Bannon Review of Don Kimes Plus Five, 2010
2010
Review: Don Kimes Plus Five
Kimes Plus Five
by Anthony Bannon
Guest reviewer
The silent presence of death stands inside the doors of the new Kellogg Hall, itself a transformation of more than a century of use, now used as galleries for the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution and renamed Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.
To celebrate the handsome new art center (3,600 square feet over two floors and five galleries), Don Kimes has installed 24 pictures of ruinous destruction. They add a somber witness to change and reflect both the bitter and the sweet of any change.
The images report on all that is left of Kimes creative output during the first decades of his career as an artist — just about the same years that he has served the Institution, first as director of the School of Art and now as Artistic Director of the school and galleries and their programs.
A wall of text installed in the Fowler-Kellogg gallery describes the situation in Kimes’ own words:
“…on June 22, 2003 my home and studio outside Washington, D.C., were destroyed by a flood, causing the loss of 25 years worth of drawing and many paintings, five filing cabinets containing nearly everything I have ever written, most of the slides documenting my life and work as a painter, more than a thousand photographs including not only a record of my work … Nature took everything back.”
Kimes set out to create a photographic record of the destroyed material — the drawings, the paintings and the photographic records of his artistic images. Of particular interest were the oxidized photographs — a forensic well known to conservationists who work to preserve the world’s film heritage.
Films made before the late 1940s—particularly those of the silent era—were of a nitrate base, and highly flammable. Short of burning up, the film slowly, relentlessly oxidizes of its own according, in spite of archives’ best practices. It is a colorful process. As films decompose, the imagery they depict congeals into an array of hues massed to echo the original compositions — similar to the different, though effectively similar, oxidation experienced with Kimes’ photos.
Runny yellows, smudgy blues, burnt umbers, gravelly purples gather around a central point in the image, often framed by a remnant of sprocket holes. Sometimes a trace of another paper pressed into the water-glued disaster forms an overlying geometry, sometimes odd biomorphics emerge, some alien cellular structure, even replete with cilia.
Barbara Rose, the critic and friend of the artist, wrote of his work: “The transformation of the material into the immaterial has always been the goal of ambitious painting.”
She was not being ironic. Kimes himself identifies in his gallery statement his interest in the results: “metaphoric works based on time, nature, memory, perceived loss and rebirth.” Subjects which are inescapable.
Kimes’ images have died to one form to live as another — just as has the very building in which they are installed. No question: Kimes’ invention of over painting upon the photographic records of the destroyed photographs creates fascinating pictures. But they become even more interesting when the process of their destruction and recovery is acknowledged and allowed to serve as a basis for metaphors of transformation, redemption, “perceived loss and rebirth.”
Still more interesting is the witness to a practice, a way of being in the world.
How Kimes has functioned as an artist and educator, both here and through his career at American University. This awareness is where the art finally resides — in the larger field of cultural production. This accounting of the wholeness of the events and people and places that create the totality that one knows and makes sense as “Don Kimes,” — all of what he stands and has stood for.
Thus, the installation of this doggedly determined, obsessive and wonderful work within a building that has stood with determination at the corner of Pratt and Ramble for 121 years offers about all the testimony that one might desire for persisting with value and
quality — as best one can make it — through life.
Kimes’ work embeds the memory of destruction and encodes the promise of discovery. It promises a new appreciation of the rich and layered sign language of painting, a privileged complex of mark-making. In its way, this installation is quite a bit of a sermon, and it even offers a benediction in the three new galleries upstairs where Kimes has selected art by five colleagues who studied at the School of Art at Chautauqua and now enjoy recognition in the field.
Kimes extension provides a lesson in the language of art — several of the basic elements, including material, scale, line, hue and form, are manifest in these former students’, now young professionals’, work.
Alison Hall now divides time between Roanoke, Va., and Todi, Italy, as a visiting professor of painting and drawing at Hollins University. With oil and pencil, Hall creates images that juxtapose thin and delicate vertical banding with massed and minimally rendered structural shapes — like Agnes Martin meeting Carl Andre — the minimally elegant against the minimally present. Her wistfully intelligent paintings — long horizontals — are quiet, meditative offerings on elemental notions.
Ani Hoover works as an artist in Buffalo, where her paintings are collected and on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center and other centers. She makes monumental runs of color focused by repeated circular shapes. Even when small, their compulsive repetitions present an ebullient grandeur of shape and hue.
Amber Scoon teaches at Syracuse University and now is studying aesthetic philosophy and communication theory in Europe, where she is working on her dissertation which will explore the relationships among the notions of theory, science, the market and art. She shows conceptually based on the act of wrapping something in wool — here four panels, warped out at the ends and woven, pulled, stitched and tangled in a magnificent expression of complexity – how from a base wrapping such an intricacy can perplex and delight. She then elaborates by casting a similar strategy in iron.
Dan Steinhilber lives in Washington, D.C., and is showing this summer at Mass MoCA and Socrates Park in New York. He offers a huge inflatable concoction of stitched together plastic bags comically emerging from a trashcan installed near the ceiling, filling out with air to overtake half the gallery, otherwise installed with his wall assembly of plastic bag mulch applied colorfully upon greenhouse sheeting: This is a bit like Jackson Pollock meeting Joe Zucker.
Finally, Albert Weaver, who works at Sikkma Jenkins Gallery in New York, creates small oil on panel paintings that line up blotted and toned hues — dark bandings of usually shaddowy adjacent colors, quietly elegant signs for what painting and thinking about painting can effect.
Kimes’ legacy at the end of the day resides with these
young professionals.
The exhibition continues through July 22.
Anthony Bannon is the seventh director of George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. He previously was the director
of Cultural Affairs at Buffalo State College and director of its Burchfield-Penney Art Center.
by Anthony Bannon
Guest reviewer
The silent presence of death stands inside the doors of the new Kellogg Hall, itself a transformation of more than a century of use, now used as galleries for the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution and renamed Fowler-Kellogg Art Center.
To celebrate the handsome new art center (3,600 square feet over two floors and five galleries), Don Kimes has installed 24 pictures of ruinous destruction. They add a somber witness to change and reflect both the bitter and the sweet of any change.
The images report on all that is left of Kimes creative output during the first decades of his career as an artist — just about the same years that he has served the Institution, first as director of the School of Art and now as Artistic Director of the school and galleries and their programs.
A wall of text installed in the Fowler-Kellogg gallery describes the situation in Kimes’ own words:
“…on June 22, 2003 my home and studio outside Washington, D.C., were destroyed by a flood, causing the loss of 25 years worth of drawing and many paintings, five filing cabinets containing nearly everything I have ever written, most of the slides documenting my life and work as a painter, more than a thousand photographs including not only a record of my work … Nature took everything back.”
Kimes set out to create a photographic record of the destroyed material — the drawings, the paintings and the photographic records of his artistic images. Of particular interest were the oxidized photographs — a forensic well known to conservationists who work to preserve the world’s film heritage.
Films made before the late 1940s—particularly those of the silent era—were of a nitrate base, and highly flammable. Short of burning up, the film slowly, relentlessly oxidizes of its own according, in spite of archives’ best practices. It is a colorful process. As films decompose, the imagery they depict congeals into an array of hues massed to echo the original compositions — similar to the different, though effectively similar, oxidation experienced with Kimes’ photos.
Runny yellows, smudgy blues, burnt umbers, gravelly purples gather around a central point in the image, often framed by a remnant of sprocket holes. Sometimes a trace of another paper pressed into the water-glued disaster forms an overlying geometry, sometimes odd biomorphics emerge, some alien cellular structure, even replete with cilia.
Barbara Rose, the critic and friend of the artist, wrote of his work: “The transformation of the material into the immaterial has always been the goal of ambitious painting.”
She was not being ironic. Kimes himself identifies in his gallery statement his interest in the results: “metaphoric works based on time, nature, memory, perceived loss and rebirth.” Subjects which are inescapable.
Kimes’ images have died to one form to live as another — just as has the very building in which they are installed. No question: Kimes’ invention of over painting upon the photographic records of the destroyed photographs creates fascinating pictures. But they become even more interesting when the process of their destruction and recovery is acknowledged and allowed to serve as a basis for metaphors of transformation, redemption, “perceived loss and rebirth.”
Still more interesting is the witness to a practice, a way of being in the world.
How Kimes has functioned as an artist and educator, both here and through his career at American University. This awareness is where the art finally resides — in the larger field of cultural production. This accounting of the wholeness of the events and people and places that create the totality that one knows and makes sense as “Don Kimes,” — all of what he stands and has stood for.
Thus, the installation of this doggedly determined, obsessive and wonderful work within a building that has stood with determination at the corner of Pratt and Ramble for 121 years offers about all the testimony that one might desire for persisting with value and
quality — as best one can make it — through life.
Kimes’ work embeds the memory of destruction and encodes the promise of discovery. It promises a new appreciation of the rich and layered sign language of painting, a privileged complex of mark-making. In its way, this installation is quite a bit of a sermon, and it even offers a benediction in the three new galleries upstairs where Kimes has selected art by five colleagues who studied at the School of Art at Chautauqua and now enjoy recognition in the field.
Kimes extension provides a lesson in the language of art — several of the basic elements, including material, scale, line, hue and form, are manifest in these former students’, now young professionals’, work.
Alison Hall now divides time between Roanoke, Va., and Todi, Italy, as a visiting professor of painting and drawing at Hollins University. With oil and pencil, Hall creates images that juxtapose thin and delicate vertical banding with massed and minimally rendered structural shapes — like Agnes Martin meeting Carl Andre — the minimally elegant against the minimally present. Her wistfully intelligent paintings — long horizontals — are quiet, meditative offerings on elemental notions.
Ani Hoover works as an artist in Buffalo, where her paintings are collected and on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center and other centers. She makes monumental runs of color focused by repeated circular shapes. Even when small, their compulsive repetitions present an ebullient grandeur of shape and hue.
Amber Scoon teaches at Syracuse University and now is studying aesthetic philosophy and communication theory in Europe, where she is working on her dissertation which will explore the relationships among the notions of theory, science, the market and art. She shows conceptually based on the act of wrapping something in wool — here four panels, warped out at the ends and woven, pulled, stitched and tangled in a magnificent expression of complexity – how from a base wrapping such an intricacy can perplex and delight. She then elaborates by casting a similar strategy in iron.
Dan Steinhilber lives in Washington, D.C., and is showing this summer at Mass MoCA and Socrates Park in New York. He offers a huge inflatable concoction of stitched together plastic bags comically emerging from a trashcan installed near the ceiling, filling out with air to overtake half the gallery, otherwise installed with his wall assembly of plastic bag mulch applied colorfully upon greenhouse sheeting: This is a bit like Jackson Pollock meeting Joe Zucker.
Finally, Albert Weaver, who works at Sikkma Jenkins Gallery in New York, creates small oil on panel paintings that line up blotted and toned hues — dark bandings of usually shaddowy adjacent colors, quietly elegant signs for what painting and thinking about painting can effect.
Kimes’ legacy at the end of the day resides with these
young professionals.
The exhibition continues through July 22.
Anthony Bannon is the seventh director of George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. He previously was the director
of Cultural Affairs at Buffalo State College and director of its Burchfield-Penney Art Center.
