This is Sandy Brown Jensen, and you’re listening to Viz City, KLCC’s arts review program.
I’m here today to talk you into going to see an art exhibit at Maude Kerns Art Center with the unlikely title of “despondent.”
Nobody ever asks me, but I would have called this stunning six woman show something a bit more appealing like “Shadow of the Night” because the themes these brave artists take on are more toward mystery and protest, as well as the profundity of trying to model deep time.
It is Kumja Lee who takes on deep time in a beautiful, mesmerizing, large-scale, floor-to-ceiling installation of many colored parallel, criss-crossing threads with delicate gradations of color. This piece explodes with a rainbow visual complexity that represents the progression of time that measures and sieves ALL human emotion in its incomprehensible immensity.
So there is something beautiful.
For something that has got to strike you as funny, M. V. Moran has three giant drawings of women in 1950’s bathing suits. Making a humorous turn on the Greek muses, these sisters are called “Disheartened,” “Discouraged,” and “Dispirited,” pretty much how I’d feel in one of those bathing suits myself! But I’m there for the drawing, which has quick, sure, evocative strokes.
I also like the environmental protest paintings by Amanda Wilcox; bright blooms called “Invasive Flowers”; a cheerful yellow mobile of plastic water bottles called, “Strange Fruit: Homage to Flint, Michigan.”
I left this show not even remotely despondent, but, rather, invigorated and inspired by these six artists working with intensity and imagination.
This show is up until March 20.
Viz City is co-produced by Terry Way and Sandy Brown Jensen.