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FAVA Exhibition Proves Flat and Unbalanced

by Nick Stillman

Instead of beginning February with a bang, Oberlin's first significant art exhibit of the month began with a dull thud courtesy of the traveling watercolor exhibition currently on display at the FAVA gallery on South Main Street.

The exhibition, entitled "OWS 2000," displays a single work from 40 different Ohio artists from the Ohio Watercolor Society, and has been touring Ohio galleries since October.

Most of the artists on display exhibit strong technical proficiency in manipulating the watercolor medium, a tricky undertaking, especially when attempting to convey realistic detail. While many of the artists excel in the realm of academic technicalities, the vast majority of the pieces lack the conceptual imagination that would separate their works from standard popular art that critic Clement Greenberg dubbed kitsch.

The first room one enters is devoted predominantly to romantic realism and idealistic Americana. Dale Harsh's A Walk on Frozen Water is a typical example. Harsh exhibits impressive skill in handling the medium - the watery application of paint runs together fluidly when viewed from a distance, but the picturesque wintry piece is reminiscent of something hanging in a ski lodge.

Pieces by Billie Richards and Florence Deringer represent the Americana-influenced facet of the exhibit. Richards' Red and White depicts a wooden duck resting on a gingham tablecloth, while Derringer's 69 Jag is a close-up of the imminently recognizable Jaguar emblem. Again, each piece is painted with care and proficiency, but lack imagination and seem stale, perfectly fitting for a calendar.

Not all the pieces in this first room are so deficient in conceptual innovation, although none wholly satisfy in terms of emotional intensity and compositional unity. Carol Prior makes an attempt at using non-representational color schemes to enhance the intensity of the work in Dinghy Patterns. The painting depicts six Skittle-colored dinghies floating next to a dock. The deep midnight blue water background disrupts the color balance of the composition and makes the dinghies seem to be floating in air.

The three pieces selected as the medal winners of the exhibition aren't especially distinguishable from the rest of the lot. Linda Weber Kiousis' Dis Taste, the silver medal winner, is the most compelling, primarily for its complexity and technical virtuosity. It depicts a busy still life of gloves and packaged plastic silverware with the sun shining through a grate, casting an elaborate shadow on the bottom two-thirds of the work.

Mercifully, the entrance into the second room includes one of the exhibition's best pieces, Barbara Zohn's Pilgrimage. Unfortunately, its unceremonious placement makes it one of the easiest works to pass over. Zohn, clearly indebted to East Asian stylings, elegantly renders blue and violet groups of color over a stark white background to create an atmosphere of wintry tranquility. Seven blurry figures trudge up a distant hill in a pilgrimage that feels more spiritual than actual.

The pieces displayed in the second room are, as a majority, more indebted to European modernism than American romanticism. Ellie Heingartner's Five is impressive on several levels. Heingartner displays strong control over the runny medium to create a piece that could easily pass for acrylic or oil-based. Five depicts urbane-looking characters painted in an almost pellucid manner. Within their bodies are several everyday objects. The fact that Heingartner seems to have included subtle panes over the whole of the piece suggests that the viewer is a voyeur observing transparent socialites reliant on objects to project a suitable image.

A variety of mixed media pieces in the second room are some of the exhibition's most exciting and fresh. Helen Needles' Jacob's Ladder, done in gouache, recalls the ecstatically vibrant Stuart Davis paintings from the 1950s. Bright forms of primary and secondary colors weave within checkerboard patterns to give the viewer a sensation of both excitement and mystification.

Looking at Paul St. Denis' The Shroud is almost like solving a riddle he constructs by combining the title with the specific work. The Shroud is a cool composition of icy blues, grays and blacks that at first glance seems little more than a postmodern mess. On closer inspection, one can discern the outline of a foreboding centrally placed figure with the silhouette of a bizarre beaked figure adjacent to it. Moreover, St. Denis also includes a small box score pasted over the painting. The Shroud seems to present a duality of the image of a man - at once coolly masculine and vaguely androgynous.

Disappointingly, the more engaging works in this room are coupled with more dull landscapes and a few blase flower paintings that look like those so ubiquitous in dentists' offices.

The placement of these picturesque pieces near more conceptual ones disrupts the flow of the show and detracts from the intensity that a few of the pieces in the second room convey. Still, the show is worth seeing for the control with which most of the exhibiting artists use watercolor, arguably the most difficult paint medium to handle. "OWS 2000" closes Feb. 25 and will be replaced by the "Six-State Photography 2001" exhibition March 11.

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T H E   O B E R L I N   R E V I E W

Copyright © 2001, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 129, Number 13, February 9, 2001

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