Tripletta
(a show comprised of miniature works of art)
FARRON ALLEN
Statement
Missing – A death in the family generated this series of drawings. I was left with boxes of old photographs. Hundreds of unidentifiable faces stared out through time. I was touched by the photos of children. The photos get incorporated into the art, sometimes apparent, buried, or missing in the work.
Biography
Farron Allen grew up in the mountains of southern West Virginia, the product of three generations of coalminers. He currently teaches Sculpture Foundry at the University of Cincinnati.
BARRY ANDERSEN
Statement
A cell phone camera and an app or two are wonderful companions. They revive the poetics of memory and place.
Biography
BA from California State University, MFA from the University of Florida. Influenced by the teaching of Ralph Fertig, Robert Von Sternberg, Ed Sievers, Doug Prince, Todd Walker and Jerry Uelsmann. Continued influence and inspiration from a whole host of pictures and life’s wonders.
JOELL ANGEL-CHUMBLEY
Statement
“Everything in Nature forms one indivisible fabric woven of living interchange. An all-encompassing world of life comes into being from the interplay of cosmic peripheral forces, meteorological forces, forces of the elements, the earth, and all its living organisms.”
— Water: The Element of Life
Nature and her elements continue to be a leading force in my work. This body of work builds on the simple elements and complex layers found in nature. These mixed media construction are presented as metaphors of the intersected layers of living interchange, connective patterns of the universe and marked paths of life’s journey.
Biography
Joell received a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Cincinnati, School of Art, area of Fibers and 3D studies in 2000; and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, with a concentration in Fiber/Fabric design from the College of Mount St. Joseph in 1992. Her work spans the disciplines of visual art, print and environmental graphic design and public art. Her multi-disciplinary experience has awarded her local, regional and national mention in various publications and selected exhibitions. Recent works have exhibited both regionally and nationally.
Joell has traveled throughout Europe and the United States documenting the natural landscape, and historical /cultural characteristics of destinations she has visited. Having this background knowledge brings concrete layers of meaning to her work and provides her with a sense of connection to the subject.
CAROLA BELL
Statement
SAND Prints
Sand, when viewed up close in a streambed or a tide pool, is more than the beach as a whole. The grains are pushed and pulled by swirls of water, carried back and forth by the tide. Nor are the grains neutral, bland. They have color, either inherently or by reflecting the environment around them. These prints try to capture that spirit.
Biography
Carola Bell is a printmaker living in Northern Kentucky. She has traveled extensively and finds inspiration from her travels, literature, as well as by randomly encountered patterns in nature and man made objects. Carola’s work often has a mystical quality and is made primarily through experimentation with monotype printmaking techniques
MICHELLE BLADES
Statement
Fascinated by constructing play spaces for her dolls and toys from a very young age, Michelle now seeks to create diminutive imagined realms with which a viewer will interact. More specifically, she uses the figure in these spaces as a foundation for her exploration of that sense of wonder. By making her works figurative, and thus relatable, she grants herself the freedom to wander about the hauntingly playful ends of her imagination and tell stories that might otherwise seem too fantastical to convey. She works mostly in 3D form, but has created a few digital shorts and more recently began working in stop motion animation.
Biography
After graduating from university if Cincinnati with a degree in Fine Art, Michelle worked for several years in the corporate world, collating documents and collecting stories. Since enjoying a lay-off due to the economic downturn three years ago, she' s been pursuing art-making on a full-time basis. Currently, Michelle resides in Cincinnati with her husband, Brent Naugthon and their two dogs, Chimp and Baboon.
LAURIE BLAES
Statement
Exploring relationships is the driving force behind my work. I am investigating the interplay between the materials and my childhood memories. My grandmother, great uncles, and aunts have greatly influenced my work by giving me an appreciation for the simple pleasures of working and being creative. Many of my sculptures contain an antique object that bears the marks or stains of its use, which sparks my fascination with items used in everyday life.
Biography
Laurie Blaes earned her Master of Fine Art from the University of Cincinnati in 1995. She currently lives in St. Louis, MO exhibits her sculptures in regional and national exhibitions. Laurie’s work continues to investigate the relationship of found antique objects and fabricated elements.
DAVID BROOME
Statement
An artist’s statement evolves and changes with the artist. I have studied art, taught art, and sold my art as a professional. Now I’m back to where I began - making art for the joy of making art. The one aspect that has never changed is the need to build and create sculpture. What has changed is a wealth of experience with materials and design. The joy is in the search for the successful application of this knowledge on new and challenging projects. As a human being, I know that life inevitably provides inspiration and challenges. As an artist, I observe and use the small inspirations as well as the larger, more challenging inspirations to give form to my work.
Biography
David Broome is a multimedia sculptor. He has a MAT from University of Louisville and taught elementary school art with the Jefferson County Public School System in Louisville from 1990-1996. He has worked in the private sector as a professional sculptor and contractor. While staying within a firm foundation of form and design, his work finds new methods, techniques and materials to express 3D ideas.
JEFF CASTO
Statement
The three works shown here, are not entirely indicative of my current body of work. They are decidedly more formal and abstract in their presentation. Environmental concerns are a key message in my art, mainly humankind’s destructive attitude towards the natural world and it’s constant effort to reshape it to our specifications. I incorporate found objects in my works to suggest the discarded, “throw-away” society that we exist in. The discovered leftovers become altered, repurposed. The three dimensional aspects of my mixed media works are designed for an uneasy tension between the domain of the actual and the two dimensional realm of artifice. Tactile textures and vivid colors are evident to allow for a theatrical experience.
Biography
Jeff Casto has been producing art for over 30 years. He has a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati (1987) and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati (1989). His work fuses painting with sculpture; found objects with fantastical imagery. It often deals with issues both personal and socio-political, notably environmental concerns. Casto’s mixed media works provide a tension filled arena that mirrors his narratives. Jeff has exhibited throughout the Midwest and in New York. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Grants from the City of Cincinnati. His work is in public and private collections
HEATHER CHANDLER
Statement
A lover of nature, humans and otherwise, Heather's current work features creatures communicating in an intimate way with the viewer to deliver the message: you are an animal.
Hair stylist by day artist at night she absorbs the interactions of the people she meets. These observations along with being a lover of trend and modern themes influence the direction and content of her work. The images are unique, playful and use bold color combinations, which have become her signature style. Although whimsical at first blush, her creatures are edgy, sexy, funny and dark.
Biography
Heather Chandler is a mixed media artist and photographer living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is proud to be involved with up and coming artists in the community and in the revival of the city's downtown gallery area.
CEDRIC COX
Statement
My art conveys overlapping aesthetic concerns, evoking ideas ranging from early modernism to contemporary postmodernism. My paintings and drawings are intended to build bridges between the past, present and future, both amongst individuals and all groups of people, through stylistic ideas and expressions. Using positivism as my basic humanistic approach to art and life, and the interstices in between, I communicate through my artwork, as Rauschenberg proposed with his primary aesthetic/cultural challenges.
Biography
After receiving his BFA in Painting in 1999, Cox began to exhibit locally and regionally.
He has had solo exhibits at the Contemporary Arts Center, the Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, PAC Gallery, and the Aronoff Center for the Arts. In support of his efforts in the visual arts and art education communities, the City of Cincinnati awarded Cox the Individual Artist Grant in 2009. He received a Congressional Award in 2010.
His art has been featured in magazines, on television, and in the college textbook Drawing: Space, Form and Expression. In addition to his work being in corporate collections, Cox executed two large-scale public murals for the city of Cincinnati. He continues to exhibit nationally and in July of 2013 Cox had his first solo exhibition at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
LESLIE DALY
Statement
Based on organic, natural textures, the Cellular Series explores the sometimes intermittent shapes and forms found in nature.
Biography
Leslie Daly has been experimenting with curious things all her life. This curiosity has enabled her to expand her creative boundaries by manipulating steel, glass and mixed media elements into creating abstract organic forms.
CHRISTOPHER DANIEL
Statement
Being a blacksmith I primarily work in steel, but for this exhibition I chose to go back to my Boy Scout roots and break out the old wood burner. The images on these burnings are recreations of designs I created for multiple gate and railing projects. The wood I chose for the burnings, poplar and cherry, have a soft quality, and burn well, allowing the images to remain crisp. Each piece is also sealed with floor wax, which enhances the richness of the images and protects them from aging.
Biography
Christopher S. Daniel is a sculptor working and living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Christopher owns and operates Blue Hell Studio, a steel fabrication and blacksmithing business, creating one of a kind, unique ornamental and functional steel work. Blue Hell Studio is the only blacksmith teaching facility in Cincinnati. Christopher received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from West Virginia University in 1994, and received his Master of Fine Arts in 1997 from the University of Cincinnati’s School of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.
His career over the last 16 years has included working for the Cincinnati Art Museum as the Lead Art Handler of the Decorative Arts De-installation Project, teaching as an Adjunct Professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, working as a freelance Toy Sculptor and illustrator and for two years he served as the Executive Director of The Mockbee, Inc., Ohio’s largest not for profit gallery.
SHARMON DAVIDSON
Statement
My work originates from a core belief in the unity and sacred nature of the earth, and of everything in our universe. Formed from the same basic elements, we are all interconnected in the most intricate ways, both visible and invisible. Using a vocabulary of personal symbols, I seek to express this idea by building up layers of transparent color to create the final image. This process feels most natural, yielding a brilliance and luminosity that satisfy me. I'm constantly searching for more effective ways of revealing this mystery.
Biography
Sharmon Davidson* began her artistic career as a graphic designer, and then chose to put her career on hold, devoting several years to raising her children. During this time, she earned a BFA in Drawing and a BA in Art Education from Northern Kentucky University. Exhibiting professionally since 1994, she has won awards in both regional and national juried exhibitions. She is currently represented by the Promenade Gallery in Berea, Kentucky, and is a member of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen.
LILIANA DUQUE PIÑEIRO
Statement
The scale of this project was an invitation to look into the minuscule and the everyday juxtapositions of events. I guess art is really about where we are at a given point in life; I am inundated with the whimsical, nonsensical, fantasy world of childhood that ever so gently and not so gently tangles itself with the reality of my being.
Biography
Liliana Duque Piñeiro is a sculptor and set designer from Colombia. She holds MFAs in both Sculpture and Set Design from the University of Cincinnati. In 2007 her co-design for Ariodante participated in the Prague Quadriennale USA exhibition. In 2005 her set design for The Life of Galileo won the Peggy Ezekiels Award in Design and Technical Achievement - USITT Ohio Region. In 2001 her work won the Outstanding Student Achievement award from the International Sculpture Center.
ANA ENGLAND
Statement
In this work, I am exploring the phenomenon of light, particularly how its weightless abstraction produces the perception of form.
Biography
Ana England, Professor of Art at Northern Kentucky University, holds an MFA from San Jose State University. Her numerous exhibitions include shows at Miami University Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum and Texas Christian University. Her work is widely reviewed and she has completed commissions for Fidelity Investments, the Cincinnati Art Museum, USA Funds and other organizations and individuals.
STUART FINK
Statement
These drawings are a playful exploration that stemmed from an earlier body of work.
Biography
Stuart Fink received his MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He has an extensive exhibition record showing a variety of media from painting to sculpture. He has many public works in the Ohio area.
SAAD GHOSN
Statement
"We are faces; we are races. We are ubiquitous; we are anonymous. We are borderless; we are border bound. We are programmed; we are free. We are We; we are You. We are heart; we are brain. We are dynamic; we are static. We are moving; we are contained. We are dogma; we are open. We are vulnerable; we are tough. We are face; we are profile. We are man; we are woman. We are old; we are young. We are body; we are soul. We are all; we are none. We are big; we are small. We are what we are."
Biography
Saad Ghosn, a native of Lebanon, has been living in Cincinnati since 1985. A medical professional and an educator, he resorts to visual and spoken art to express himself and convey his social and political views. Saad is the founder of ‘SOS ART’, a yearly art event of sociopolitical expressions for peace and justice, and the editor and publisher of the yearly ‘For a Better World, Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice by Greater Cincinnati Artists’. For the past few years Saad has mostly used printmaking in his art and is a recipient of a Cincinnati Artist Grant for his printmaking work.
In addition to his own work, Saad has been curating locally art shows for the past twenty years. From 2009-2011, he wrote a regular column in Streetvibes titled “Artists As Activists” and is currently writing a regular column for Aeqai, the online art magazine; it is titled “Art for a Better World”.
ROBERT GLOVER, JR.
Statement
This series features abstract photographic images from my private backyard oxidation preserve.
These images feature a blending of glass toy marbles, fossilized rocks and curly willow tree branch photographs all taken in my backyard. They would look great in your Summer home on the Moon.
Biography
Rob Glover is a graduate from The Ohio State University with a BFA in sculpture and glass blowing, Rob has over 30 years’ experience as a working artist in a wide assortment of mediums. He has lived on both US coasts and now resides in Loveland, Ohio with his wife and daughter. His award winning style of photographic work can be found in a wide assortment of residential and corporate settings.
SANDRA GROSS
Statement
Continually fascinated by translucency and light, Gross began a language using heat, glass and vellum in Graduate school. Representing the internal and external filters than are ubiquitous in the human experience, the papers are as marked and layered as their subjects. The pieces in Tripletta are not only in dialogue with one another but examine how order, time and experience can affect that experience.
Biography
Sandra Gross is an artist from Cincinnati, Ohio. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and an M.Ed in Montessori Education. Both passions came together when she opened Brazee Street Studios in 2009. Located on an acre of urban land, the former Oakley Tool and Die building is now home to 25 studio artists, native gardens, beehives and Brazee Street School of Glass. Her most recent projects, besides her own studio work, is doing large scale glass installations with children. Gross resides in Cincinnati with her husband and 3 daughters.
BRIAN HARMON
Statement
Athazagoraphobia - the fear of forgetting or of being forgotten. After watching several close relatives lose their personal histories to the nothingness of dementia, I have developed athazagoraphobia. I fear forgetting the big things (people, events, relationships) down to the minute things (that specific crack in our house’s foundation, the way my son left his toys after playing with them on the sixth of January at 2:37 pm). It has become evident to me that I can no longer rely on my own memory to indefinitely house and protect my unforgettables. But if that is the case, what am I to do? How can I rest assured that my memories will be remembered? How can I create an insurance policy against loss that hereditarily is lying in wait? How can I take these fleeting moments and solidify them? These questions coupled with the size challenges of this exhibition led me to begin photographing my memories using Polaroid film. The instant film allowed me to immediately transfer image to object, cutting out the middle-man of processing or uploading. However, these Polaroids did not seem precious enough to reflect the memories they captured. This led me to my mother's sewing machine. Reprinting the images on fabric, sewing, stuffing and hand-embroidering details onto them allowed me to create tiny, comforting pillows for my memories to both rest upon and within.
Biography
Brian Harmon is a visual artist and educator living and working in the Greater Cincinnati area. Brian holds an MFA in photography from the University of Cincinnati, as well as a BA and MA in art education. The ideas of memory, dementia, memory-objects, and the memory collection/catalog have been the focus of his recent research and visual investigation. In addition to his art creation, he teaches photography at Campbell County High School in Northern Kentucky.
LUCIA HARMON
Statement
Sunflowers are indicators of joy and life for me. I have a lifelong love affair with them. Each year, around my birthday, I travel to Yellow Springs, Ohio and spend the day in a field with sunflowers as far as the eye can see. I have taken these three photographs and modified the literal image to bring out a deeper view, attempting to show not just a plant, but a living entity that adds to the being of the viewer. Each image is mounted to Clay Board and embedded in the strata. It is then sealed and sanded for protection and depth.
Biography
Lucia Harmon has been a photographer for over 30 years and concentrates on portrait, travel and fine art photography. A graduate of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, she now lives in Newport in an 1880’s house with her daughter, husband and a furry blonde assistant named Angel Buttercup.
RENEE HARRIS
Statement
The continuous stimulation of everyday life observations inspires the visual dialogues between remembered color, light, texture, form and intuitive design in my work. The narrative nature of the pieces begin with simple, black line sketches and then are revealed by way of methodical applications of chosen materials. Each stitch through cut fabric or paper becomes a drawing tool that transforms my ideas into tactile illustrations.
My current series combines subtle marks of graphite pencil drawings with colorful, detailed embroidery stitches. The collective elements suggest
movement of form from a static foundation while evoking the sense of a
mysterious origin.
Biography
Renee Harris attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Art Academy of Cincinnati graduating with a major in painting and a minor
in illustration. A continued interest in textile materials inspires her to explore the infinite possibilities of “drawing” with various fibers. Renee exhibits her
work nationally in exhibitions and galleries.
LISA JAMESON
StatementThese pieces are part of a series inspired by my interest in the beautiful simplicity of Tantric painting from Rajasthan , India.
BiographyLisa Jameson is the coordinator of the art education program at Northern Kentucky University. She received her MFA in drawing and MA in art education from the University of Cincinnati. Lisa is a past- president of the Kentucky Art Education Association, which provides professional development opportunities for art educators at all levels. In addition, Lisa is a visual artist who has been exhibiting for over 20 years. Her work is included in many collections, including the Cincinnati Art Museum.
ANDREA KNARR
Statement
There is something about making art that speaks to what it means to be human. A precise moment is captured by the hand and is then recorded, forever unchanged. In making these images I seek to push the boundaries of time and space and to use the quality of light as an emotional barometer. The suggestion of the horizon as a place of longing and fear is a universal metaphor for the human condition.
Biography
Andrea Knarr is a Senior Lecturer and Printmaking Coordinator in the Department of Visual Arts at Northern Kentucky University where she has taught since 1988 after receiving her MFA from the University of Cincinnati. She teaches a full program of printmaking processes with a special focus on mixed media, intaglio, and color printing. Her work has won numerous awards and has been shown extensively in galleries, museums and universities across the United States.