October 15 - November 22, 2019
Carolyn Wenning : Realm(s)
(main gallery)
Public Reception: Saturday, October 19th, 5-8 pm
BoxHeart is proud to present Carolyn Wenning: Realm(s), a new body of artwork that includes drawings, paintings and mixed media pieces. The artwork emerges from sites, settings, and situations both real and imagined. Each painting or drawing occupies the space between abstraction and figuration. Wenning brings together and selectively removes layers of paint, charcoal, and wax to create works of art initially inspired by a place but that quickly depart to more poetic realms celebrating gesture, space, and color.
Wenning exhibits nationally and internationally; most recently at The Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and 707 Penn Gallery in Pittsburgh, and at Obras Residencies in Estremoz, Portugal. She has been included in exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum and The Mattress Factory. Her artwork has won numerous jurors and special recognition awards and is held in private and corporate collections. As well as producing her own work, Wenning is a dedicated art educator. She has taught in the public school system and at various universities including Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chatham University and the School of Education at Carlow University. Her academic training includes an MFA in painting and print media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.
Reception with the Artists
Carolyn Wenning: Realm(s) will be on exhibit from October 15th through November 22nd in BoxHeart’s main gallery. The exhibition coincides with our 2nd-floor gallery exhibit Robert Mirek: For Want of Meaning. The reception with the artists will be held Saturday, October 19th, from 5 - 8 pm.
October 15 - November 22, 2019
Robert Mirek : For Want of Meaning
(upstairs gallery)
Public Reception: Saturday, October 19th, 5-8 pm
BoxHeart is proud to present Robert Mirek: For Want of Meaning, new conceptions of physical and mental spaces described using an alternate alphabet of objects of art, on exhibit in our 2nd-floor gallery.
For over forty years, artist Robert Mirek has cultured an alternate alphabet and built it into sculptural structures rich in meaning. Materials in Mirek’s arsenal include rubber, mylar, thread, stone, pumice acrylic, and glass fragments, embedded into intricately cut plywood forms. Detroit arts-writer Dan B. Jones explains, “His raw ingredients are augmented or terra-formed into landscape features, settlements, and glyphs. All are discrete, but ultimately knowable in relation to one another. Each sculpture possesses its own value and can be appreciated as such but, when taken together a network appears, a constellation of meaning suggests itself”. To emphasize his devotion to art making, Robert Mirek: For Want of Meaning includes mixed-media sculptural wall paintings from several of his series of artworks.
The exhibit begins with four oil paintings on clay board framed to 18” X 14”. Created in the late ’90s, these paintings “harken to a kind of rubric of existence, yet discrete and immediate. Like appetites or emotions stripped of personhood, leaving only the skeletal under-carriage of effect” writes Jones. For Want of Meaning also includes nine sculptures from his series “Thread” (2014-2015) which expose his composition’s architecture: “plywood cut and layered to suggest a rigid architecture upended by seemingly chaotic applications of multicolored fibers”. Six sculptures from his series “Scorched” were selected for the exhibition and are punctuated with Aluminum no. 260 (2004), a 28” X 23” shield of armor in oil paint and silicone rubber with etched aluminum. Created between 2006 – 2008, the “Scorched” sculptures are like ancient glyphs created with burnt paper pulp, inked mylar, and silicone rubber on plywood.
Sculptures from his series “Strand” (2010-2013) and his series “Seeds, Comets, and Shuttlecocks” (2017) are caressed with two paintings from his series “Tarpaulin”. Particularly organic, sculptures from “Strand” and “Seeds, Comets, and Shuttlecocks” are akin to magnificent jewels – individual and unique – placed purposely together to form delicate patterns of color and shape. In “Strand”, “the symmetrical arrangements of glass and stone reach out from the wall, as if in still formation”. “Seeds, Comets, and Shuttlecocks” command attention. Simultaneously weird and wonderful, the ten sculptures selected from this series for this exhibition spring forth with powerful vulnerability. Mirek’s “Tarpaulin” series is among his newest artworks. Created in 2018, his chosen materials for these works are stitched and grommeted in Belgian linen over 40” X 60” in size.
Jones eloquently writes of Mirek, “he seems to take a suggested, even ethereal, form and layer something substantial above. We are satisfied, yet the dissonance remains, dancing in our periphery. Our minds want to create order out of this dissonance, they demand it, and this is the artistry of Robert Mirek. To define the individual, but to organize it symphonically. To restlessly traverse the networks that connect our worlds, organizing the lights as we search for meaning”.
Mirek was born in Detroit Michigan in 1957. He received his BFA in Painting from the College for Creative Studies. Recent solo and group exhibitions include; Sacred Spaces at Higher Art Gallery, Haute Domain Detroit a new dwelling and exhibition in Detroit, 100 Sculptures: A Survey of Contemporary Sculpture at the Ella Sharp Museum, Abstraction an invitational exhibition by Rick Vian at Janice Charach Gallery, Big Sculpture Show at 333 Midland, Echoes a three-person exhibit at Galerie Camille, and Robert Mirek a solo exhibition at the Detroit Center for Design and Technology.
Reception with the Artists
Robert Mirek: For Want of Meaning will be on exhibit from October 15th through November 22nd in BoxHeart’s 2nd-floor gallery. The exhibition coincides with our main gallery exhibit Carolyn Wenning: Realm(s). The reception with the artists will be held Saturday, October 19th, from 5 - 8 pm.