Opening
Saturday, November 24
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

While lecturing at Kent State University several years ago a questioner asked David Craven if he wasn’t just another post-modernist and Craven replied with a question of his own. “Do you think this work is about cynicism?” He also answered the question by stating that his work was about affection, by which he meant an admiration for prior and historic tropes. After this exchange he started using heart-shaped embossed paper towels as a ground in his painting.

David Craven’s work, outside of some consistent strains, has been somewhat “stylistically promiscuous” over the years, a kind of public experimentation. The devices he’s used have had multiple applications. In the 1980s, for example, there was a sense of absence in the black and white figurative work, where all the characters responded or reacted to something outside of the frame. In the work of the last 10 years he’s repeated its subtext. The subsurface organizing factor has been insistent but not benign. He’s also continued to unify painting and drawing to emphasized the work’s “in betweeness,” its floating off the wall into real space. To quote the artist from a review in Border Crossings in 2001: “let’s have an exercise that will not diminish drawing to a secondary or marginal activity and will not put painting on a plateau above that.”

David Craven believes that every painter wants to take one more shot at Pollack. He asks if Pollack is still relevant, or if he’s simply an icon, and approaches Pollack’s legacy from the point of view of the mechanical, that is, he sees his work as schematic, diagrammatic, wired into the world of the internet and therefore closely associated with contemporary issues.

Opening
In Gallery 2
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Artist Present
2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Jordan Broadworth writes:

Each mark, however spontaneous looking, is a result of the studied tracing of someone else’s mark. For the past few years I have been making gestural paintings by working from signatures. In my most recent work I have focused on signatures taken from fifteen years worth of art related correspondence. These signatures are fragmented, layered and reconfigured into composite drawings that are then used as templates for the final paintings. Both signatures and brushstrokes are unique, singular events, yet both are repeated in order to be recognizable as ‘signature marks’.

I have developed a method of painting that manipulates possibilities that occur during the paint’s drying process. The result is a reversal of the expected relationship between figure and ground. The painting’s gestural elements exist within rather than on the surface. This reversal opens the work to multiple readings. Gesture is commonly read as the painter’s assertion of presence. In my work gesture is made visible through a lack of paint rather than a pronouncement of paint and is read more as absence than presence.

The history of abstraction can be read as a dialogue between gesture and structure. I play one against the other. Bracing and interrupting the gestural component of these works are grids, horizontal brakes, and grids within grids that function as vents to both block and reveal. The larger grids facilitate changes in colour and tonal relationships. This underlying structure provides a framework to both support and complicate the gestural aspect of the work.