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

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris and Her Magical Realism

Well, if Komechak Art Gallery was to start off an exhibition season with a smash up painting show, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris would have to be the logical choice. Her work is stunning, engaging, curiously quirky and richly painted. The woman's subjects range from swans, to women morphing into other animistic forms and flowers and birds abound.

The delightful way in which Spiess-Ferris engages her audience is a classic game of cat and mouse. The audience is seduced by her subject and color, and caught in the cat's clutches with her mastery of the painting process, which in this case is oil and gouache. Spiess-Ferris knows her animals and birds. Many of her works include species indigenous to the Midwest, and her purpose in describing them so accurately is to preserve the wildlife around us. The same is true when she describes flowers. Their delicate blooms are handled gently by her feminine subjects.

Spiess-Ferris has been moving toward a smaller composition in this exhibit, using intricately woven painted borders around the subjects. They have a woven, protected feel from the elements, and the figures are securely placed centrally in the compositions.

I enjoy the way Spiess-Ferris' female subjects emanate out of watery bodies, and move lithely through a river. They carry the gifts of Nature (flowers and birds' nests) on their heads like crowns, or on their arms one finds a swan wrapped around the figure's body. Curous little bugs and creatures morph into one another easily, and one cannot imagine a world where this kind of things does not exist. Spiess-Ferris' imaginaiton allows the viewer to transport to her world, and we do not care if we return to our own world. The places she paints are far too interesting to leave.

Her sense of magical realism is based upon her own upbringing in New Mexico and the visual and literary influences of Latin America. That sense of a special place where things are not quite real, but surreal, is where Spiess-Ferris' own images come from.

Spiess-Ferris was born in Las Vegas, New Mexico in 1941. As a recognized artist, Spiess-Ferris’ work incorporates influences of the Spanish and Native American cultures of Northern New Mexico. She earned her B.F.A. degree at University of New Mexico, and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her works blend mythological, spiritual, psychological, environmental and feminist themes in dreamlike contexts. She plays with the ideas of Symbolist art by morphing figures of women into roots, trees, leaves and birds, and her work integrates elements of surrealism, symbolism and expressionism. Spiess-Ferris teaches at the The Art Center of Evanston, Illinois. She has received numerous major art awards and citations including Artist-in-Residence grants at Anchor Graphics and Paper Press, Chicago, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Grant and a Vielehr Award from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Public Collections: Benedictine University, Lisle, IL Block Museum at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, IL Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL James R. Thompson Center, Chicago, IL Portland Museum of Fine Art, Portland, OR Wustum Museum of Fine Art, Racine, WI

CAVA comes to the Komechak Art Gallery

The Fr. Michael E. Komechak, O.S.B. Art Gallery is pleased to present its latest exhibition for the summer , May 1st – July 30th. The exhibition features a juried member competition of over fifty works of art, in a variety of media and style, by the group formerly known as Senior Artists’ Network(SAN). SAN was formed twenty-five years ago, in Chicago. Its purpose was to showcase the work of elder artists over the age of fifty-five, and present venues for them to display their art. Many of these artists have had long, productive careers in the arts, whereas some are exploring their creative muscles.

The group recently changed its name to the Chicago Alliance for the Visual Arts (CAVA) and is opening up its membership to include younger artists. Patricia O'Malley., former Director of the Renaissance Court Gallery in the Chicago Cultural Center, and SAN co-founder, helped to coordinate the competition. This year's jurors were Teresa Parker, Curator of the Komechak Art Gallery, and Jennifer Scavone, adjunct faculty at Benedictine University.

Works were selected for their vision, excellence of execution and originality.

Artists interested to join should look at their webpage at http://www.wearecava.org/

For more information regarding the art on campus at Benedictine University, see www.ben.edu/artgallery

Colossal Self-Portraits at Ben U

David Marcet's beginning painting classes at Benedictine University are set with an arduous task: to create a colossal self-portrait. Ugh. To see oneself in the mirror may be hard enough, but to draw and then paint a self-portrait that is not only descriptive, but also captures the students' personality is a challenge, indeed. Marcet's classes show they are up to the challenge, and the exhibit of portraits currently shown on the first floor of Kindlon Hall - north side, are some fine paintings.I will post them here for you to see. Some make me chuckle, some make me smile along with the person in the portrait. But they all engage the viewer with their fresh color and scale. Kudos to Marcet and his class. We look forward to seeing what these students will produce in the future.

The Tactile Art of Book-Making by HaiRi Han

The interest in handmade artist books has grown over the years. So much so that there are degree programs in handmade books across the country. Still, when we find someone who makes handmade books with the sensitivity and flare of Ms. HaiRi Han, we marvel at the complexity with which she makes the objects, but we are astounded when we realize she taught herself how to make her beautiful handmade books.

Han is the head of Graphic Arts and Design at Benedictine University, in Lisle, Il. She studied design at Purdue University and came to Benedictine University in 2012. While she teaches graphic design by day, she spends innumerable hours designing and making her books. These delicate and intricately cut pieces are thematically designed; often on the themes about Nature and the changing of seasons. Han is a master at the accordian-style book which stands up and is visible from multiple angles.

The exhibition at Benedictine University's Komechak Art Gallery will run March 7 through April 7, 2016. Han will give a closing reception lecture on her work on Thursday, April 7th, at 4:00 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.For more information on this exhibition, contact Komechak Art Gallery at 630-829-6270 or write Curator Teresa Parker at tparker@ben.edu

Alan Leder's Photographs of "El Cemeterio de San Miguel de Allende"

Alan Leder has been a known fixture in the Chicago art scene for over two decades - as an educator, arts administrator and more recently known as an artist - photographer. Leder debuted a series of photographs last fall at Benedictine University. The work was from a series he has been working on for several years where he has gone to the city cemetery in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to observe and photograph the nichos and other funerary art.

Leder's intention was to photograph these very personal family remembrances of departed loved ones. What he found were wonderfully unique nichos (a literal square box opening in a wall of niches where a person's remains could be placed for burial. They are often plastered over with cement and then ornamented with paintings photographs and carvings, then adorned with flowers and other mementos of the departed.) These artistic touches are endearing, and sometimes boastful of the departed person's personality. One person was a tap dancer and had a pair of shoes cast and placed onto his nicho. Another person had a photographs of a father and son who had been killed placed together. Flowers and other adornments grace these mini-shrines. Sometime using real flowers, but often using fake ones so they would never wither and would always look fresh.

Some of the cemetery pieces are small boxes with glass coverings. There are pictures of the departed within them, along with flowers as seen above, but sometimes they contain toys for a child who has died. The poignancy of these pieces is palpable. Leder has been to the cemeterio several years now, and he sometimes retakes pictures of nichos he took before as the family has come back and attended or updated their adornments. They become a record of attentiveness to their ancestors in a culture that worships their ancestors on All Saints Day and Day of the Dead celebrations all over the country. Leder has chosen this place to document San Miguel's ancestor repository and the folk art traditions associated with death. The series promises to grow as he continues to explore the cemeterios of San Miguel and Mexico.

Clifton Henri's "Cuba City" Comes to Komechak Art Gallery

Clifton Henri, award-winning photographer from Chicago, Illinois, recently exhibited his photographs of Havana at Benedictine University's Komechak Art Gallery from January 18 - February 29, 2016. Henri's take of life of the Havana streets is eye-catching and engaging. His subjects range from youth fighting in a boxing ring,

to a couple of teens sitting on a stoop. Their faces show a look of promise and faith their fates will be different than their forefathers', who have live in constraint under Communism. They dress in more contemporary clothing, and if it weren't for the fact we know they live in Havana, we would expect to see youth like these young men on any street corner in the US.

Henri said he wanted to visit the country for a long time, and when he got the chance early last year, he jumped at it. He said the culture was fascinating, the people warm and friendly, and music, food and atmosphere were life-changing experiences where he will surely go back to take more pictures and explore more of the island nation.

Henri took portraits of the people he met, and their faces are elegantly portrayed in natural lighting, and without artifice in style or composition. They are straightforward and reveal faces full of life.

The artist also took pictures of buildings and areas seemingly long abandoned, but the mystery of an open door and light falling on a set of old chairs in a boxing center, or light dimly illuminating a stairwell, are inviting for their textures and colors and areas we cannot see.

This photographer is presenting to us a world still largely unknown to the outside world. He shows us the day-to-day activities of people on the street, the time capsule of their environment and all of it makes us want to go visit this uniquely wonderful place. Henri's work is up and coming in attention and awards have been accorded him with growing numbers. We will watch this rising star with optimism as he grows and develops.