Space237 exhibits nostalgic work
Space 237’s spring exhibition, “Yesterday & Today” is an excellent and complicated show, from the first floor to the fourth. This review focuses on the work that opens the show. The first floor features art filtered through corporal sensations and organic sensibilities.
Dave Wisniewski’s two-panel “The Showdown” greets visitors as they enter the exhibition space. His large portraits of cowboys are just part of his unique sensibility. Beyond its Wild West motifs, Wisniewski’s paintings navigate challenging terrain. The painter (who is legally blind) creates oversized and charmingly cartoonish images partly in response to his compromised vision. The ambiguity of a diminished sense also show up in his portraits’ clouded and shadowy eyes. At what are they looking? Beyond the dozen or so excellent portraits on display—many textured with additives, like birdseed, sawdust and sand—Wisniewski presents a landscape of a big sky Main Street that rewards a close viewing.
It’s a short jump from the dusty towns of high noon showdowns to the ravages found in a bellicose installation from Melanie Harris. It’s been a while since Toledo has been graced with a product of the Melanie Harris studio. To see her darkly narrative packrat sensibilities on display in the miniature-epic “Let’s Kill: War, Year One” mixed-media installation is a rare treat. A tabletop series of seven buildings and five vehicles of the-guerre-type, “War, Year One” presents a collection of household ephemera, old-timey illustrations, and lots of tiny bulbs from holiday lights in the service of Harris’s vision. The buildings’ windows offer diorama showing tiny staircases to somewhere, mysterious pharmaceuticals, and dozens of other tiny compositions that add up to a charming piece that one could lose lots of time in.
As Wisniewski’s cowboy faces with shadowy eyes force us to come to terms with our ability to make sense of and narratives from the lapses in our own vision, so too do the paintings of Allison Rae Butkus. Her drawings of figures and structures obscured by fog offer the opportunity to reckon with the impact that memory and imagination have on our recollection of what we see. Two standouts from this series are the technical and bulbous “Waterslide in the Fog” and an ethereal andmysterious vision of a marching band amid mist, “Joy Complicated.”
The final artist on the first floor is Travis Sanderson’s, whose ceramics seem to be inspired by organic forms from Earth, as if they were rearranged with another planet’s gravitational rules, kind of like an early Star Trek landscape. The ceramic structures resemble alternately, an alien life form, a husk of a plant from another continent, or a component of an underwater coral reef. Sanderson’s ceramic vessels mix science fiction, air bubbles, moldy forms, plant anatomy, earthy discoloration, and a healthy dose of whimsy.
