Two Fine Arts Faculty Receive OAC Individual Excellence Awards
Mark Harris and Don Kelley of DAAP's School of Art are the recipients of Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council.
Mark Harris, director of the University of Cincinnati's School of Art, part of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), and Don Kelley, professor in the School of Art, are recipients of Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council.
Based on examples of recent work and an artist statement detailing past and ongoing work, each received a $4,000 grant to pursue future creative endeavors.
Mark Harris Harris is an artist, critic and curator. His diverse approaches to making artwork include painting, installation, video, and photography. His work has exhibited nationally and internationally, throughout North America, Europe and elsewhere.
In his winning proposal to the OAC, Harris submitted three recent video works:
- Mao Songs
- Utopian-Bands
- Video Drawings
In "Mao Songs," 35 Beijing performers are filmed singing Mao Zedong's Long March poems. They represent a wide range of musicians, including traditional musicians from parks, pop singers from bars, street musicians from subways and rock-and-roll vocalists from clubs.
Linking these present-day musicians with Mao's poems represents the juxtaposition and integration of the contemporary with the historical. The Long March poems were written between 1934-36, predating the Communist State. They evoke an intense connection with nature and reflect Mao's idea of individual transformation through an experience of nature. The future they summon is not the one that came about.
States Harris, "I intend the project to reference the complexity of Mao's legacy for present-day Chinese."
"Utopian-Bands" explores imagery of intoxication as a form of utopian representation. The work imagines intoxication functioning as an alternative to the aggressively incursive strategies of the historical avant-garde.
"Utopian-Bands" represents the culmination of his work following a trip Harris took in the summer of 2006 when he traveled to Beijing to document six Chinese rock bands in an outdoor concert he co-organized with Beijing alternative music promoter Yang Licai.
The work captures a glimpse of the cultural changes sweeping China and celebrates Beijing rock bands as the return of the repressed utopian communities once stifled by a Chinese
Communism focused on national social reorganization.
"Video Drawings" consists of a series of ad-hoc drawings recorded on video as they were made. One, in Detroit's airport, is interrupted by police. Others were made on public transport or in hotels in Austria, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The videos propose that if the concept of "drawing" exists at all, it should exist everywhere, at any time.
Don Kelley
Kelley is a sculptor and printmaker. His prints are in permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Simon Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County's Artist's Book Collection.
His work - both printmaking and sculpture - is motivated by interest in and curiosity regarding the natural world, especially the earth and certain landscape forms and the natural forces that inexorably alter the land over time.
Kelley's sculpture installations are comprised of dry clay and steel because, as he states, "I like the contrast between the hard sharp-edged steel and the soft and ephemeral nature of dry clay. There is a striking tension in the combination of these materials that is fascinating and beautiful to me."
He shapes the dry clay and forms it onto the steel plates in a way that suggests changes in the earth occurring over the long span of geologic time. The powdered clay is pushed to exceed its angle of repose - hanging precariously but tenaciously along the edges of steel usually cut into geometric shapes of various sizes, including parallelograms, trapezoids, segments and arcs of circles.
According to Kelley, the history of the modern world is replete with efforts to "control nature," often with disastrous results. In his sculpture, the relationship between the crisp, stable geometry of steel and the fluid, unstable nature of powdered clay suggests the problematic relationship between humans and nature.
Recently, for the first time ever, Kelley created a series influenced by the "front pages of today's newspapers." His Timeline series features soft clay pierced with sharp steel fragments, like those that might be found in an improvised explosive device. These installations not only refer to geologic changes in the earth but also refer to the timeline of violence in the Middle East.
Kelley used his award from the OAC to purchase materials and supplies for his current series, which will eventually consist of 100 different landscape forms of steel and clay in varying sizes and shapes. He has completed approximately 30 of these sculptures.
Kelley is also working on a hand-printed lithography project that references several sculptures he has previously made that were inspired by Constantin Brancusi's 96-foot high "Endless Column," located in Romania. He is referencing the physical sculpture in print on paper, wherein the paper can be extended to run its full length up and down a wall. Or, it can be folded - accordion like - into a box.
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