Wed 9/7-Sat 10/15
Sat 9/10 @ 11AM-7PM
Akron Soul Train provides opportunities for both veteran artists and those just breaking into the gallery scene to develop and display projects. And the two upcoming shows in its galleries demonstrate both pieces of what they do.
Strange Mechanisms, in the Burton D. Morgan Exhibition Space, features the work of residency artists Steven Mastroianni and Palli Davene Davis, both of whom have established reputations.
Cleveland-based Mastroianni was known for his portrait work but in the last several years he’s be working in more abstract styles and alternative processes. His current work is large-scale, multi-panel cyanotype prints created from assemblages of stencils, found objects and sketches on light-sensitized paper.
“This work draws inspiration from sources as varied as the James Webb Telescope, Harold’s Purple Crayon, 18th century opera arias, mechanical drawings, Byzantine icons, the geometry of pasta, and the subconscious,” he says in his artist statement. “Evocative of watery depths, imaginary galaxies, and mysterious maps, these luminous images create an immersive dimension with their own rules of scale and space. Like dreams, these objects seem familiar but weird; letters that don’t exist, mechanical forms floating in dark space or deep water, math problems that don’t add up, and overlapping patterns that follow their own logic of space and dimension.”
Palli is a sculptor from Oberlin, who works in wood and stone; she’s won the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award four times. “I am an object maker,” she says. “I need form. My hands need touch telling me how an object is becoming what it is to be. Stone is the found object, gleaned evidence of the planet’s alterations and endurance. Wood, victim to the hand work of man.”
In Akron Soul Train’s CapSoul Gallery, whose mission is to provide exhibition opportunities for emerging artists, Lauren Baker, a recent graduate of Kent State University and Cranbrool Academy of Art, will be showing a body of work called Glacial Uprooting of a Cotton Candy Dream.
“Existing in the space between familiarity and fantasy, the organic and the contrived, Glacial Uprooting of a Cotton Candy Dream focuses on ideas of the simulacra,” she says. “Rooted in playful imagination and contradiction, Glacial Uprooting of a Cotton Candy Dream strategically deviates from mere imitation. Recycled and highly synthetic materials falsify the natural, posing larger questions about the reciprocal relationship between human beings and the environment to which we inhabit.”
The opening reception for both shows is on Saturday September 10th @ 11am-7pm. It’s free and open to the public.