Art Faculty Biennale Exhibit at Komechak Art Gallery

Once every other year, the Art faculty at benedictine University get an opportunity to exhibit the artwork they do outside of the classroom. It is an opportunity for the students, faculty and staff at the university to see what their colleagues do, and an opportunity for the community to see the quality work that comes from the Fine and Graphic Arts Department at Benedictine University.

First up is the work of painter David Marcet. Pictured here is his "Darwin's Eden", a superb work involving beauty, Nature and the ever-tempting apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden. Marcet has three paintings in the exhibit, which stand out for their scale, and their mastery of media. He includes a self-portrait in "Two faces" and a life-sized portrait of his father, Thomas, which is an engaging portrait for the realistic image of his father mixed with an abstracted backdrop. Next up is an installation piece by Teresa J. Parker, called "Reveal/Conceal". Her old-fashioned vanity table and chair sit quietly in the front of the gallery. On the table are a set of ten mirrors, which when the viewer picks up, one can see images painted on the mirror surface. The images are portions of collaged images of battered women. her point is to bring the viewer into the piece and make them confront the subject face to face. It is a difficult subject in today's society, and Parker handles it with aplomb. Parker also has a progressive drawing mixed media piece in the gallery, where she is working on the piece during the length of the exhibit, working on it a little each day. The purpose there is to show the creative process.

Jennifer Scavone brings a painting and two photographs to the exhibition this year. The image pictured here is of "Autumn Fog" which is an excellent view of an early morning walk in the woods. Scavone's delicately handled composition harkens to the pictorial era of Stieglitz and Steichen. One longs to see more from this series.

William Scarlato, chair of the Fine Arts department at Benedictine University, has chosen to exhibit a still life and a series of five landscape paintings. Scarlato has worked with the still life format for some years, and his "Reverence for Life" composition in this show is a subtly nuanced balance of life and imitation with a stuffed bird and an image of a bird in the painting. His newer landscape series marks a departure toward direct observation of Nature. The results are quite pleasing, and the scale of the work creates an intimate relationship with the viewer for places found in and around the Lisle, Illinois area, but they also extend east and west to the US southwest. These landscape include no man-made object or person, and have the feeling of a 19th century English landscape like John Clayton Adams. The work is intimate, in a break with traditional landscape painting where Scarlato's colleagues would attempt to describe a larger vista. Here, Scarlato delves into the complexity of an deceptively simpler space. The work is quietly contemplative.

Artist books by HaiRi Han and Karen Brooks demonstrate a variety of media and material with this ever popular art form. Han, who is head of the Graphic Art and Design program, shows an excellent accordian style book, called "We Are Family". Brooks, whose mastery is calligraphy, combines her interests in book-making and hand-printed imagery to produce a booklet of tender communication between lovers.

The large scale painting by artist/art therapist Stacy Jo Barber brings a breeze of fresh air to the exhibit. The subject (cropped image here)is herself reflected in her husband's sunglasses. This joyous double portrait is a triumph for the artist.

Ever the consummate professional photographer, Vincent Lucarelli catches the viewer's attention with his "Cool Choke". Lucarelli has built a reputation for experimentation and perfection of his craft. His photographs as in this piece size up the singular subject and analyze it, but he turns it on its ear and gives the viewer an unexpected solarized surprise. The works by Mesa Arizona's Harold Lohner and Susan K. Davis round out the exhibition with her Nature-based drawings and watercolors, and his monoprint of cactus people.

Finally, the scene-stealer of the show is the work of Michael Tole, who teaches at Benedictine University's Mesa Arizona campus. Tole's "Circle" painting on board is rich, sumptuous and wonderfully fleshy. The intertwined figures elegantly crowd the tight composition and seem to move between the realm of the living with the realm of the imagined or ghosts of the past. His technical prowess is evident and his figures happily hover somewhere between being solid mass and/or vaporous. The exhibit at Komechak Art Gallery will run October 9 through November 12. For more information on the artists, please contact the gallery at tparker@ben.edu or call 1-630-829-1874. www.ben.edu/artgallery