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A group show of Jason Baldwin, Jean Gray Drake and Chris Hutson, February 20-March 16, 2007.
Jason Baldwin
Jason Baldwin (Evansville, Indiana) has been creating award-winning art
for over a decade. His collages and inventive self-portraits have been
shown in numerous galleries and museums nationwide.
"The box was clearly labeled "Jason's crap" and mom was grinning ear
to ear. She handed me the box and exclaimed, "My job is now complete."
This box carries the elements of my youth, which includes progress
reports, school assignments, random doodles or drawings, anything I
would have thrown away; mom had kept. It is a timeline full of
failures, successes, and an apparent obsession to drawing houses and
astronauts. I have held on to these things and only see them when it is
time to migrate, to load them in a truck and move on. From my clumsy
cursive writing to my B minus book report on Tom Sawyer I repeatedly
ask, why do I keep all this?
When beginning this series of paintings I wanted to use the contents of
this box as the background, a starting point from whiCh to go in a new
direction. I was drawn to their texture and color; the pages were old,
brittle, and worn. I was interested in how these items, however
mundane, have influenced my life. In doing so I have used images
accumulated in the short rime that I have lived in Evansville. Random
photos of parking signs, the hotel key card I incidentally took from
the Chicago Art Club Trip, airplane safety cards, and other ordinary
images I kept and began to juxtapose them with my past to form a bond.
Arrows giving directions, hand signals, text, random antennae and
telephone poles carry signals and clues for the viewer to migrate from
panel to panel, from image to image, giving hints to past experiences
while producing new ones to be regarded.
While producing this series these older images, these things, became
more than just evidence of past memories. By layering the old and new
imagery in a random order they became a visual link to the past that
undoubtedly shaped my present self. The correspondence between the
layered images create compositions not bound by the exactness of the
moment but by the illusion of the loss and reconfiguration of time.
Each painting portrays a moment in time suspended seperatly from the
past and the present, rather it exists in a state of ambiguity. This
allows the painting to take whatever shape, form, or childlike
narrative it chooses. This series is simply about the migration, or
changes, of my body and mind over the past thirty-four years. I am
evolving as a human, a man, and an artist"
Jean Gray Drake
Jean Gray Drake (Swainsboro, Georgia), is an accomplished artist, and
winner of the prestigious Abbott Cup Award for her achievements in the
arts. Her work in this exhibit consists of her more recent textile arts.
"In 2004, my work consisted of digital prints mounted on
deep, rounded edge cardboard panels with acrylic paint. It was
suggested to me that in slides, the pieces looks as though they were
made in sardine cans. In a way, they were sardine cans in a conceptual
sense; dense collections of disparate images forced together into
relatively small compositions.
The idea of sardine cans served as a
basis for what I am making now. I began by actually fixing images
inside sardine cans and pouring resin on top. The result was dark and
unreadable when left inside the tins. Once removed, the images gained a
depth and translucency that wasnít there when they were simply mounted
on top of panels. The layers of resin serve to forever embed the images
with one another. The transparency offers an opportunity to reveal or
hide various elements of an image. The scenes, objects, and imaginings
from my standard domestic days are able to appear in varying degrees of
clarity, reflecting the clarity with which they appear in my mind. The
resin also has a certain thickness to it, both when it is liquid, and
once it has set up. The implication of progress and motion occurs often
in my work, and this thickness serves to slow it.
The result is a depiction of what goes through my mind at the end of
every day. A murky collection of fragments floating together and
forming quirky relationships."
Chris Hutson
Chris Hutson (Peoria, Illinois) is
an expert printmaker whose most recent work is comprised of
semi-abstract images of surreal biomorphic images and settings, derived
from random or gestural information. Hutson is gifted in the arts of
intaglio, lithography, prismacolor, monotype, and illustrations done in
ball-point pen. His exemplary work has received national attention and
critical praise.
"My artwork has fairly recently changed course from a previous
narrative and symbolic figurative direction. My current work consists
of a series of drawings and prints. These images begin as gestural,
nonobjective shapes and evolve over the process of the drawing into
representational depictions of imaginary objects. These emergent
shapes, forms and textures are informed by and reflect my interest in
the life sciences and natural form. They suggest and are rooted in the
characteristics of such things as embryo, cloud, shell, wood, bone,
mushroom, muscle, viscera and stone. I hope to create interesting
shapes to be viewed like pinned insects, and to evoke the various
physicalities of life.
Drawing is as essential to my work as printmaking, and I have been
working often from initial powdered pigment drawings into a succession
of prismacolor and monotype layers. Whether in these media or intaglio
or lithography, the drawings are a playground for my interest in
markmaking, rendered form, and the energy of the drawn line."
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