FAVA Show Has Promise, but Comes Up Short 
BY NICK STILLMAN

Although the new exhibition at the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts gallery may not be the best show it has displayed this semester, it is the most coherent in terms of presentation and certainly the most spiritually searching. Circles, Cycles and Structures shows pieces from four Northeast Ohio artists, each focusing on the personal and expressive as a theme.
Martin Ball’s paintings are the first works the viewer encounters when entering the two-room gallery. While Ball’s media are traditional — paint on canvas and panel — he manages to create a convincing sense of movement and illusion on two-dimensional planes.

Each of his works are untitled, differentiated only by numbers the FAVA curator has placed adjacent to the paintings. The choice to leave the works untitled makes sense, since Ball seems to have created a personal style and these works are presumably members of a larger series. Three of the paintings are compositionally similar — multicolored circles and ellipses dancing over a white background. 

In each of these works, Ball has structured the composition so as to create a sense of movement. However, while Op artists from the 1960s like Bridget Riley tended to favor stark black and white colors for this static kinetic art, Ball uses loud gaudy colors, distracting the eye from the structure and composition of his works.

The best of Ball’s paintings is also the most inconspicuously displayed, hidden near the reception desk. The artist uses a reduced range of colors — mostly midnight blue with touches of gold and green — to create a dizzying sense of swirling motion that is best seen when standing at a distance. A close inspection reveals the human touch in the work, as several of the lines that appear exact from a distance are broken and imperfect.
In terms of process, Laurie Addis’ work is the most interesting of all the displayed artists. Several of Addis’ mosaic-like cloths are on display. To create her compositions, Addis designs the elements of color and pattern on a computer, then uses a computer-assisted loom to weave them, intentionally utilizing a flaw in the dye process that lends a streaky effect to the works.
Addis is best described as a colorist — her most successful works make use of several varieties of the same hue for nearly the entire piece. In “Blur” she uses purple and gold coloration, woven with spaces in between the elements of the color field to give the piece a fuzzy abstracted feeling.
Three large weavings by Addis are included in Circles, Cycles and Structures, two of which are well over 10 feet tall. All appear to have been woven more crisply than the smaller works on display and fail to convey the blurry warmth that make her smaller pieces work well.

Hildur Jonsson has three weavings on display, each including environmental imagery. The most breathtaking of her three works is also the largest. “Mountains” is a large, meticulously-executed weaving, approximately 6’x6’. The piece can be separated into a top and bottom half. The top is a shimmering yellow with a simplistic mountain included just above the dividing line, while the bottom is a vague bluish-green hue with a reflection of the same mountain. 
“Mountains” appears to be a work indebted to Rothko’s massive fuzzy abstract paintings. Although the weaving is composed of two basic hues, several areas are discolored, giving the piece a fuzzy, dreamy feeling similar to Rothko’s best paintings. A few areas of the piece don’t work — the divide between the two colors is too crisp and calls for a fuzzy integration to cohere with the work as a whole. Also, the muddy aqua color works poorly with the glistening yellow. Still, of all the displayed artists, Jonsson’s work has the most potential, especially if she increases the size to a massive scale.
Of all the works on display, the flamboyantly-colored abstract paintings by Craig Lucas register the least. Lucas’ work is based in movement — his paintings look like gumballs moving rapidly down the chute of a machine. The streaky paint application conveys motion successfully and the bright primary colors Lucas works with lend a carefree childishness to his works, but the unplanned look of his paintings feels too premeditated to work successfully.
Circles, Cycles and Structures is a spiritual and earthy show — a refreshing change from austere postmodernism. Although none of the artists can claim that every displayed piece of theirs succeeds, the exhibition offers hope for a vibrant and unique artistic culture in Northeast Ohio.