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Vignette: Steve Heine
Interdisciplinary is a word that has dominated art conversations for the past ten years or more. Aside from the more obvious mash up of mediums and disciplines, a more subtle result is the occasional work that conjures rich associations with other forms. Steve Heine creates commissioned architectural glass for homes and corporate clients, and in “Sonnet” has shifted from purely abstract forms to the use of letters to pull our attention into the composition. We demand that it be readable, we search for words among the endlessly overlapping letterforms, and the title leads us to expect nothing less than the words of William Shakespeare.
But Heine has a trickier premise for this work: “The ‘infinite monkey theorem’ states that a monkey striking keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly type out the complete works of William Shakespeare. With this new piece, I’m interested in the iteration and abstraction of randomly generated text to create a visual spell of line, light and shadow.”
Heina has work throughout the region, including the Marriott AC NuLu Hotel, Decca Restaurant, Jewish Hospital Medical Center South, Owensboro Health Regional Hospital, Sacred Heart Schools’ Ursuline Arts Center, KMAC and Faulkner Real Estate.
“I see my artwork as small-scale architecture—the process of making and an emphasis on materials are vital for me. My current work is primarily explorations via low-relief mixed media: I’m concerned with the thoughtful manipulation of surface and the modulation of light, color and shadow. I’m drawn to Minimalism and to spare yet potent built architecture [where I see it in the world]. I’m interested in creating work that is “quiet”, balanced and resolved, and distilled to its essential elements.”
“Cloud Panels” is a permanent installation at the Marriott AC NuLu Hotel on E. Market Street in Louisville, and was accomplished in collaboration with Louisville Visual Art. “Although I usually envision these panels in blues or violets, the color can be changed at any time via a small, hand-held, wireless remote control. The range of available colors is virtually unlimited. The hotel currently has ‘Honeycomb Clouds’ programmed to continually shift through a wide range of colors.”
Recent recognition includes:
•2018: "Beetle", a small hollow-core vessel cast several years ago from recycled light bulbs, was selected for "Celebrating American Craft—Southern Style", survey of contemporary craft across the American South, at Vanderbilt University.
•2018: A permanent installation at the Marriott AC NuLu Hotel was featured in LEO Weekly.
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Education: BS, Architecture, University of Kentucky
Website: craniumglass.squarespace.com
Instagram: instagram.com/craniumglass/
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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.
Vignette: Charlotte Pollock
"The mind includes more than intellect. It contains a history of what we learn through our feet. It grasps the world that meets the eye, the city we know through our legs, the places we know in our hearts, in our guts, in our memories, and in our imaginations. It includes the world we feel in our bones." - E. V. Walter
Charlotte Pollock doesn’t just paint what is in front of her. Some landscape painters may, in fact, be documentarians; capturing with accuracy the details of color and light they find before them, but for Pollock, the choice of subject has specific meaning for her: “This series is the result of my desire to understand the meaning of place and its relationship to self. I paint places that emotionally resonate within me as a way to map my biography. Light and color articulate mood and combine with my paint application to make an interior world accessible to the viewer.”
“A sense of place,” is an elusive phrase that can be parsed many ways, but when we speak of art, we are trying to describe how an individual point-of-view of one moment in time might attempt to communicate ineffable aspects of a location. The artist doesn’t create a picture-postcard; instead they share their own unique experience and understanding of a given place, which may be markedly different than the viewer’s experience. It may also strike unexpected chords of universal experience - anything is possible. The E.V. Walter quote that partly inspires these paintings perhaps says it best: “It includes the world we feel in our bones.”
For Pollock, these paintings occupy the realm of autobiography, but on her own terms. What you may glean about the artist from these pieces will not be a complete picture, but what is there to discover just might only be available through her work.
Pollock’s solo exhibition, Lore & Landscapes, opens June 2 at Art Sanctuary with a reception that evening, 5:30-9:30pm. Reception is FREE, family-friendly, and open to the public. Refreshments will be available for purchase.
She also has work in On the Waterfront and Beyond through July 29 at the Jane Morgan Gallery in Louisville.
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Age: 26
Education: BFA, Allen R. Hite Institute, University of Louisville
Website: http://www.charlotteannpollock.com
Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.
Vignette: Kent Krugh
“The tools of the trade, having faithfully imaged for decades, have themselves been imaged.” — Kent Krugh
Introspection, that ability for self-examination unique to humanity, is nothing new for an artist - It’s what lies at the core of many artists’ motivation. In these new images from photographer Kent Krugh, he goes Meta with the concept, deconstructing the camera and pondering the essential nature of his equipment instead of himself.
“This work uses x-rays to explore the microevolution of cameras and is a metaphor about the limits of evolution. While form and media may have changed, the camera is still a camera: a tool to create images by capturing photons of light. Today’s sophisticated digital cameras look and operate far differently than the first cameras of the nineteenth century, however the essentials have not changed. The photographer points a contraption with a lens towards the subject to encode its likeness on a storage medium, be it film or digital sensor. And this contraption has been manufactured in many wonderful and clever designs, the complexity usually hidden inside. While making these x-rays, I have been surprised and astonished by what I found inside the cameras. The lens, when imaged from the side, contains a multi-element train of perfectly shaped glass forms whose purpose is to collect and direct light towards the target.
Speciation is the process where new species can arise when populations are reproductively isolated. The can be due to random mutations and natural selection, or hybridization between closely related species. This process has been documented by many and is difficult to deny. Many insist that this is indeed evidence of evolution in action—given enough time this same process has given rise to all forms of life on earth. And many also insist that this process can indeed produce species and variation within species, but this is the limit of evolution—no one has ever seen a dog produce a non-dog. So, to close the loop—a camera is still a camera, though tremendous diversity exists.
In quite another sense, this project pays homage to the cameras I have owned, used, or handled. The tools of the trade, having faithfully imaged for decades, have themselves been imaged. The resulting images align with an inner desire to probe those unseen spaces and realms I sense exist, but do not observe with my eyes.”
Krugh’s work can be seen right now at the Cincinnati Art Galleries in the exhibit Return to Beauty: Asian Influence on Contemporary Landscape Art, March 3l April 22, and later this year at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, Colorado in Black & White, which will run July 7-August 19.
In 2016, he was a part of, Inside the Gate, Museo de Artes Plásticas Eduardo Sívori, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio
Age: 61
Education: MS, Radiological Sciences, University of Cincinnati, 1978 BA, Physics, Ohio Northern University, 1977
Gallery Representation: Gallery on Wade, Toronto, Ontario; Costello-Childs Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Gallery 708, Cincinnati, OH
Website: http://www.kentkrugh.com
Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.
Vignette: Hillary Cox
There has always been a strain of emotionalism in Modern Art. With the ubiquity of psychoanalysis in the 20th Century, painting became, for many, a direct conduit for expressing the dark and complex currents of human feelings. The plasticity of paint mediums seem ideally suited for cathartic – only one step away from the profoundly elemental aspect of finger painting.
Hillary Cox is a self-educated painter who understands that quality in her much of her own work: “My art is somewhat representative of my thoughts and how I feel, touching on aspects of mental illness, mixed with the aspect of darkness and horror. I believe it is a very interesting thing to explore and indulge in the shadows of your mind, but is also good to learn how to appreciate the light.”
“Although I make a large amount of dark art, I also like to make fan art and cute things sometimes when I am feeling a little brighter. I work mostly in the realms of macabre and illustrative art, dipping into influences from nature to anime. My preferred materials are gouache on canvas, or watercolor pencil and ink on paper. I also enjoy working on digital platforms such as Manga Studio Pro.”
Cox is a 2016 St. James Court Art Fair Scholarship Recipient.
Hometown: Louisville, Kentucky
Age: 23
Website: http://www.hillarycoxart.storenvy.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lilharibo/
Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.