The Cleveland State University Art Gallery will present “Curious Terrain,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings exploring the idea of the “landscape” in art, opening Friday, January 18 and running through Saturday, March 8, 2008. The exhibition includes artists Randall Tiedman, Rob Robbins and JenMarie.

The exhibit is curated by Tim Knapp, assistant Art Gallery director. An Opening Reception will take place on Friday, January 18 from 5 – 7 p.m.  The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

The Art Gallery is located at the corner of Chester Ave. and East 24th Street. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m.   For more information, please contact the Art Gallery at 216.687.2103 or visit www.csuohio.edu/artgallery.

In Gallery C

Have we Forgotten . . . Still in Chains
January 18 to February 9, 2008
Cleveland State University Art Gallery and Sankofa Fine Arts Plus proudly present this multi-artist exhibition.
           
Sankofa has assembled five area artists to showcase works in a variety of media that depict the struggle and triumphs of the Black experience in America.  In addressing current events such as the Jena 6 protests, Hurricane Katrina and the Florida boot camp verdict, the artists’ works call into question  America’s social infrastructure and justice system that are often blamed for deconstructing black families and communities, and perpetuating self-destruction.
           
Participating artists are Jerome T. White (acrylic), Donald Black, Jr. (black and white photography), Kevin Knuckles (acrylic), internationally renowned sculptor Woodrow Nash and Anna Arnold (acrylics).
           
Sankofa Fine Art Plus is a nonprofit community arts organization dedicated to the education, preservation and distribution of fine ethnic art. For more information, visit www.sankofafineartplus.org.

Opening Reception: January 18, 5 – 7 p.m.

Mere Witness
February 11 to March 8, 2008

A collection of 27 black and white photographs recently gifted to Cleveland State University by the celebrated Cleveland photographer Michael S. Levy, depicting the African American faith community of Cleveland at worship.

Artist’s talk and reception Thursday, February 14 at Noon.
Co-sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs.

Artists’ Statements for Curious Terrain

Robert Robbins
The drawings are created more through erosion than anything else. The paper is painted with layers of tinted gesso and charcoal, and then sanded down in areas to reveal an image. This process is repeated over and over again until the light, air and humidity or arid dustiness dominates one’s sense of the place.

One doesn’t walk through these spaces, but drifts through them. The drawings are soft, atmospheric, and quiet. They slow you down. The space absorbs you and lets you find your own way. Nothing in the work asserts itself too strongly. The drawings quiet the senses, then peak one’s curiosity with subtle anomalies of color, space and form. As one spends time with the drawing one gets to know its curiosities, thereby developing their own unique relationship with the place.

These landscapes offer a unique sense of place which seems familiar, but new. A bead of light off in the distance is both a view that may have existed some 150 years ago and one that could be happening here in the moment. In this way the landscape acts as a vinculum between the past and the present, and it obscures any sense that the work just happened. This work often pits the viewer’s natural and aesthetic instinct against one another. The viewer is drawn into the landscape to find themselves left in the deep woods or the impending storm. It is then that one is lured to little bits of light in the distance, slow lyrical rhythms, and softly curving lines falling into perspective.

Hopefully, as the viewer leaves the work a change occurs within them. The agitation and anxiety they acquire from the frenetic world we live in today is quieted a bit. This work attempts to be an antidote to and a criticism of the condition of our day.

Robert Robbins received a MFA from Yale University in painting and printmaking after receiving his BFA from the Columbus College of Art & Design. Upon returning to Columbus where he now teaches at CCAD he began working mostly in charcoal, and assembling large landscapes out of smaller pieces of paper that are then glued together. He has twice been a MacDowell Fellow, he has been a resident of the Chateau Rochefort-En-Terre Artist residency program in Brittany, France, and has received several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. His work has been seen in galleries and museums across the country including the Butler Institute of American Art, The Chateua Museum in Rochefort-En Terre, France, The Springfield Museum of Art, Sears/Peyton New York, the Carnegie Center for the Visual Arts, The MacDowell Colony in Perterboro, New Hampshire, Moorehead University, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. His work is in various private and public collections including the Ohio State University, the Nord Family Foundation and the Columbus Metropolitan Library.

JenMarie
I have come to know my immersion for the melancholic thrives on my attachment to past experiences which evoke a feeling of despair. I am interested in the process of letting go of something once longed for and losing hope in something once believed in.  To have known something, but it is no longer present while thriving on this dual memory of having known something deeply and still have a memory of it being lost. Through this dialogue, the work is drawing upon perceptions of withdrawal, loss, and transience. I hope my work can evoke these sensations within the viewer when they reflect on their past times, even if we don’t share the same memory. By painting about this nostalgia for the past, I am extending these relationships so that they seem to somehow still exist. I am interested in an enigmatic space by creating a dark aura of ambiguity within a vast landscape, suggesting hopelessness through a somber palette. My paintings deal with issues related to the pragmatic burden of loss, often using the landscape as a metaphor for state of mind.   Maybe some things in our lives were not meant to stay.

JenMarie was born in 1984 in Cleveland. She is currently attending the Cleveland Institute of Art and will attain a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting in 2009. She has exhibited works at the Pop Shop Gallery, in Lakewood, Ohio, as well as the Reinberger Gallery and the Coffee House Gallery at CIA over the last four years. Her work deals with issues related to the pragmatic burden of loss, often using the landscape as a metaphor for state of mind. 

Randall Tiedman
An artist may have a specific idea as to the kind of painting he intends to make. However, the process usually leads to unforeseen dynamic possibilities in line and form impossible to imagine at the onset. I begin my paintings cold. These "inscapes, " as I call them, are visionary works made without reference materials or photos of any kind. They are inner visions composed entirely from imagination. Their source of inspiration comes from my love of classical music. I endeavor to maintain balance in the composition and to use color and texture to create a feeling of ever shifting musical tones and harmonies. This intuitive approach helps to avoid the boredom and labor involved if I were to copy from source material. The work is revealed to me in the creation.

Randall Tiedman is a highly intuitive self-taught artist. He was accepted for an advanced standing at the Cleveland Institute of Art after his tour of duty in Vietnam but decided to pursue art on his own. He did not publicly exhibit his art until 1982 when he made his gallery debut in the Proscenium 82 at the Beck Center in Lakewood, Ohio. The following year he was selected for inclusion in an exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art that was curated by Sherman Lee. Since that time, Tiedman has received more than a dozen awards in juried exhibitions including the Canton Museum of Art, the Trumbull Art Guild, the Jewish Community Center, the Beck Center, the Hallinan Religious Show, and the Fine Arts Association. In 1992, he won first place in the National Mid-Year Exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. His work has also been shown at Case Western Reserve University, BK Smith Gallery, Lakeland Community College, Cuyahoga Community College, In Town Club, Mansfield Art Center as well as numerous invitationals. His works are also in the collection of The Butler Museum of Art as well as private and corporate collections across the United States. In 2002 his works were also purchased by Circus de Solei. Tiedman is a former president and co-founder of the Artist Archives of the Western Reserve, an organization dedicated to preserving the work of Ohio artists.

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