The Best of Times

The Best of Times
Grants and galleries made 2009 an exciting year
by Douglas Max Utter
Two steps forward, one step back — or maybe one step forward, two steps back. Cleveland's homegrown visual-arts scene dances a dysfunctional tango with local galleries dipping and swooning in response to what is unavoidably a marginal market. Ability and enthusiasm are never in short supply, but the reality for local artists is that money usually comes from elsewhere.

From that point of view, 2009 was better than most years, despite general economic woes. Tobacco-tax dollars earmarked by voters for the arts were distributed through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. The $20K Creative Workforce Fellowships included 20 for visual artists living in Cuyahoga County. Such funding is without parallel in Ohio, and rare anywhere. It remains to be seen whether the county's generous stimulus initiative will drive growth, but it sends a convincing message of support to the arts community and makes it possible for a few artists to take time off from their day jobs. The result just might be more and better art, and deeper roots for the arts.

One CPAC Fellowship recipient (and winner of the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize as Emerging Artist) was Tremont's Amy Casey, whose paintings of billowing masses of urban real estate lassoed in midair has won her national attention. MOCA Cleveland and Arts Collinwood both hosted mini-shows of her acrylic-on-paper images this year, giving Clevelanders samplings of the work that's impressing audiences in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Maybe the fellowship money will help to keep her here.

Like Casey, life-long Collinwood resident Randall Tiedman is featured in the latest Midwest edition of New American Paintings. The Cleveland State University Gallery and Arts Collinwood both presented shows of Tiedman's large, darkly Miltonic landscapes. His work is on view through January 10 at Ursuline College's Wasmer Gallery in a two-person show he shares with the powerful, versatile Patricia Zinsmeister Parker.

Cleveland's off-again, on-again gallery scene seemed stuck in the "on" position through much of the year. Several newer spaces like Front Room Gallery and Legation Gallery kept their doors open, while a hardy species of native gallerist enjoyed a growth spurt. In fact, many of the top stories of the year were about both artists and the galleries where they showed.

Thirty-year veteran Bill Tregoning opened a dramatically attractive new space at West 78th Street Studios, where he mounted two noteworthy exhibits. His Chris Pekoc/Night Visions examined the origins of Pekoc's stitched collages in his airbrush paintings from the 1970s. In a similarly analytical vein, Tregoning's Matt Dibble Paintings and Constructions took a thoughtful look at an important Ohio painter's work, contrasting recent abstract constructions with figural reveries from Dibble's construction-trade-oriented studio practice. Also at West 78th Street, Bill Scheele of Kokoon Arts Gallery extended his own three-decade career, showing complex works by Seattle-based Mexican-born artist Alfredo Arreguín.

William Busta continued to mount significant shows of some of the area's best artists at his two year-old space downtown. Strong solo shows by Cecelia Phillips, Hildur Asgeirsdóttir Jónsson, Douglas Sanderson, Stephen Yusko and Lorri Ott demonstrated the vitality and continuity of a diverse group of mid-career artists living and working in the region.

Gallerists who have achieved a level of real maturity over the past several years include artist/entrepreneur Dana Depew of Asterisk, internationally noted architect Robert Maschke and his 1point618 Gallery, Brett Shaheen with a national and international focus at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary, and Bonfoey, Cleveland's longest-running commercial space. Among the standouts were Craig Kucia's hallucinatory yet painterly oil-on-canvas works at Shaheen, John Pearson's installation of subtle, harmonious 3D works at 1point618 and Depew's yearly salute to Bernie Kosar, 19 — an engaging salon made up of 19 established and emerging artists.

Meanwhile the city's contemporary art museum, nonprofit galleries and educational institutions endured, providing a different sort of backbone for the community. Headed by SPACES and MOCA Cleveland, the list isn't long, but it's not getting any shorter, and that's a kind of triumph. The Cleveland Sculpture Center, Zygote Press, the Cleveland Artists Foundation, the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, the Cleveland Institute of Art and Arts Collinwood all offered great shows.

There's also a new kid on the nonprofit block, the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, which opened in 2008. One of 2009's most memorable events was the Morgan's summer show, War as Art/Art as War. Organized by Combat Papers of Vermont, it showed prints and other works made from paper produced from pulped combat uniforms. Most of the images were made by artist-veterans of Iraq and other wars involving American armed forces. The show's objective was to recycle and redeem trauma, reclaiming damaged psyches. Surely art has no more valuable or higher function.

arts@clevescene.com

Accidental Art Festival

Cleveland's art galleries have created an accidental art festival
By Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
October 02, 2009, 12:01AM
Cleveland artists love to complain that the city lacks a robust gallery scene and that good work never gets the attention it deserves.

Uh, sorry, that's not the case at the moment. The city's nonprofit and commercial galleries are knocking themselves out this fall, in the middle of a recession, to pay homage to scores of Cleveland artists. At this very moment, half a dozen key venues are showing more than 250 works by 100-plus local artists in shows that are selective, well focused, well organized and well worth seeing.

It all amounts to a virtual festival of Cleveland art. The problem is that the wave of shows is the result of individual, uncoordinated, go-it-alone efforts. You don't see any fliers proclaiming the event. But the lack of collaborative marketing shouldn't prevent us from appreciating the moment.

The accidental Cleveland art festival of 2009 includes more square footage of exhibit space and more art by blue-chip local artists than the Cleveland Museum of Art was ever able to cram in its once-vaunted May Show exhibitions. In fact, it's as if the May Show were happening all around us, right now.

Consider:


Through Jan. 10, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is showing a handsome exhibition on the Op Art paintings of Julian Stanczak, who, at age 80, ranks as one of the most important artists in Cleveland's history. The show captures the joy Stanczak finds in making precise geometric abstractions that tingle the eye with scintillating colors and vibrant patterns of line.


Through Saturday, Oct. 10, the Cleveland Institute of Art is holding its annual faculty show. This year's version is a lively one, with roughly 100 works by 43 artists. Highlights include Bill Brouillard's "Guns and Religion" installation of terra-cotta tiles molded in the shape of handguns, and the "Metaphoric Garden" sculptures by Barbara Stanczak (the wife of Julian Stanczak), in which the artist carved chunks of orange, translucent alabaster into abstract shapes resembling large, fleshy flower petals.


Through Saturday, Oct. 24, the Sculpture Center is displaying a fine retrospective on the work of its founder, David Davis, who died in 2002 at age 82. With more than 30 works from the 1970s through the 1990s, the exhibition makes the case that Davis was better at fashioning smaller, domestic-scale abstract sculptures than the larger public works installed around the city and close-in suburbs. Influenced by Russian Constructivism and the biomorphism of Jean Arp, Davis worked in a manner that was both rigorous and intuitive, combining gentle, organic shapes with folded and perforated planes, and sticklike linear frameworks.
The Cleveland Artists Foundation, through Saturday, Nov. 14, is celebrating its 25th anniversary with an exhibition of 56 works by 38 artists from its permanent collection, including excellent paintings by Elmer Brown, Viktor Schreckengost, Frederick Gottwald, Henry Keller and Paul Travis. The selection, accompanied by a handsome catalog, is a typically impressive effort for a small but important institution that deserves more attention than it receives in its location at the Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood. The foundation, with more than 3,000 works in its permanent collection, should strike out on its own someday -- the sooner, the better.


Through Sunday, Oct. 25, the Cleveland Arts Prize is celebrating its 50th anniversary year with an exhibition of more than 40 works by 14 prizewinners, including Judith Salomon, Laurence Channing, Christopher Pekoc, Brent Kee Young and Linda Butler. The works on view, all selected by the artists themselves, are for sale, with proceeds to be split 60-40 by the artists and the nonprofit arts prize organization.

In two weeks, Bonfoey Gallery will salute Kent artist Joseph O'Sickey, 90, whose colorful garden scenes, still life and circus pictures take inspiration from the loose brushwork and joie de vivre of Henri Matisse. That show will run from Friday, Oct. 16, to Saturday, Nov. 28.

Steven Litt, The Plain DealerBiomorphic and geometric sculptures by David Davis are on view at the Sculpture Center's 20th anniversary salute to its founder.In addition to these shows, other notable displays of local art this season have included the recent posthumous retrospective at the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve on the career of Phyllis Sloane, who died in May in Santa Fe, N.M., at age 87. The show closed Saturday after an all-too-brief 10-day run. Sloane was known for tranquil still lifes and portraits of women in domestic settings, which she organized with bright areas of flat color and superb passages of drawing.

On top of that, the Cleveland Museum of Art's new East Wing features two new galleries devoted to Cleveland art, the first displays of their kind in the museum's 93-year history. One gallery focuses on 13 works by a dozen artists from the first half of the 20th century, including Charles Burchfield, Margaret Bourke-White and Hughie Lee-Smith. The other gallery features a mini-retrospective on the ceramics of New Jersey artist Toshiko Takaezu, who was born in Hawaii in 1922, and who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly a decade starting in 1956.

Through Saturday, Arts Collinwood, at 15606 Waterloo Road, is showing an exhibition of dystopian urban landscapes by Randall Tiedman and somber, richly painted images by Douglas Max Utter.

Over at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 2307 Chester Ave., an exhibition of photographs of new urban landscapes in Turkey, by assistant professor Mark Slankard, is on view through Saturday.

Through Saturday, Oct. 31, Malcolm Brown Gallery in Shaker Heights is showing art quilts with African-American themes by Carolyn Mazloomi of West Chester, Ohio. Though not a Northeast Ohioan, Mazloomi is an important figure statewide.

At the William Busta Gallery, an exhibition on surreal sculptures and assemblages by Lorri Ott, a 2004 master-of-fine-art graduate of Kent State University, is on view through Saturday.

Taken all together, it's a season with a high percentage of thoughtful solo exhibitions and retrospectives, mixed with strong group shows and exhibitions of historical material covering a century of visual creativity in Cleveland. With everything that's on view, the key challenge is realizing what's out there, and taking the time to see as much of it as possible. Next year, if all the venues that focused on regional art this fall in such a broad way could draw attention to their efforts collectively, we might have a real Cleveland art festival instead of a virtual one.

Show Review

Art Review: Asterisk Gallery in Tremont
Thursday August 27, 2009

by About.com contributor, Ken Gradomski

What's the difference between Modern Art and Contemporary Art? Many think that there is no difference. Many others would strongly disagree claiming there certainly is a difference! To clarify, Contemporary Art is work created by living artists whereas the paradigm of Modernity and the production of Modern Art ended with the beginning of the Pop Art Movement in the 1950's. Contemporary work is actually difficult to find outside of the decorative paintings that usually inhabit most galleries whose only conc erns are for sales and income. Those are not bad concerns in themselves...

However, there is a place in Tremont that exists only for exhibition, that is to say,to present the different facets of contemporary work created by local and residential artists without regard to ornamental marketability. Dana Depew, owner of the Asterisk Gallery and artist himself, will tell you that ‘the value of the Gallery far exceeds the payment’...of keeping it open. He will also inform you that when he started it eight years ago it was to be a ‘strictly exhibition’ space unconcerned with income from sales.’ He said he wanted a place whereby the artistic community and the community in general ‘benefits from excellent work and synergy.’

Currently on display at the Asterisk Gallery, 2393 Professor Avenue are 24 works by Matthew Dibble in a show he has entitled, ‘Equipping the Shop for Action.’ His works have primal power, filled with strong lines and figures that are both allusive and symbolic. Informed by what presents as a Formalistic Neo-Synthetic Cubism, the paintings are large and linear, the drawings small, but captivating. Rest assured that that description falls far short of the pure impact and presence he creates with this selection of his newest work on display. He harbors an ongoing and subterranean passion that he infuses into his lyrical lines on both paper and canvas. Matthew has been creating Art for more than thirty years and his work hangs in both private and corporate collections.

Shown above is Dibble's five-foot-two inch by six foot painting entitled, ‘Guardians Against Cold.’ It is a representative depiction of his heroic iconography and, according to Matthew, his most favored piece. Online information is available on Asterisk Gallery's Web site Information from the artist, himself can be obtained on Matthew Dibble's site. His work at the Asterisk Gallery is waiting for you to visit.

Matthew Dibble works exhibited at two Cleveland galleries: Art Matters
by Steven Litt / Plain Dealer Art Critic
Wednesday August 19, 2009, 3:37 PM

Courtesy of Matthew Dibble- Artist Matthew Dibble made "Together With Moths" and other paintings in his new show at Asterisk Gallery by projecting photographs of small sketches onto a large canvas and then adding areas of color and drawings of objects such as the chair to create the final image.
Every artist plays a game in which he or she alone makes the rules. But what happens when the rules are so loose that anything goes?
That question is raised by two exhibitions of work by Lakewood artist Matthew Dibble, at Tregoning & Co. in Cleveland s Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood and at Asterisk Gallery in Tremont.
Dibble, 52, a native of Euclid who trained at the Cooper School of Art in Cleveland from 1975 to 1978, has oceans of energy and a great deal of visual intelligence.

But while filling yards of canvas, he has also veered in a variety of directions in ways not justified by quality in each case.
In the Tregoning show, Dibble is displaying three types of work from the past decade.
REVIEWS
Tregoning & Co. / Asterisk Gallery What: Two simultaneous exhibitions of work by Lakewood artist Matthew Dibble.
When: Through Wednesday, Sept. 30, at Tregoning; through Saturday, Sept. 5, at Asterisk.
Where: Tregoning: 1300 West 78th St., Cleveland; Asterisk: 2393 Profes sor St., Cleveland.
Admission: Free. Call 216-281-8626 for Tregoning or 330-304-8528 for Asterisk.
First, there are heavily painted but flaccid abstractions that weakly echo paintings by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning. Second, there are several colorful and thinly painted abstractions that have a semi-Cubist look. Finally, there is a selection of large, cartoonish images of grotesque, imaginary creatures floating in shallow visual fields pressed close up against the picture plane.
As Dibble explains in an artists statement: These acts of painting helped me become more related to my inner world.
It s great that the paintings give Dibble satisfaction, but the lack of rigor, especially in the thickly painted abstractions, suggests that at times, the artist values quantity over quality.
The best paintings in the Tregoning show are the colorful, semi-Cubist images, in which the artist combines linear patterns with dryly brushed patches of color to create visual effects akin to stained glass. Unfortunately, these works are in the minority.
In the Asterisk show, Dibble is exhibiting 14 large canvases and 10 drawings in which he makes a definitive choice of direction: All the works are done in the artist s cartoolike mode, with bizarre, imaginary creatures lurking comically amid basement appliances such as a hot-water heater and a utility sink.
The pictures are constructed in a smart, efficient, no-nonsense way, with great economy of effort. They communicate Dibble’s main message, which is to suggest mental phantasms that seem to creep through the basement of the mind.
Here, though, Dibble’s work would be stronger if he could add clarity and finesse to his drawing, which tends to look rote and repetitive. His humanoid creatures have noses and eyes, but instead of hands or feet, they have flippers or stumps.
Could it be that fingers and toes are simply too hard to draw?
If Dibble toughened the rules of his game and truly focused on a direction that meant the most to him he might win greater satisfaction and a larger audience.

Together With Moths

BLUEPRINTS FOR A MYTHOS
Matt Dibble at Asterisk and Tregoning Galleries
by Douglas Max Utter

Matt Dibble's recent large oil-on-canvas paintings in Equipping the Shop for Action at Asterisk Gallery seem almost to flicker, like a cartoon flipbook caught between pages. This is odd because in most respects, they're as plain as paintings can be — line drawings in paint and charcoal firmly marked on brusque surfaces.
Dibble's muted, all-over taupes and grays are like the first uneven coat of a tasteful decorator shade on a living-room wall. Likewise, most of the objects he depicts against these sober color fields are as uninflected as he can make them: schematic charcoal outlines of furniture and utilitarian objects. An air compressor in a work titled "Building the Best Workbench" is probably the fanciest contraption shown, but mainly Dibble's barely indicated interiors (a curved line for an alcove, a vertical line for a corner) frame cement blocks, a couch, a chair, a furnace — and (whammo!) a bestiary of exotic composite monsters, also rendered in the same matter-of-fact linear style, but in dark oil paint. It's as if a minotaur's cousins and siblings floated, dream-like, into rooms that otherwise betray no imaginative dimension: Maybe Dibble's calm places — emptied of emotion or even affect — lure or conjure these weird creatures, like deep-sea fish nosing up against the glass of an aquarium.
As in many of Francis Bacon's paintings, geometric and architectural linear elements are used as a type of confining metaphysical space. In a Bacon painting, this dimension is stretched around too-solid flesh. But Dibble's figures aren't souls in torment or flesh tormented by incarnation. They're transparent and conjectural, like stick figures evolving under the pressure of an alien atmosphere. They also feel like sketches — of angels, demons — in the margins of a medieval manuscript, or like formulae for a necromancer's algebra of transformation. One thing is sure — we're looking at imagery levitated from the depths of the mind, asking questions about the thin air of our reality and the fluid strangeness of our own presence in the world. Who are these spirits, configured like masks or Celtic daydreams, with claws and carapaces and memories of ancient gods, but us — our true shapes compounded of our ancestors, flickering behind the ordinariness of daily things?
Dibble's work is also currently on view at Tregoning & Co. It's a mix of his current paintings with other, entirely abstract works completed since 2000. There's a touch of Cezanne here, a bit of Leger there and a fascination with material on its own terms, including construction-grade adhesive. Showing some of the breadth of Dibble's efforts and his consistency as he explores different ways to fill a pictorial rectangle with shapes and motion and a sense of soul, Tregoning's picks cast light on this extraordinary painter's over-all project. At once a materialist and a mystic, Dibble ranges through the history of painting and the physiological basis of the mind, remembering that all we know is eternally in flux.
arts@clevescene.com

Studio 2009

NEWS RELEASE
For immediate release
AUGUST 10, 2009




Solo Exhibition of New Work by Matthew Dibble Opens at Asterisk Gallery
CLEVELAND—August 10, 2009—On Friday, August 14th, Asterisk Gallery in Tremont will showcase recent figurative work from Cleveland artist Matthew Dibble in a solo exhibition consisting of ten drawings and fourteen paintings. The exhibition is titled “Equipping the Shop for Action,” and runs through September 5th. According to Dibble, the title is not to be taken literally, but is a metaphor for the psychological preparation he undertook before completing this series of work.

The paintings in this exhibit were inspired by an ongoing series of figurative pen-and-ink drawings that the artist has been producing since his days in art school. Commenting on the paintings, well-known artist and writer Douglas Max Utter said, “Like half-remembered myths, Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade … part hero, part clown, tumbling in a world that is no more than a back-drop for their antics. They are perhaps like skins of light, shed in the process of personal change.”
The drawings on display were selected by Christopher Pekoc, the 2007 Cleveland Arts Prize winner who also curated the first public exhibition of Dibble’s drawings in 2005. Pekoc explains, “In his drawings, Matt produces an elegant line drawn with a sure and sensitive hand. He fills these small worlds with mystery and beauty. I am attracted to them because of their uniqueness and originality, and also because I suspect that their source lies deep within the artist’s creative core.”
Pekoc will also participate as a panelist in an artists’ dialogue at the gallery on Saturday, August 15th at 3 pm, along with innovative neon artist Jeffry Chiplis, Utter, and Dibble.
Dibble’s work has been exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Tregoning & Company, and the Butler Institute of American Art, and resides in private and corporate collections.
Asterisk Gallery is located at 2393 Professor Ave. in the historic Tremont area of Cleveland. For more information, contact artist and gallery owner Dana Depew at 330-304-8528 or www.asteriskgallery.com. For more information on Matt Dibble, please visit www.dibblepaintings.com. “Equipping the Shop for Action” will be on view from August 14th through September 5th.

Ingenuity Festival 2009

July 15, 2009 Arts » Arts Features
HOMESTYLE TINKERIN'
Ingenuity gathers the family around
by Michael Gill
Ingenuity organizer James Levin predicted that Ian Charnas' production Boltz — a campy mix of musical theater, dance and electrical tinkering presented by Case Western Reserve University — would be the iconic event that people remembered from Ingenuity 2009. Hopefully that's not true. The production's music and dance weren't badly realized, and the sustainability message was just about right for an after-school special or a comic book, but the science failed to impress. The electrical spark that was to be the centerpiece just didn't measure up.
Nonetheless, this year's edition of Ingenuity — and even the anticlimactic Boltz — captured the spirit of the festival's name more than previous installments. Roaming the whole scene, Melissa Daubert's horse on wheels amused festgoers with its shaggy fur and whimsical gait as it rolled with electronic clippity-clop accompaniment. It wasn't high-tech but undeniably mixed imagination with mechanics more sensibly than the high-tech, high-concept installations that have attempted to capture audiences' attention in previous years.
The art and high-tech concept is traceable to Richard Florida's book The Creative Class, which argues that software engineers are artists too. But Florida was trying to attract people to cities, not build an arts festival to enhance a city. In that regard, this year's less glitzy, lower-tech Ingenuity Festival was more successful than previous ones.
Cleveland talent ruled. Local bands like the punk-, new wave-, and noise-influenced girl group Hot Cha Cha and the experimental pop trio Mystery of Two rocked the scene not as filler, but on the main stage during prime time Friday night. Original music is a kind of ingenuity Cleveland can understand. And who are we kidding if we're trying to promote Cleveland as an arts destination if we don't celebrate our own?
A festival highlight was Asterisk gallerist Dana Depew's exhibit of work by 50 regional artists, including Scene art critic Douglas Max Utter, Dan Tranberg, Amy Casey, Matt Dibble and many others who showed their work in a building slated for demolition. Depew's work isn't high-tech, but his adaptive re-use of light fixtures, door peepholes and other domestic gadgetry is not at all short on ingenuity.
Next to one of his pieces, Dibble left a handwritten note instructing festival organizers to leave one of the works hanging so it could be demolished with the building around it. There's something endearingly Cleveland about that.
In the All Go Signs Alley, Chuck Karnak featured a collection of Cleveland painters, including the Sign Guy, whose ingenuity is to make his mark on the city with goofy, hand-painted signs chained and bolted around town. If graffiti is like tattoos on the landscape, his work could be considered its jewelry.
Ingenuity doesn't have to go high-tech or import high-concept headliners to live up to its name. It's unfortunate that finances are what drove programming this way. But here's hoping that no matter how the money shakes out, the festival continues to show off Cleveland — and that crowds are interested enough to keep coming back.
mgill@clevescene.com

Tregoning and Company

Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, Satchel Paige bio author and artist Matt Dibble are in the Critic's Circle
by Plain Dealer Entertainment Editors
Sunday July 12, 2009, 12:01 PM
Cleopatra (Carly Germany) smiles on Antony (Brian Pedaci) in "Antony and Cleopatra."
THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE
Sometimes. Exhibit One: The Cleveland Shakespeare Festival has begun its 12th season of trekking about Northeast Ohio, bringing the Bard to audiences in the great outdoors. Theater critic Tony Brown caught a matinee of "Antony and Cleopatra" recently and notes that strong performances help ensure that it's "one of the best entertainment bargains of the summer." In repertory with "The Winter's Tale" weekends through Sunday, Aug. 2. For a schedule, go to cleveshakes.org.
Larry Tye
Exhibit Two: Baseball has not beenn very, very good to us this summer, but if you're still hooked on the sport, you'll want to meet Larry Tye, author of the nifty new biography "Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend," a profile of Satchel Paige. Book editor Karen R. Long calls Tye's 2004 "Rising From the Rails," about Pullman porters, "a gem of history writing." Tye will be reading from and signing "Satchel" at 7 p.m. Thursday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 24519 Cedar Road (Legacy Village), Lyndhurst. Call 216-691-7000.
Exhibit Three: Matt Dibble has been quietly making a body of work over the past decade or so from his studio on the near East Side, exploring a range of styles from Picasso-esque neo-Modernism to three-dimensional pieces that mix painterly craft with sculpture. Now he's ready to stake his claim with the exhibition "Matt Dibble: Paintings and Constructions" at Tregoning & Co., 1300 West 78th St., Cleveland, on the edge of the Gordon Square Arts District. Call 216-281-8626 or go to tregoningandco.com. Again, free is the word.

Equipping the Shop For Action

Yankee in the Basement

Issue Date: July 2009,

A Work of Art

After eight years, Dan Bush has turned 78th Street Studios into an arts mecca for Cleveland’s West Side.
Beth Troy
When Dan Bush received the keys to 78th Street Studios a week after his wedding, his vision for the building didn’t really extend beyond pitching ivy removal as an ideal honeymoon activity to his new wife. But eight years and four dumpsters of ivy later, he has successfully helmed its transformation into a thriving arts center that anchors the west side of the Gordon Square Arts District.

“I am crazy about the arts,” Bush says. “I believe they are a huge component of our neighborhood and a great contributor to what will happen in its renaissance.”

In 2001, Bush didn’t even own any paintings. He credits 78th Street’s creative ghosts — the building housed the creative headquarters for American Greetings throughout the ’70s and ’80s — and the small contingent of artists who initially occupied the building as catalysts for its transformation.

The building’s high ceilings, abundant windows and seemingly infinite space —actually 170,000 square feet, an artist’s architectural manna — beckoned to him. It wasn’t long before Bush traded mundane superintendent duties for customizing suites for creative businesses, including studios, galleries, auctioneers, recording facilities and editorial headquarters for a national magazine.

“As far as aesthetic goes, I build to suit, because otherwise, I am just creating a vanilla box. I want businesses to come to a space that’s cool, fun and well-built, with a design sensibility,” Bush says.

The result is a maze of eclectic spaces where curved drywall intersects brick walls and the cool hues of galleries contrast with the bright tones of their neighbors’ studios and offices. The art at 78th Street Studios reflects the diversity of the suites, and visitors can expect pieces that run the gamut from photography to paintings, classical to modern, still lifes to live performances.

Bill Scheele, owner of Kokoon Arts Gallery and tenant of three years, appreciates that the design is an extension of the culture at 78th Street Studios.

“That’s what interested me in the building: the diversity of creative types doing a lot of different things,” Scheele says.

The tenants officially convene quarterly for open-house receptions to exhibit their work to the public, but they regularly tour clients through the spaces and support each other’s ventures with the galleries cooperating to raise awareness of art. This symbiotic dynamic attracted Hilary Aurand to the space several months ago to partner with her husband, John, in Legation, an art and music gallery.

“We saw just this huge opportunity to collaborate with the businesses operating out of this place,” she says. “It’s encouraging to me as an artist to see all of these artists working together and making money.”

At 85 percent capacity, 78th Street Studios is no longer a well-kept secret, and Bush often brainstorms ideas to use the remaining empty square footage to bring resources to the artists, such as a library, photography studio or administrative office. Even a wine or coffee bar where the artists could commune or take their guests would be a welcome addition.

“Some of the best days of my life are when I am at events in this neighborhood,” Bush says. “You are standing around with other people enjoying being here and thinking this is the best place to be.”

Visit 78th Street Studios this month during its open house, July 10 and 11. For more information, visit 78thstreetstudios.com.



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Tregoning and Company

Matt Dibble-Painting and Constructions opens July 10th 2009 at Tregoning and Company.

Christopher Pekoc

Cleveland Arts Prize Winner Christopher Pekoc visited my studio and selected ink drawings for the show opening at Asterisk Gallery August 14th 2009.

Asterisk in August

Asterisk Gallery Proudly Presents:
“Equipping the Shop for Action”
New Works by Matthew Dibble
With drawings selected by Christopher Pekoc

This exhibition is a series of paintings and drawings that concern the artists search to discover something new and a response to conditions in the studio

Opening reception Friday August 14, 2009, 6-11pm
on Sat Aug 15 at 4pm join us for an Artist Exchange
with the following panelists:
Christopher Pekoc- cleveland arts prize winner.
Douglas Max Utter - nationally known painter and writer.
Jeffrey Chiplis -certified barbecue judge and carrot king.
2393 Professor Ave. in historic Tremont
330-304-8528
www.asteriskgallery.com
Show runs through Sept 5
hours by appt.
Special thanks to Mark and Bruce Schantz for guiding me in the study of shop maintenance.
"How nice-to feel nothing and still get the full credit for being alive”.
Kurt Vonnegut-Slaughterhouse Five

Marks Obiturary

Mark Putnam Schantz, 58, passed on peacefully with his loved ones surrounding him on June 13, 2009. His mantra at the end of life was open your heart. Those who survive him, and whose hearts are filled with him, include beloved wife, Lee Nielsen, daughters Kate and Jessa, sons Erik and Jon Schickedanz, sons-in-law Dick and Michael, daughters-in-law Ruth and Cheree, and grandson Henri Erik. He is also survived by a bounty of adoring family and friends: mother Grace, siblings Anne and Mark Perlmutter, Victor and Darlene Schantz, Jack and Marsha Schantz, Jill and Terry Frank, Ted and Jennifer Schantz, and Peter and Danni Schantz. He was doting uncle to Sarah, Emily, Betsey, Joe, Mary, John, Becca, Laura, Ella, Amy, Peter, Leah and Ben. He was preceded in death by father, Bruce.

Born in Orrville, Ohio, on September 9, 1950, Mark was raised amongst many immediate and extended family members. A graduate of Orrville High School and Otterbein College, he taught sixth grade in Shaker Heights before he joined American Greetings.

Mark’s life was a study in kindness and courage. At the age of 49, he left corporate America to travel to Africa, a life-long dream, and to pursue a new career path as a furniture designer, builder and restorer. He generated and restored many carefully wrought and enduring pieces of craftsmanship. He and Lee spent many happy years working from their home businesses, walking their two golden retrievers in the Metroparks behind their home, and hosting countless family gatherings, including an annual summer family vacation on the beaches of North Carolina. A master breadmaker, Mark was often baking and giving away his artisanal loafs.

Mark’s gentleness was felt by all who knew him, and he goes before a host of friends who adored him for his humor, attentiveness, and generosity of spirit. Many of Mark’s friendships were rooted in his decades-long study of Gurdjieff, a spiritual practice that fortified him and gave him peace during his illness. His love was boundless and clear; it galvanized and will forever support those who love him.

Together With Moths

Schantz Woods

Mark,

I wanted to let you know that a group of alcoholic assholes who meet on Thursday evenings are praying for you and also the boys from the C.Y.O. wrestling team.

I’ve heard it said that God hears the prayers of drunks and children so we’ve got those bases covered. I don’t think even Mr. Gurdjieff could steal these sincere prayers before they get to heaven.

I’ve tried to keep this image of you in my mind- when we were working on the movements hall roof, you were cutting up that steal beam and I was thinking “man, this guys tougher than I thought”!

A group of learned men got together once and asked “what’s the worst sin a man could commit” after some time they decide that it was being a bad example.So I think the best thing a man can do is be a good example,which is what you’ve been for me.

I’ve always admired your kind nature and the way you handle people,always with a sense of fairness. I feel that you and your father can both be called “good householders” in the highest sense.

I want you to know your in my thoughts and prayers thru this difficult time.

Wishing you well,

Matt

(enclosed is a special prayer from Thomas Merton)

11-24-08

Rest in Peace my friend.

American Springtime

Letter of support for Dana

Feb. 26, 2009

Committee,

I have committed to have a solo show of new paintings at the Asterisk Gallery in August 2009. I’ve been following the progression of the Tremont art scene for many years and have been impressed. Asterisk Gallery has especially interested me. The exhibitions I’ve seen are very innovative and I’m excited about the opportunity to show there.

Some of the favorable impressions I’ve had are a direct result of Galley Director Dana Depew. His fearlessness in exhibiting high quality, insightful art shows is admirable. The exhibits there are professional, well organized and memorable.

The Gallery is large, clean and well lit, an ideal place to have an art show. When I spoke with Dana he seems to have a long term plan and I get the sense that he’ll be part of the Cleveland art scene for a long time.

I’ve been painting in Cleveland for thirty years and have seen great efforts stall due to lack of support. My wish for Dana and the Asterisk Gallery is that he receives the help and support he needs to carry on this worthy and much needed endeavor.

Sincerely,

Matthew Dibble
www.dibblepaintings.com

Light Wound of Early Youth (oil on Canvas) 72"x48" 2007

Facing Down Giants (oil on canvas) 68"x45" 2007

Skins of Light

Skins of Light: An Appreciation
Matt Dibble on display at Tregoning & Company
By Douglas Max Utter

Like half-remembered myths Matt Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade, color and pattern. In his painting Light Wounds of Early Youth, the half- inch dark brown line that defines the figure moves fluidly over a mottled background of pale pastel colors. This flat, uninflected stroke might be used to render a geometric shape in another sort of painting, and here it retains something of that formal, expository quality: it seems as if the figure depicted is a theorem, as much or more than a person. Perhaps each of these characters in recent paintings like Facing Down Giants, Missing Rungs, and Break Ornaments, Spill Food, is a constellation of a sort, a depiction of the imaginary lines that tenuously connect distant explosions of experience, seen or sensed in a painting long after the fact.
For most of the past three decades Dibble has been known mainly as a painter of expressive abstract works that emphasize the physical qualities of the painted surface. These often very active, crowded compositions seem to enact collisions between figure and ground, As with the ambitious, emotive physicality of paintings by Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock from the early 1950’s, Dibble’s works of this type are agons, battles between the artist’s dynamic gesture and the limits of the various surfaces (panel, canvas, etc.) he chooses; on the sidelines we also can sense the usual spectators: the idea of literal depiction, and traces of the self. His Quarry (2005), for instance, which deliberately echoes the dimensions and energies of DeKooning’s seminal Excavation (1950), is an account of violence, but also of concealment. DeKooning’s shattered fragments seem to represent the half-buried carnage of the Second World War, while the paper bag-brown rectilinear shapes that cobble over Dibble’s space might be seen to resemble the iconic hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The source of Dibble’s figurative paintings is an ongoing series of small, lithe ink drawings. As fluid as calligraphy, they are at once the opposite of his tumultuous abstractions, and their complement. While his non-representational works explore as wide a range as possible of the visual incidents that chemistry and gesture can generate, Dibble’s drawings are in equal measure restrained. And yet the paintings which are exact enlargements of these quiet graphic interludes seem like a more sober articulation of the same visceral strain and drama. Limpid in their quietness and crisp, these drawn works are examples of transformation, cutting and pruning the human figure and the space in which it is embedded with sharp triangular sections, like thorns.
In Light Wounds of Early Youth the nude male figure is located, just barely, in interior space. He leans with a distorted limb against a yellow plane, which seems to be part of a room, or the thought of a room. If before leaning the limb was an arm, it has changed; it flattens out at the end and has an armored, spiked appearance. The artist has caught this personage in mid-metamorphosis, as if he were a Celtic selkie just returned from the sea. His stocky, amphibian legs stand on rectangular, toe-less feet, and the room itself is insubstantial with its oddly rounded flor and thinly applied paint, like an hallucination. An even less structured ground flickers within the breast of the creature ; it is tempting to associate the title with this flickering: here are transcendent wounds of light, as well as superficial bodily or emotional injuries -- the sort of marks that Jacob might have received as he wrestled with the angel.
There is often also a sly sense of humor about Dibble’s paintings. In Light Wounds the figure’s stately, almost sculptural head has been placed upside down on his stocky neck, as if he had hastily reassembled himself and got that part completely wrong. Or it could be that he’s just fooling around, enjoying a newfound freedom of posture. There is, really, nothing very definite about him. The few strokes that depict his genitalia are perfunctory and cherubic. He stands balanced on his right leg, with his foot turned inward, like a bashful boy. The curved green floor at his feet and the square, deep blue window behind his left elbow don’t confine his transformation, but frame it. In such paintings Dibble gives us quick maps of meditative states of mind. A graceful torsion bends the figure in Facing Down Giants, for instance. Like Dibble’s other personae, he is cast in a heroic mold, with an exaggeratedly athletic torso. His small head faces skyward and he sits on the ground, as if in a yoga posture, awkwardly graceful and content. Dibble’s spiritual beings are part hero, part clown, tumbling in a world that is no more than a back-drop for their antics. They are perhaps like skins of light, shed in the process of personal change.

Cavalcade of Oddballs

Smaller-scale drawings reveal artist's power of personality
Friday, January 20, 2006 Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer
Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at New York's Cooper Union School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.
"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."
If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.
It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces. Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.
Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.
It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.
Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, they always come to me at the oddest moments."
Lewis is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.

Thin Layer of Dirty Snow (india ink on canvas) 6"x5" 2005

Day Dreaming About Sandwiches (india ink on paper) 4"x5" 2005

Night Visions

Nights Of The Soul
Tregoning Gallery Revisits Chris Pekoc's Powerful Early Works
By Douglas Max Utter


For the past 20 years, Cleveland-based artist Christopher Pekoc has been known mainly for works created from shards of black-and-white photographs, mixed with other reality-evoking translucent materials and stitched into a provisional whole on a sewing machine. Often, the abrupt transitions of his high-contrast photos are softened with the warm amber tones of shellac or adorned with gold leaf. Decorated and pierced with clean round holes, distressed and crinkled, they evoke a mysterious, dangerous night world, a place where a hand or a bird or a tree may suddenly flare as beacon or portent. Pekoc's textures and imagery speak of the burnt, hard smell of city nights and of identities underlying the daily costume changes of our lives.

Like much art of the last 50 years, Pekoc's nearly sculptural works are rooted in the early modernist discovery of collage and its reintroduction as one of the principal tools of pop art in the early 1960s. Repositioning enigmatic fragments as he inserts them into the abstract space of a painting or drawing has given Pekoc a way to enter his work obliquely, a side door through which the creative act passes unobserved, allowing the artist to transport scenarios directly to the eye as if snatched whole from the unconscious mind.

Pekoc's show Night Visions at Tregoning & Company displays a suite of six smaller mixed-media, photo-based collages made between 1995 and 2002. But the big surprise for newcomers to Pekoc's oeuvre is the presence of some 20 larger canvases and works on paper produced by the artist over a 10-year period starting in the mid 1970s. These are strikingly contemporary-looking works, sometimes painted with an airbrush, or consisting of pastel and charcoal rubbed into etching paper by hand. The consistently smooth-surfaced, hard-edged, oddly ambiguous shapes in works like "In the Middle of the Night" (1982)Êor "Night Watch" (1979) would be at home in any show of up-to-the-minute painting. They seem to reflect contemporary software imaging techniques, apparently referencing an information-driven culture where the abrupt importation and seamless juxtaposition of disparate data is how you get through the day. Yet they were painted well in advance of the contemporary computer age.

"Strike" from 1975, for example, is a three-by-six foot, two-panel composition on canvas dominated by abstract forms rendered in primary colors. The airbrushed acrylic work is reminiscent of its pop-art forbears, especially James Rosenquist's billboard-derived canvases. But there are more differences than similarities between the two. Pekoc has taken Rosenquist's dismemberment of commodity-reality a step or two further. Nothing in his early paintings and drawings reads as a familiar object. Instead, Pekoc presents a cipher of interlocking shapes. And although his vocabulary is made up in large part of sensuous, even luxurious shapes and surfaces, the work doesn't seem to react to consumer culture. The subject matter is personal, dealing with relationships, hopes and fears in coded imagery that sometimes breaks down into dotted lines, letters and mathematical symbols, as in the 1976 painting inscrutably titled "Space Window CDSM12/24p."

Tregoning's installation sketches a history of Pekoc's techniques and the logic of his sensibility across a three-decade span. A narrow, waist-high plexiglass vitrine in the center of the gallery contains a sample study from the mid 1970s, salvaged from one of Pekoc's many studio drawers. It's a postcard-size model for a painting, constructed of pieces of ads cut from a magazine of the period. This sketch-collage was the first stage in a long process that involved making multiple related compositions, photographing them, projecting the resulting slides and composing works piecemeal after tracing outlines on canvas. Even relatively small paintings like those on view took weeks to complete, and large-scale projects required many months of elaborate effort. Pekoc's 20-by-40 foot mural on canvas titled "Night Sky," on permanent exhibit at the west end of the Reading Room at the Cleveland Public Library, was commissioned and installed in 1979. In terms of scale it was the most ambitious effort of that period, but as a composition, it's typical. A kind of maquette - consisting of a study for the painting itself, mounted in a large black-and-white photograph - is included in the Tregoning show and was the centerpiece of his original proposal. In the painting itself, a great pale crest rises smoke-like against a background of glowing gray, emerging from a crumpled riot of deep red and blue. Pekoc worked as a scarfer in a steel mill for a year or so. His translation of the harsh, almost demonic, power and scale of steel production into a new emotional range, using intimate quotations gleaned from the glossy urban nights where Halston and Lauren Hutton reigned, is a metaphorical triumph.

Many of the pieces in Night Visions were composed from the pages of fashion magazines - Vogue in particular. Often, Pekoc used ads for high-end luxury goods, transforming carefully sliced, anonymous commodities into fragmentary symbols. They seem neither manufactured nor natural, but like sensuous theorems - semi-abstract objects at play in a dimension of calm desire. That they seem so fresh as they enter their fourth decade is a tribute to Pekoc's deep sincerity as a lexicographer of personal truths.

Christopher Pekoc: Night VISIONs 1975Ð2000 Tregoning & Company 1300 W. 78th St. Through March 29 216.281.8626

CHRISTOPHER PEKOC JOINS TREGONING & COMPANY

Tregoning & Company is pleased to announce that CHRISTOPHER PEKOC – one of the most admired and honored Cleveland artists of his generation – has joined the gallery in a new partnership.

Bill Tregoning, T&Co owner and gallerist stated, “Chris’s decision to join Tregoning & Company confirms once again our commitment to the very best creative artists working in our area. Pekoc joins our roster of other mature contemporary artists of our region. We exhibit their art in one of the finest, most spacious galleries in Northern Ohio, and creatively market their works, drawing on our 35 years’ experience in the Fine Art market.”

To celebrate this important new relationship, Tregoning & Company has organized the first significant exhibition of Pekoc’s art from 1975 to 2000. CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 presents 26 seminal works of art on canvas, paper and mixed media that form the foundation of Pekoc’s continuing exploration of “the Human Condition” – deconstructed, fragmented and resurrected in remarkable new forms. “Collage and photography [here seen in fragmentary magazine images] are the root of Pekoc’s entire artistic output,” said Tregoning. “These exhibited works provide a powerful key towards understanding the work he is admired for today.”

Night has always provided Pekoc refuge from daily distractions and a quiet, still environment within which to work. Night’s mysteries and ambiguities, its romance and danger, infuse the airbrushed acrylic paintings, the pastels, the prismacolor drawings and watercolors seen together here publically for the first time in decades. Many exhibited works have received critical acclaim and multiple exhibitions.

CHRISTOPHER PEKOC | Night Visions | 1975-2000 continues through Saturday 28 March 2009. A reception for the artist – including remarks by Dr. Henry Adams and the artist himself – will be held Friday 20 February 2009, from 6 to 9 pm. Ample free guarded parking is adjacent.

Tregoning & Company is in its 26th year in Cleveland. Focusing on fine art in all media from the 17th century through to the present, the gallery specializes in American Art and is noted for its extensive collection of art by artists of the Cleveland School. Its 4800 square feet of gallery space is easily the largest commercial gallery in Cleveland, located in ARTEFACTORY: The Studios of 78th Street building, at 1300 West 78th Street, in the dynamic new Detroit-Shoreway/Gordon Square Arts District. The gallery is easily reached off the end of Shoreway, just 5 minutes from downtown Cleveland and 20 minutes from both East and Western suburbs.

Spine of the Hymnal

Impressions from a recently attended Guitar Mass.

Remembering Bellaire Gardens

Cleveland Canvas Goods

Bill and Mike Morton owners of Cleveland Canvas Goods traded me 100 yards of high quality canvas for a large oil painting installed in there office. I've been using there canvas for years and have been very happy with the results.

My Last Drink

My last drink was January 4th 1984. I used to say that I quit drinking that day, I tried to quit drinking many times before that. It was easy to quit but hard to stay quit. Why did I have the strength that day? After long reflection I've realized that it wasn't me. I was given a gift,the gift of sobriety.
I was spending all my money on alcohol, sick and tired of being sick and tired, feeling angry isolated and alone. I had experienced all the things that go along with an alcoholic life. The most honest prayer I could muster was "Lord I don't want to quit drinking but I know I have to". On that last day I had a glimpse of what kind of guy I really was, not the picture I had of myself but my real situation.
I realized I was nothing, that I had a ruthless concentration on self and my life was ruled by self pity, anxiety, resentment and hate. I was an asshole who didn't now how to live sober. This was my "bottom", it felt hopeless.
I knew about a group of people who's only aim was to stay sober and help another alcoholic achieve sobriety. They told me I didn't have to live that way any more and showed me a new way of life, something I didn't know anything about. I realized the only way to learn how to stay sober is by some one else who all ready had.
I was given hope and a new way of living to be applied one day at a time.