Current Exhibition

See a review by Kevin Mellema

Currents, Joseph Barbaccia’s aquarium-like installation, takes the viewer on a deep sea dive into a dazzling underworld filled with magical creatures. Six glittering, biomorphic sculptures are set in a dimly lit, dark-green gallery. Their names, Praise, Ridicule, Happiness, Suffering, Loss, and Destruction, refer to six of Buddhism’s eight worldly concerns. While traditional teaching advises one to avoid these concerns, Barbaccia’s shimmering surfaces and erotic shapes make the effort nearly impossible.

Each sculpture in Currents is constructed of carved polystyrene meticulously covered with thousands of colored sequins. Through a studio process that is as much contemplation as it is craft, Barbaccia relinquishes his own concerns about the sculptures’ outcome. The artist’s detachment may explain his success in combining incongruent ideas and wildly different life-forms into simplified, graceful figures. Loss is an iridescent, two-legged form reminiscent of a plump frog hunched over in sorrow. But a hint of pink on its feathery feet suggests that loss, although heartrending, makes space for something new to grow.
See Joseph Barbaccia talking about his art on YouTube.

Nationally recognized neon sculptor, Craig Kraft, departs from his iconic linear forms in a bold experimental project, Unintentional Drawings. Reducing his palette to shades of blue, Kraft expands the limits of neon by transferring random doodles into drawings made of light. Unintentional Drawing I, a free-standing eight-foot tall sculpture, features words like a commercial neon sign but it uses them in a haphazard way, as though the drawing was first conceived on the back of a napkin.

Unintentional Drawings II and III continue the random, scribbling theme but as smaller, wall-mounted works. Kraft further pushes the boundaries of his previous neon sculpture by revealing the inner workings of his new project. Viewers can peer into the backs of the light drawings to see how they are illuminated. In a Plexiglas box on the reverse side of Unintentional Drawing I Kraft encases the wires, tubes, and transformers carrying more than 240,000 volts of electricity needed to light the work. Walking around the sculpture, comparisons between its front and back are inevitable, suggesting that the back view with its masses of tangled wires and glass tubes could be the true "unintentional drawing."
See Craig Kraft on YouTube.

Borderland, the title of Judy Southerland’s exhibition of mixed-media prints, refers to both her intention and her process. "To make a picture, I start with the space in-between," she reveals. Southerland’s "in-between" is often an open field, a blue sky, or an empty wall. Into these nebulous places she combines human gestures with other images estranged by time and style. Gradually, like the artist’s laborious process of developing each screen-print, a narrative emerges. Although the individual stories behind each work are personal, to the viewer they appear like fairy tales and share the literary form’s advantage of being both universal and timeless.

Fairy tales depend on the tension created when characters must leave what they know to look for something new. In a contemporary twist on the ancient theme, Southerland’s figures, in their off-balanced spaces, reflect the artist’s belief that humankind is searching for a way to fit into a world that is unstable and unpredictable. "It’s like looking at the stars and down at your feet," she remarks.
See Judy Southerland on YouTube.