Artists Talk With LVA: May 26, 2022

This week Skylar Smith, Letitia Quesenberry, Gibbs Rounsavall, & Martin Benson talk about how their work communicates together in Not A Certainty But A Circumstance at Quappi Projects. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk With LVA.

Skylar Smith is an artist, curator, and educator. Her work deals with micro and macro perceptions of the natural world, and human-scale politics that influence perception.

Smith’s work has been exhibited regionally and internationally, including at Sanskriti Kendra Foundation, New Delhi, India; and at the Sanbarbh Residency, Partapur, India. She has completed Artist Residencies in India at Sanskriti Kendra and Sanbarbh Residency; and Colegio Trener, an elementary school in Lima, Peru. 

In 2020 Smith curated BallotBox, a contemporary art exhibition examining past and present voting rights with support from Kentucky Foundation for Women, Louisville Metro, Louisville Visual Art, and Great Meadows Foundation. BallotBox was on display in Louisville Metro Hall and at 21c Museum Louisville through March 2021. 

Letitia Quesenberry lives and works in Louisville Kentucky. Through the play of material, process, surface and technology, Quesenberry creates hypnotic objects that extend the boundaries of visual perception. Her bright amalgamations contain layers of vibratory and translucent elements: color correction film, tinted resin, mica dust, coal slag, sanded plexiglass, fluorescent paint, LEDs. She tempers the impulse to understand her work conclusively by focusing on visibility, bewilderment, and the desire to celebrate uncertainty.

Gibbs Rounsavall is a Louisville-based geometric abstract painter who was featured as one of 13 artists in Louisville Magazine’s, “13 Artists You Need to Know Now” issue. 

 His work has been included in academic presentations on subjects from abstract art to urban climate change. He has appeared in print, radio, and online interviews and feature articles. He has been invited as a guest artist to speak at events for arts organizations and academic settings. Most recently in 2017, he spoke on the subject of Serendipity for the Creative Mornings monthly lecture series titled, “How to Become a Serendipitous Learner.”

Martin L. Benson’s exploration of the healing power of art has its roots in personal experience. Born in Georgia and raised in Kentucky, Benson’s college education was temporarily interrupted when he became seriously ill and had to return home. “[That experience] opened up my world to my spirituality, which fostered a healthier relationship with myself and the world,” says Benson.

Benson’s hunger for greater understanding and meaning led him to the ancient science of Sacred Geometry –  the geometry used in the design of religious structures, sacred places, and religious art – and to the mathematical underpinnings of the cosmos. “Math’s universal language transcends linguistics, symbolism, and mythology, while at the same time remaining strongly connected to it,” says Benson. “Its inherent principles indicate the thumbprint of the creator.”

Not a Certainty But a Circumstance: April 29 - June 4
Letitia Quesenberry, Gibbs Rounsavall, Skylar Smith, & Martin Benson

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Feature: John Brooks

“An Abyss Of Thighs” by John Brooks, 37.5x33.5in, Oil on canvas, 2019, $3800

John Brooks has work all over Louisville right now. He is a part of the Imagined Monuments exhibit at Metro Hall, he is showing with Letitia Quesenberry at O Gallery, and some of his paintings from a just closed show at Moremen Gallery will remain on view in a space adjacent to the main gallery (he’ll be showing there again this summer). On top of all of that, his Quappi Projects exhibition initiative, in which he shows other artist’s work in his studio in the Portland neighborhood, is going strong in its second year. He is especially articulate about the foundations of his practice and the imagery he creates, so we will let his most recent Artist’s Statements speak for themselves:

“I consider myself foremost an oil painter. This new and developing body of work represents the first time I have integrated two other areas of my creative practice - collage making and poetry - with my painting practice. This solution evolved out of what was primarily a crisis of composition: after nearly a decade of almost exclusively creating expressive faces, my painting practice had reached a standstill. I did not see a way forward until it occurred to me to utilize my collages - during the making of which I do not suffer from compositional frustrations - to help facilitate composition in my painting. Through this change in method and approach, I feel unbounded. The addition of poetic text into my painting has also made my work more expansive and allows for a more comprehensive representation of my artistic conceptions. In the past, I have mostly resisted incorporating text into my visual work out of a fear that it could be too leading, but as a person who writes constantly in my head as I move throughout the day, the appeal of joining my poetry practice and my painting practice was undeniable. The way in which I have incorporated text into these paintings provides a narrow window into an idea or feeling but bewilders more than illuminates.”

“Fizz Of Hornets (Betty)” by John Brooks, 42x56in, Oil on canvas, 2018, $3800

“For the last decade, my work has explored themes of identity, memory, death, and place, and has been centered around questions of contemplation, the expression of emotion, the transformative power and the emotional resonance of particular experiences and what Max Beckmann described as “the deepest feeling about the mystery of being.” These paintings are a continuation of those notions. Something seems amiss in the zeitgeist; a mood of uncertainty and disquiet has seemingly overtaken the world. We find these moments before in history: in 1929’s Buchmandel, Stefan Zweig wrote: “Something had gone irrecoverably wrong; he was broken; the blood-red comet of the war had burst into the remote, calm atmosphere of his bookish world.” Are we living on the cusp of such an era or has it already begun? Collage is the perfect metaphorical representation of the disjointedness of contemporary life, of this exact moment in the twenty-first century. We are at once both so interconnected and so siloed; we are so fortunate and so starved; we are so inundated with knowledge and information that we ignore it in order to remain ignorant; our societies are unimaginably diverse and complex yet we fear the stranger, the other. “

“In most of these works, I have chosen to leave expanses of canvas unpainted. This is both an aesthetic choice but also a reference to the paintings’ relationship to poetry. Good poetry says the most it can with as few words as necessary; the impact of one correct word far outweighs the impact of several incorrect words. What a poet leaves out is as important as what he or she includes. Rich and luscious, oil paint has inherently excessive qualities; many colors are made from amalgams of precious minerals and metals, and others are made from earth pigments and charred animal bones. Throughout the process of making this series, I became entranced with the challenge of working with materials that dared me to be excessive while trying to employ the restraint of a poet’s eye. In that sense, these paintings are an exercise in spareness.“

“While these works contain some personal references, experiences and particular depictions of extant LBGTQIA+ life, their objective is ultimately not concerned with the specific; rather they are meant to evoke tantalizingly unreachable atmospheres and to engage with nebulous answers to queries about the search for and ambiguity of meaning and the powerful desire for connection and sense of belonging; they approach an attempt to make sense of the constant disparate noises, voices, and directives which contemporary life seems to exist amidst.”

“Stinson” by John Brooks, 8x10in, Digital photograph, 2018, $250 (edition of 5)

Brooks offers separate thoughts on his photographs:

“I consider myself foremost an oil painter, and it is in my painting where these fundamental themes are most  rigorously probed, but my creative practice encompasses work in a variety of other media including collage, sculpture, poetry, and photography. While painting mostly happens only in long, designated sessions, I live with and work with poetry and photography on a daily basis. I consider them to be essential to my work as an artist.”

”These works were taken with my iPhone 8 Plus and represent the first time I have exhibited photography. Locations include Louisville, Miami, the San Francisco Bay area, New York City, the Hamptons, Athens and other parts of Greece. Even as a writer, I think visually. I see in images; I look in frames. Before the proliferation of mobile phones and the vast improvements made in their camera lenses, I often carried around a Nikon 35mm camera, and later a Leica X1. In the last several years I have become inseparable from my iPhone - less so for internet access than for wanting to have the camera with me at all times. In case a bird comes; in case the light moves. It isn’t documentation of occurrences that I am compelled to capture, but rather what I feel, or see, or what I think I almost see. Permeated with an atmosphere of loss and longing, or what the Germans describe as Sehnsucht, these meditative and emotionally resonant images do not posture a sense of knowing, but rather disclose themselves as unknowing, even unknowable. Joy is present, too, and praise for the ephemeral delicateness of existence. In thinking about this joint exhibition with Letitia Quesenberry, she and I came to understand that what binds these two bodies of work together is the subtle tension between the promise of an attainable understanding and the elusiveness of the answer. There is never any arrival; understanding is just out of reach, tantalizingly beyond what is within grasp. These non-arrivals are, of course, what compels us to revisit works of art time and time again.”

“Statement of Other History” by John Brooks, 72x96in, Oil on canvas, $2200.00

Jim Zimmer / Often the Content is Impenetrable is at Quappi projects through March 3.

Non-Arrivals, with Letitia Quesenberry at O Art, 1000 Swan Street, runs through March 9.

“Statement of Other History” is a part of Imagined Monuments, an LVA exhibit for Metro Hall, 527 West Jefferson Street, runs through July 12.

Hometown: Frankfort, Kentucky
Education: BA in Political Science, Minor in English literature from College of Charleston, SC 2000; continuing education at Central St Martins, Hampstead School of Art, Camden Art Centre, London, England 2006-2009
Website: johnedwardbrooks.com
Instagram: narcissusandgoldmund

Scroll down for more images

“Wind Is Wild Now”by John Brooks, 42x56in, Oil on canvas, 2018, $3800

“Mother(Darrell)” by John Brooks, 8x10in, Digital photograph, 2018, $250 (edition of 5)

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

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