Opening Reception October 6th from 5:30-8

Artist talk with Brian Frink and Jimmy Eddings at 6:30

Exhibition runs through October 30th

Clare Doveton

Artist Statement


The farmlands and tallgrass prairie of the Midwest provide unobstructed views over large stretches of land. The horizon fades into the distance, and the point where sky ends and earth begins is difficult for one to determine - bringing into question whether a line of separation exists there at all. 

We are used to seeing defining lines between things, so recognizing the absence of one captured me completely. I have studied Buddhism most of my life, and in it there is a constant reminder that there are no defining lines between anything - this includes life and death, as well as the body and the mind. The very act of painting is a form of mediation on this - like anything that can hold one completely in the present moment. And in this moment it is clear there is no separation between anything. 

“If you look at matter on a particle level through the lens of quantum physics, division between one mass and another disappears. The same goes for sky and earth, body and soul, and the cycle of organic life. Clare Doveton’s ethereal paintings illustrate these ideas in wide, undefined expanses that blur the barrier between earth and the cosmos. Texture is distinguished with the direction of the brushstrokes; a blade of grass, or stalk of wheat, is distinct from the marbled stratum of the sky. In her drawings, the direction of the lines behave like unmapped areas of land or patterns in the upper regions of the atmosphere. Even linear time is subject to questioning: a band of light grays and soft orange tones suggest the moment before or after the sun crosses the horizon; skies hold clouds that follow or precede extreme weather. Doveton never anchors our sense of time by revealing the circumstances around each image. It is this uncertainty that demonstrates suspension between two states of being. Midwest farmland, prairie grass, and that famous unobstructed sky fill the role of visual inspiration. It remains up to the audience to decide if the work on view depicts a landscape up close, in the distance, or on another spiritual plane altogether. One experience is consistent for most viewers: there is a moment when the paintings transition to intangible terrain, when they cease to resemble landscapes in this world. 

Doveton uses her intimate memories of maps and landscapes to build the foundations of her drawings and paintings. Her father, a petrophysicist, inspired an early curiosity for recording natural phenomenon and seeking pattern in organic life cycles. When she began to pursue quantum physics as a way of understanding the connection between spirituality and the empirical world, her art practice found a medium ground to draw influence from her multiple interests. A move from city life to a small country farm allowed her to intimately explore the life cycle of the landscape and its varied inhabitants. Doveton’s paintings have the ability to silence the world around the viewer and provide a window to a meditative state—an extension of her ongoing spiritual practice. Doveton’s meditations on Buddhism and Shamanism generate a consistent tone of unearthly peace in the mid-sized oil paintings, inviting the audience to enter an undefined condition between physical and mystical. Her power to transmute familiar shapes into cosmic suggestions elevates the work to a place where ego, fear, and even gravity, cannot follow.”
Annie Raab

Bio

Clare Doveton is a graduate of Parsons School of Art and Design in New York City. She has served on the Board of Directors for the Kansas Zen Center, and decades of meditation practice play a key role in her work. She completed permaculture design certification through Kansas Permaculture Collaborative as part of her continued interest and research of integrated systems and patterns in nature. Doveton was the Featured Artist for the Lawrence Arts Center Benefit Art Auction in 2015, and now also serves on their Board of Directors. Her paintings have been featured in Present Magazine, Farmhouse Magazine, The Journal, The Kansas City Star, KC Metropolis, and more. Doveton has been nominated for the Kansas City Collection and was selected for the Hunter Museum of American Art Spectrum Exhibition and auction in 2014. Her work can be found internationally in private and corporate collections, including The Art of Emprise, Quest Financial, New School University, KU Medical Center, Truman Medical Center, NOVA Financial, One Light, Tradewind Energy, and others. Doveton has lived and worked in New York, California, and New Mexico. She now resides in Kansas with her family.  

Brian Frink

Bio:

Brian Frink lives in Southern Minnesota in the town of Mankato.  He and his partner, Wilbur, live in the old Blue Earth County Poor Farm.  They have renamed it the Poor Farm Studios.  In it they have space for the creation of artwork and work related to Wilbur’s social justice theater groups.

Brian’s work has been exhibited extensively.   He has received grants and awards including two McKnight fellowships, five Minnesota State Arts Board grants, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Wisconsin State Arts Board grant, and a Jerome Travel and Study grant.  In 2010 he was named a Distinguished Faculty Scholar at MSU, M.

Brian grew up in Illinois attending school at Illinois State University in Normal.  In 1979 he moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn NY living there for five years.  He and Wilbur were true “urban pioneers” of that now famous artist neighborhood.  In 1985 he began graduate school in Madison Wisconsin where he earned his MFA in 1989.

Brian has been an active artist for over forty years. For the past twenty-nine years he has taught painting and drawing at Minnesota State University, Mankato.  Currently he serves as the Department of Art Chair.

Statement:

The making of the object is central to my concept of painting.  The experiential knowledge I bring to my work informs content, process and the resultant meaning of the objects I make.  Our physical experience of the world contains a subtle poetry.  It is this poetic relationship I pursue.  Human consciousness has always been caught in a dilemma navigating the ephemeral and the concrete.  The disembodiment in our current “digital age” is just another version of this dilemma.  I think the making of objects and things of an aesthetic nature speculates on this dilemma and disconnection.  

About a year ago, as a side project to my paintings, I started making small painted plywood constructions with scraps of wood that were lying around my shop.  Part of the inspiration for these came from a trip to Mexico during the Day of the Dead festivities.  The shops and the ofrenda’s were full of small, brightly painted, constructions that intrigued and delighted me.  The other influence for these works is my Father.  He is a woodworker that loves to make quirky wooden constructions that he decorates and paints with bright colors and patterns.  Both of these influences awakened a desire to make work that steps a bit “to the side” of my painting and explore a means of creation that is more object and installation based.   

I have been looking, again, at the early American modernist painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, John Marin and Marsden Hartley.  Their fusion of European painting of the early twentieth century with the idiom of the American landscape has always intrigued me and influenced my work.  I view my constructions as physical manifestations or perhaps extensions of these artist’s interpretations of the landscape.  I consider these new works of mine stylized simplifications of the landscape.  Elemental images referencing sun, moon, rain, cave, soil, water, wave, wind, hill or path have visual corollaries in both the shape of the construction and in the patterns colors and forms I describe within the painted space of the construction.    

So these constructions are extensions of my own inventions from landscape paintings combined with historically based observations and folk art traditions.  I consider each construction to be a work in itself.  Some of the paintings have a stronger alignment with pictorialism while others describe a more structural and formal painted space. 

Jimmy Eddings 

Artist Statement

The objects I make as a ceramic artist are based on my observations and interaction with the

natural world. In nature and my creative process there is a sense of discovery, an opportunity to

explore a new environment and push further in a familiar territory. Through texture, form and color objects are manipulated to represent—but not perfectly duplicate—my findings in nature. During the creative process, I am conscious of the possibilities the material has to offer. The making is quite intuitive, responding to how the clay is reacting to the different techniques where the original inspiration or plan for a piece can and will change through the making.

I am not interested in re-creating natural objects found in nature. I use the forms and my emotional responses to the objects as the conceptual platform for creating works of art. Capturing the essence of my inspiration in the objects I make enables the viewer to go through the same emotions I do in nature and within my studio.

Biography

Jimmy Eddings was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At an early age he moved to Madison Wisconsin where he spent most of his life. Observing nature and immersing himself in it provides information for color, texture, form and concepts in his art.

Jimmy received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin Whitewater in 2005 and his MFA from the University of Kansas in 2009. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally and maintains an active studio practice. Jimmy lives in Algoma WI, where he is the co-founder of Everett's Mugs and is the studio manager of James May Gallery.