and birds,” among others, in part as an effort to bring anthropocentrism in art into question. This time she would like to see it as an invitational that might include Glen Helen as a part of the exhibition.

She would also like to host shows that would align with Antioch’s curriculum outside the arts, possibly including politically oriented shows. Drawing on inspiration she found while teaching conceptual drawing at the University of Cincinnati, she has recently been interested in conceptual mapping and would like to bring those ideas into the Herndon. She is fascinated by the beauty of internet search mapping, a process that makes visible for anyone connections between internet sites that would otherwise remain unseen. This kind of conceptual mapping, she said, has been applied in a number of other ways, and can be used to visualize connections as diverse as links between political figures and the chronology of interpersonal relationships.

Her enthusiasm is not limited to her work in the Herndon Gallery, however. Wenker said she has found the atmosphere all over Antioch exciting and energizing.

“I would have gone to college here if I had known about it,” she said.

Wenker noted that people on campus seem more optimistic than she had been expecting given how busy Antioch has been during the past three years working toward accreditation. She speculated that the excitement is a result of the recent good news concerning the college’s candidacy for accreditation. She described the mood surrounding the community meeting on Tuesday, June 8, during which she was introduced to the community, as light and buoyant, and said she loves Antioch already. She feels excited to have begun working at Antioch at such a positive time in the college’s history.

*Jenn Wheeler is an Antioch College co-op student.

A current of artistic energy is circulating on the Antioch College campus these days with spontaneous artwork from students and experimental art from faculty and resident scholars.

Students took over the Herndon Gallery recently for a one-night guerilla art show and are now passing around the student body a single piece of art to be constantly reinterpreted much like the childhood game of Telephone.

Meanwhile, art faculty and resident scholars are erecting an edgy show in the Herndon Gallery that pushes the boundaries of their disciplines while it engages the audience in the present.

The exhibit, running now through Feb. 14, is called “Currencies,” and in addition to being current work, reflects an experiential theme coursing through the work of the Antioch art faculty.

“It’s very experiential work and we’re at a very experiential college,” explained Sara Black, assistant professor of visual arts and the first member of Antioch’s new art department. “We’re taking what would be considered static forms and pushing them into motion….It’s all time-based.”

For example, Black will disassemble and reconstruct her sculpture through the duration of the exhibit in an exploration of the hidden places of the human mind and the gap between the conscious and unconscious. The scaffolding is literally part of the sculpture, called “Reconstructing the Fold,” and Black will work on it during gallery hours in full view of visitors.

“The live performance of building is really important to me, it’s a kind of choreography as every gesture is deliberate,” Black said.

Raewyn Martyn, a visiting assistant professor of visual arts, is pushing her work into time as well. Her floor-to-ceiling abstract painting will reconfigure itself as Martyn peels back layers of paint throughout the course of the exhibit to create dissonance for the viewer.

“Where it goes from a two-dimensional surface to three dimensional, it is somewhere between an image and an object, and that’s an important part of people’s experience,” Martyn said.

An opening reception for the exhibit is 7 to 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 12. On Jan. 23 is “The Arts Presents,” an evening of presentations by the exhibitors on their arts practice, and a closing reception will be on Feb. 14.

As Antioch’s art faculty grew from one lone instructor to five in the last two years and the student body burgeoned to more than 200, an artistic vitality returned to campus, according to Herndon Gallery Creative Director Dennie Eagleson, who is also exhibiting new work. To Martyn, who was hired this fall, the Antioch community is still small enough for ideas and energy to spread quickly, while it is finally large enough for art to erupt naturally.

“It’s a critical mass in terms of community and as soon as you have a community of that size, art emerges,” Martyn said.

In her first college teaching position, Martyn, a former a high school art teacher in New Zealand, is excited about her students’ enthusiasm for art. She finds that the students she teaches in her painting and drawing classes are willing to take risks and are making political statements that are both subtle and complex.

New Associate Professor of Performance Gabrielle Civil is also impressed with her students, to whom she teaches performance and storytelling. Civil, originally from Detroit, Mich., said that Antioch students often arrive with a lot of talent and experience in music and theater and are interested in “self-actualization” by producing their own material, which Civil accommodates by teaching performance in a “more generative instead of interpretative way,” she said.

Civil’s installation, “Kinds of Performing Objects I’ve Been,” uses photography, paintings and keepsakes and live interaction to document some of the more than 40 original performance artworks she has created around the world in the last 13 years. As part of the exhibit, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 9, she will perform “Aide-Mémoire,” a new performance artwork that premiered in Zimbabwe last month.

Civil originally studied poetry, but felt that it was too rote and began exploring “how language moves,” ending up as a performance artist with a unique approach that is not theater or acting, but “creating an embodied artwork in space and time,” she said. Civil feels strongly that Antioch’s art faculty members demonstrate to students that they are working artists themselves. It’s a group Civil said she is honored to be a part of.

“We’re pretty awesome in the sense that we are interesting thinkers and makers, we’re fairly dynamic, interested in social questions and interested in working in multiple forms or playing with them,” Civil said. “We’re willing to make bold statements and try things, so it’s not a very staid group at all.”

As an example, Michael Casselli, Antioch’s instructor of media arts, is breaking from his typically abstract and conceptual installations in creating an emotionally-intense piece for the show. His installation is a reflection on caring for his mother as she was dying of lung cancer in 1996 at age 57 and is titled, “wishing we had talked, there’s so much left unsaid.” A loop of audio of Casselli talking to his mother will play, with his mother represented by a pot of miniature roses under a grow light and an empty armchair representing Casselli. Throughout the exhibit Casselli will continue to make and upload new recordings, and he will sometimes speak and read from the chair in person.

For Casselli, the installation is a tribute to his mother and an exploration of his conflicted feelings for her, which he did not express during her final days because of their somewhat strained relationship.

“It’s about how we can be more genuine with each other and embrace conflict,” Casselli said. “If you don’t deal with it, it will fester, and you will miss an opportunity.”

Charles Fairbanks, an assistant professor of media arts who was the second member of the arts faculty, will show two short films, The Men and Wrestling with my Father in a specially-built screening room in the gallery, along with photographs titled “Do you know the cause of your problems and suffering?” that he shot in rural Chiapas, Mexico.

Several former Antioch instructors, some of whom are now resident scholars, are also showing in the exhibit. This includes the gallery’s creative director Eagleson, a former Antioch photography professor, who will present a series of abstract photographs made from outdated Polaroid film of the bees she cares for on her land, along with a video she shot of the bees. Nevin Mercede, a former professor of painting and printmaking will show two triptychs from a series titled “Ovation,” which explores the interpretation of gestures. And additional events associated with the exhibition will showcase performances by Jill Becker, former dance professor and Louise Smith, a former theater professor and current dean of community life.

Black said the participation of former Antioch arts faculty reveals an artistic thread connecting the previous and the current incarnations of Antioch.

“They are foundational for our arts community,” Black said of the former faculty. “There is this intergenerational thing … along with the same thread that there is an invitation for participation by the viewer.”

Black will work on her piece in the gallery from 1 to 4 p.m. Jan. 9, 2 to 7 p.m. Jan. 23, and 1 to 4 p.m. Feb. 6. For more information, visit www.antiochcollege.org.