MIDDLETOWN – The Middletown Art Center (MAC) opened its new show “Right in Front of Me” on Saturday October 12 at 6 p.m. The exhibit features the work of 20 artists working in a broad variety of media. One of the engaging elements of the MAC experience is how MAC director Lisa Kaplan and her curatorial team are able to fill the space with such varied and high-quality work while preserving a feeling of spaciousness for the viewer.
“Dream Dance” and “Falling (from Dream Dance)” by Darren Jekel two series of small oil and pastel paintings on board are vertically stacked figurative paintings of movement in red, flesh, black and white that seem like a critique of Robert Longo’s Men in Cities series from the 1980s. Falling in particular captures gestures redolent of “Men in Cities.” The Longo pieces were huge, mostly black and white of men and women in suits and dresses frozen in time as they fall and contort through space, while Jekel’s dancer is organic, lively and undressed. The series feels like Matisse and Basquiat were somehow merged and channeled through Jekel. The dancer crackles with energy. There is an undeniable life force in the small figures that was absent in the 80s work.
Alana Clearlake’s handmade felt pieces throughout the show are particularly effective. Hard Rain (2016) has descending white lines crashing into bodies of water creating smoke-like impacts surrounded by concentric circles radiating out from the impacting rain. There is a Japanese painterly sensibility evoked in some of the felt filigree, but with a wholly original vocabulary. The sinuous threads of the felt texture underscore the contrasting whites atop roiling blacks, grays and blues. We feel the beautiful violence of water on water.
Jaymie Hernandez de la Torre’s Out has the burned wooden shape of a woman’s torso suspended above burned points at what might have been knee joints. Asked about her piece, de la Torre responded, “There’s a hesitation for me sometimes in talking about my work because I love the conversation and the dialogue that the viewer has with it. …I want to put as many layers as possible into my work so that everyone who sees it, has a different way of connecting with it.”
She mentioned that the title Out is a contranym, a word with opposite meanings, “and so that sort of contradiction captures a lot of what I’m trying to talk about in my piece. You’re thinking about a fire, so you douse a fire. You want to put it out, right? And then there’s the way that we come out in our life, that we bring ourselves out into the world. And I feel like those two contradictions are what I’m playing with. How do we do both? Maybe burn away what is no longer needed? And …not put out the fire that is needed.”
De la Torre indicates a portion of the torso that appears to be tree bark with green lichen unlike the rest of the charcoaled sculpture. “…There’s this one part that’s not burnt, so it’s easy to say that’s the part that was salvaged, or the part that’s still alive, or … which part really is alive? What is the source of life for us and becoming?”
The MAC press release states that “This evocative group show brings together a diverse group of local artists, both familiar and new, in a compelling and timely art exhibit that delves into pressing contemporary issues at personal, community, and global levels.”
Free to the public, Right in Front of Me will be on view through Jan 6, Thursday – Monday, 10:30 to 5 p.m., or by appointment.
The MAC is located at 21456 State Hwy 175 at the junction of Hwy 29 in Middletown. To find out more about MAC’s programs, events, and ways to support their efforts to weave the arts and culture into the fabric of life in Lake County, visit middletownartcenter.org or call 707-809-8118
