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Joel Sheesley;
Wood Street Gallery & Sculpture Garden Joel Sheesley Multispacial; multifocal; paradimensional... and a manifold delight: Joel Sheesley; Deborah Maris Lader; and Joyce Owens at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden, 1239 North Wood Street, Chicago. Philosopher Immanuel Kant observed that we cannot know reality. We can only know what our senses tell us -- what we taste and touch, feel, smell, and see -- Kant based a philosophy on this. The 'thing in its very selfness,' "ding an sich," Kant said, eludes us. The philosopher even postulated that we are 'hard-wired' to see the world in a certain way, and any deviation leads to further illusionism. Neurologist, Edward Restak added that "...we don't simply detect patterns of light and dark; we discern objects, which, if we are not careful, may turn out to be strikingly different from the object that is actually there." (The Brain: Bantam: 1984) And, at this point, the artist enters... ...that is, artist ... Joel Sheesley, who is currently showing thirteen oils on canvas at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden. The exhibition is entitled "More Than Enough." It is. Two major aspects of Joel Sheesley's oils immediately strike the visitor: the artist's command of light; and a viewer's own implied space in the viewing. In the works at the Wood Street Gallery, Joel Sheesley skillfully employs light, perspective and composition to explore the nature of observer and observed -- observation -- the essence of art. Sheesley commands a painting technique akin to such modern realists as Alfred Leslie or Jack Beal, but draws his content from suburban life, and then proceeds to play with insight and subtle wit on the process of seeing both the real within the art and art within the real. And within the images, the artist's hand at times leaves clues and keys, a wink and a nod to the viewer. The thematic paintings are excellent in themselves, as More Than Enough (60"x38") and Tramp (50"x70") confirm. More Than Enough, a self-portrait amid lush foliage, points to the artist's search for less than conventional effect: his implied perspective in the upper canvas seems to deliver a bird's-eye view, but this is accelerated and compressed as the eye scans down toward the base. The shifting of expected convention adds a sense of motion, a telescoping dynamic to what could otherwise be a static portrait. Here, the pose and expression of the model build tension with the gentle alterations to the viewing plane: it is a serene subject in a visually active portrayal. More Than Enough seems to echo the reply of the Zen master, who when asked by his acolyte for enlightenment into the great mysteries, replied: "Look all about you. I have hidden nothing." And it is more than enough.
Sheesley's contemporary genre painting such as Tramp (50"x70") offers momentary suburban idylls. In Tramp, a backyard trampoline is being examined, and judging by the general hues of the overcast sky, and the state of the nearby trees, the season may just as well be late autumn as earliest spring. It is a highly effective mood piece and showcases Sheesley's style: clean but realistic color, crisp contours, and well-balanced composition. In such oils, Joel Sheesley displays satisfying skill in what is indeed a long history of naturalistic illusion: technique in the service of mood. Again, life is more than enough: a raison d'etre for life, and the art it engenders. Sheesley expands upon his recent canvases, and this is exemplified by his development of the title canvas of "More Than Enough." In this exhibition, More Than Enough makes a second appearance: as an inverted painting among the furnishings of At Home (50"x40"). The central figure in At Home, a woman on the telephone, appears oblivious to both the inverted portrait which seemingly performs behind her, as well as to the artist's own reflection in the mirror on the coffee table alongside her. And in At Home, the painted representation of More Than Enough mimics the pose of a young woman who 'head-stands' within Second Sighting. In Sheesley's work, models and paintings of models interchange behavior: there is a perceptual equation. It is one of many in Sheesley's works. Art critics and historians may play with levels of interpretation, but Sheesley goes them one better and plays with the interpretation of visual levels. In many canvases, only closer inspection reveals whether an image represents a window view or a doppelganger painting. M.C. Escher and Rene Magritte were both born in 1898. Escher, at first disregarded in the fine art world, drew heavily upon math and perceptual biology, and was overt and systematic in his visual disparities; Magritte, more 'painterly' and humanistic, and with a better publicity conduit, was sooner accepted in his image play, but remains still obvious. Sheesley finds roots in both realism, perceptualism, and the surreal; he employs their means to great effect, without flaunting the mechanics. Works such as Interior with Singer (1999, 55"x42") and Prayer in Suburbia (1999, 51"x60") offer implications without conclusions.
Part of what makes the current work so successful is Sheesley's use of varied scales of light -- tone and hue -- and, in such as Interior with Juggler (1999, 60"x45"), conspicuous angles of perspective. In Prayer in Suburbia, several canvases are set about the living room in which a family lights candles. At the exhibition opening, one visitor asked about the overcast murkiness in a doppelganger painting (and the original). But many of Sheesley's oils are sunny, bright. What the viewer caught, unawares and directly, is Sheesley's sensitivity to the contrast between outdoor and indoor lighting. Georges de la Tour, that foremost master of light and shadow, concentrated on interior light. Sheesley displays a kindred skill, but focuses upon the phenomenon by which we most often experience bright indoor lighting on overcast days, or darkened rooms in sun-swept seasons. But the artist mediates his light so consistently as to reveal it is not serendipity, but instinct and intent. The central doppelganger painting in Prayer in Suburbia seems natural, but particularly catches the eye because its general tone is still ever slightly too clear and light to comply with the room's ambience. All of the included canvases in Prayer in Suburbia, if merely naturalistic, would be darker, perhaps even too dim to draw specific focus. The final impact is eerie, disorienting, plausible and seems like dimensional portals among the painted and the enveloped viewer. The spirit of Magritte is whiffed among the canvases in a hall of cross-framed mirrors. And philosophers have observed it, as when M. Merleau-Ponty declared: "Each of the levels in which we successively live makes its appearance when we cast anchor in some 'setting' which is offered to us.... This setting itself is spatially particularized only for a previously given level. Thus each of the whole succession of our experiences, including the first, passes on an already acquired spatiality. ... Yet this cannot be a certain world, a certain spectacle, since we have put ourselves at the origin of all of them." Joel Sheesley's more perceptualist paintings play with the viewer's sense of orientation, and not just with doppelganger image, or light. Interior with Juggler utilizes sharp perspectives -- approaching the oil head-on, one starts with an initial impression of entering the room... the image... from a side. And it is Interior with Juggler which prompts an observation: both the artist and Gallery owner, Mary K. O'Shaughnessy, decided to hang Sheesley's canvases lower than the conventional height, an excellent decision. It does indeed draw the viewer further into the painting: "one steps into the world of the image." Richard M. Restak in (The Brain (Bantam Books: 1984) summarized: "A correct explanation for vision, therefore, must provide for the symbolic aspects of our visual perceptions. In a phrase, there must exist symbols within our heads capable of representing the things we see, symbols that are as unlike the things they represent as the color red is from the implied command that we bring our car to an immediate stop. Vision -- in fact, perception in general -- relies upon converting objects in the environment into symbolic representations encoded within the activity patterns of neurons within our brains."Joel Sheesley employs his own thematic pieces in further perceptual elaborations. The initial impetus may have been serendipity, but inspiration favors the prepared and open mind. Sheesley's art plays with what we can know of the world -- what our vision interprets, correctfully or in illusion. Sheesley's thematic genre works are deeply gratifying; his use of them in the perceptual work, subtle and provoking. In Sheesley's Interior with Singer (55"x42"), the laundry-folder cohabits with his Girl with Cockatiels (59"x42") and Singer on the Journey (66"x44"); Tramp reemerges in Interior with Tramp (50"x41"). "More Than Enough" provides a rare opportunity to view a number of the paintings, and their paintings, together. Each canvas works by itself, i.e. one doesn't need to know the mirrored realities reflect actual canvases, but, here it lends an added enjoyment to "More Than Enough." And, as Restak concluded in his book: It suffices to realize, upon close inspection, what is afoot here. ...we arrive at a theory that is very similar to the principles of Gestalt psychology: "The perceptual whole is more than the sum of its parts." In other words, in visual perception parts are not treated as separate entities; rather, they interact to produce a gestalt."
Vasari, in Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters... (1550) said illusionist art ended with Michelangelo; Hegel repeated the charge in 1828; and philosopher A.C. Danto today concurs: ended, but does not stop... as if to bring a former end (and current means) to high competence implies there can be no further ends in art. In an age of Gestalt psychology and neurophysiology and transcendent math, Sheesley demonstrates that the artist intuitively renews and side-steps attempts to straight-jacket art. Without the soundbits, photo-opts, PR and market hype of whatever "-isms" are in fashion, Sheesley's art demonstrates art is an irrepressible human activity and we still have much to explore. Deborah Maris Lader Deborah Maris Lader is a Chicago artist and a founder of the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative. Her current works at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden concentrate on the images of relations -- in her "Tool Series," relations with objects of labor; and, in the current manipulated emulsions, with other human beings. Lader's work has been noted in ArtScope.net (Dec. 4, 1999), but the Wood Street Gallery offers a range of new pieces. Embrace (Waterless Lithography, manipulated Polariod transfer, 23"x35") is representative of the new work. In much of the work, multiple images are juxtaposed toward a single theme in a process which compels the viewer to complete the picture. Among Lader's manipulated and layered Polaroid transfers on paper, Alike but Different (Manipulated Polaroid emulsion transfer on Brick Tile, 3.75"x3.5") is particularly striking.
Joyce Owen "Tell me, when you are alone with Max, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?" Oscar Wilde made the wisecrack about English artist/writer, Max Beerbohm, and poet W.H. Auden quoted it in his review of Max by Lord David Cecil (New Yorker: Oct. 23,1965). In his review, Auden records the concern of numerous writers about a personal 'mask,' or persona, noting that public masks may deceive, or shore up identity; Auden further notes: "Young people... often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them -- the one, in fact, which is not a mask." And Auden cites the power of masks in Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," where "in order to win the heart of a nice girl, a rake assumes a mask of virtue, but ends up by becoming in reality what at first he had only pretended to be." (Forewords and Afterwords, Vintage: 1973). The paintings of Joyce Owens center upon masks to explore roles and projections of self, the perceptions of others, expectations and aspirations. In her oils, Joyce Owens ranges from deeply individual psychology to the cultural and societal ointments and armaments people assume and assimilate. Much of Auden's wisdom finds striking visual realization in Owens's work now at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Chicago. Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (W.W. Norton: 1992) chronicles how the cult of personal life and individuality drove out public appearance as theater, complete with its play and the roles of societal marking, both by self and others. Sennett, in analyzing modern life, cited a literary example: "...the images of theatrum mundi are pictures of the art people exercise in ordinary life. ... For a writer like Balzac, these roles are the various necessary masks people wear in different situations. Man as a creature of masks perfectly suits Balzac's belief, as it has other writers who have perceived human affairs as some species of comedie, that neither human nature nor some single definition of morality can ever firmly be deduced from behavior." Joyce Owens's paintings indicate that what we perceive at first often differs from the reality. Each work is an exercise toward the silent dialogue between person and persona. No doubt, psychologists and socioIogists, as well as philosophers will differ in their afterthoughts. It remains only to heed W.H. Auden's qualification: "Lastly, among artists of all kinds... it is not uncommon for their artistic persona to express but a limited area of their total experience." (Forewords and Afterwords, Vintage: 1973). All three artists at the current showing explore our perceptions of how we see the world and ourselves: our phenomenological spaces, the objects we assign to our lives, our masks within those lives. The current exhibition at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Chicago is a significant exploration of what we see and what we know, or expect to be there. This current show at the Wood Street Gallery and Sculpture Garden exemplifies a very vital power of art, one, very much alive in this year 2000, and best summarized by the lines of the poet: We shall cease from exploration --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. |
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