EXHIBITION Information & ARTICLES
Thank you to Jud Yalkut and Pam Dillon for your arts coverage.
Let’s just say that December and January were busy months, I am glad to be looking at them from February. I had three shows in a relatively short amount of time –my Thesis Show: photography by Paula Willmot Kraus, work included in a traveling show called “In The Garden”, and Still Lives & Other Memeories, photographs by Paula Willmot Kraus.
The Thesis Show: photographs by Paula Willmot Kraus was the culmination of work done for my master’s degree at Anitoch University McGregor and represented two years of long days and nights. It was a great experience working with my advisors: Sean Wilkinson of the Univeristy of Dayton, Ben Montague of Wright State University, Dennie Eagleson of Antioch College, and Dr. Jon Saari of McGregor. The combined experience of my four advisors made my experience rich and helped me raise the quality of my photographs.
Jud Yalkut is a great local artist with a national reputation and a talent for arts writing.
From the Dayton City Paper
December 3-9, 2008
Reprinted by permission of the Dayton City Paper
A P H O T O G R A P H I C A D I E U
THE WORKS OF PAULA WILLMOT KRAUS IN YELLOW SPRINGS
By Jud Yalkut
Paula Willmot Kraus has been a notable photographic artist for more than 25 years with shows locally featuring her work at the Dayton Art Institute Regional Artist Gallery and the Dayton Visual Arts Center. Currently a traveling exhibition of her work called “In the Garden,” has been curated by DVAC and the Massillon Museum.
For the past two years, Kraus has been completing her master’s program in Individualized Liberal & Professional Studies at Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs. This realm of study, working with area photographers like Sean Wilkinson of the University of Dayton, Benjamin Montague of Wright State University and Antioch College’s Dennie Eagleson, has allowed her access to the Antioch College campus during its final year of operation, completed in May 2008. The fruits of this long labor are displayed through December 19 at the Antioch McGregor facility.
Following her instincts in the genre of documentary photography, Kraus developed an eye “towards recording evidence, this left behind by countless students, faculty, and staff” over the decades of Antioch’s existence. She intentionally avoided the portrayal of people in her documentation to give greater importance to the spaces with an eye to the “anthropologist’s trove of artifacts from which to dissect the represented culture.” represented culture.”
Kraus felt that, during that year of looming tension surrounding Antioch’s uncertain and precarious future, it was important to record the college and its unique character as a historic landmark. Throughout these images she produced are traces and “evidence of the spirits of students who have left their marks.”
“This is Love” is scrawled in chalk on the lintel of the North Building residence hall, and written in ink over scratched graffiti on the arm of a student desk is “We dream of a New
Reality because We Believe in the Reality of Our Dreams.” In “Meiosis, Science Building,” colorful biological charts intersect at an angle. As cultural frieze mural of giant figures is seen above an angled volleyball net in “Mural Curl Gymnasium.”
Dramatically arranged in a row against a radiator and a yellow wall are the “Yellow Chairs, Theater Department” with the words “Administrator,” “Villager,” “Faculty” and “Alum” painted in black letters. “Art Project, Main Building” has an expressionist construction with exaggerated angles standing before the actual red brick Kelly Hall like a superimposed dream. A Georgia O’Keefe-like cow’s skull adorns the wall between windows revealing autumnal trees in “Fall 2007, Science Building.” The word “”happy” is repeated on each ascending gray metal step in “Happy, Art Building.”
Also from 2008 is an elegant series of black-and-white Palladium prints, which are floral images, quite unlike the usual photographic clichés. Posing her springs of blossoms on a liquid base, Kraus looks for the deeper resonance and rich “qualities of light and depth given by surface tension” captured her in beautiful velvety tones. “They melt before the lens,” notes Kraus, “and display their delicate and complicated structures, their splendid geometry and architecture.” The bells of “Lily of the Valley” arch in a subtle curve with auroral waves of outline. A pair of “Bleeding Heart” blooms float like angel wings on the dark fluid surface.
The apexes of “Dogwood Flowers,” with their dark berry-like centers, seem illuminated with radiating energy, two floating blossoms form “Hostas” face yin-yang-like in opposition. Dual discs of “Money Plants” float like lily pads on a limpid gray void. Kraus also has a pair of
“Violets” with their striated patterns floating in grayness, and two opposing “Japanese Ferns” are graceful figures within darkness.
Kraus has included an earlier 2007 set of black- and-white photographs in a series called “Still Lifes and Other Statements.” Much of her earlier work has relied on metaphorical juxtapositions that translate into visual poetry. Here, she is attracted through contemplation and experimentation “to still life photographs to study the effects of light, focus and the frame.”
“By selecting small objects in extremely close work,” Kraus finds mechanical shapes “that evoke memories of my father, an engineer.” A conical metal pyramid is shot with a skeletonized leaf with its veins exposed in “Leaf/Pyramid.” Another such leaf lies before a gray metal ball in “Leaf/Ball,” and a small gear with a stem like a gyroscope lies on a bed of rusted metal and mesh in “Gear.”
In addition, a single “English Rose” leans out of a soft-focus glass vase, a submerged “Flower in a Vase” is placed before a soft-focus glass pitcher and a loose “Foxglove” blossom reclines on a glistening field of light. Such images are manifestations of Kraus’ interest in formal elements like shape, line, and tonality which she skillfully employs “to evoke a sense of stillness, memory, tenderness, and the temporality of life.”
IN THE GARDEN now at its fourth and final location of this traveling show representing the work of 11 Ohio Artists is at the Dayton Visual Arts Center. There is much I could say about it, but I will keep it short so that you can read the review – first, it is so great to have my work shown with some of my favorite local photographers, Sean Wilkinson, Ben Montague, Andy Snow, and Otterbein’s David Stichweh. There are some talented photographers in Ohio and this show represents a wide range of talent, styles and processes. It is a virtual history of photographic processes on display. The following is an article reproduced with permission from the Dayton Daily News.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/story/content/oh/story/living/2009/01/13/ddn011409lifedvac.html
Get a preview of spring
By Pamela Dillon
Contributing Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Come in out of the cold this winter and warm up with images of flowers dappled with sunshine. The last stop of the traveling exhibit, “In The Garden: Photographic Images by Ohio Artists,” is on view at the Dayton Visual Arts Center. The exhibit was organized by The Massillon Museum and funded by the Ohio Arts Council.
The exhibit features myriad ways to interpret a garden’s beauty: archival injet prints, dry plate tintypes, color prints, collages, photo monoprints, chromogenic color prints, and even X-ray prints.
Two large-scale archival inkjet prints by Tony Mendoza greet visitors just inside the door. Get a very unusual, bug’s eye view of a field of yellow flowers. It’s a new perspective with little surprises, like a ladybug resting on one of the petals. Mendoza is a professor of photography at The Ohio State University.
“Gardens appeal to a wide variety of audiences, and gardens tend to evoke memories for all who enjoy them,” said Massillon Museum of Art exhibit organizer/curator Christine Fowler Shearer. “In the same way, each artist who focuses on the garden as a theme will approach it in a new way.”
Four artists in the exhibit reside locally, and are current DVAC members:
Paula Willmot Kraus is showing color prints that showcase one aspect of a plant through focus and lighting. “Japanese Fern” brings out the minute details of a curled leaf, while softening the backdrop.
“They begin as blades of grass, flowers and seed pods, but when translated through the lens, they become a palette offering up shades and shapes and colors,” said Kraus, a fine art photographer and educator at The Ohio Institute of Photography and Technology. “At times the intimate magnification causes the slightest adjustment in focus to alter everything. The flora become abstract, soothing, Zen-like.”
Benjamin Montag is presenting five small dry plate tintypes of insects in dark frames. His perspective makes the bugs seem fragile and vulnerable.
“There is a hidden beauty within the delicate skeleton of a cicada shell,” said Montag, an assistant professor at Wright State University teaching photography and art education.
Andy Snow has been working as a photographer and digital artist for 35 years, and his expertise is apparent. For “Empress’s Garden, Beijing” a delicate tree becomes the vertical filter that beautifies and transforms human-made horizontal elements. In another image, thick fog lends a mysterious mood. The color digital print of “Orchid 1530″ changes the blooms to symmetrical designs of light and shadow.
“Serendipity manifests nonverbal beauty in the play of color and light. Content blooms in the face of infinite non-narrative perception,” Snow says.
Like Mendoza, Sean Wilkinson’s perspective for the exhibit was from below looking up. His images focused on the beauty of fallen leaves on an abandoned greenhouse in Yellow Springs. In the Transparency series, a single leaf seems to float on separate panes of glass. He is a Universitiy of Dayton faculty member.
Other artists in the show include David Bergholz, Judith McMillan, Ardine Nelson, P.J. Rogers, David Stichweh, and Tennyson Williams.
HOW TO GO
What: “In the Garden: Photographic Images by Ohio Artists”
Where: Dayton Visual Arts Center, 118 N. Jefferson St.
When: Through Feb. 19
Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday (until 9 p.m. Thursday)
More info: (937) 224-3822 or www.daytonvisualarts.org
If you haven’t been to the Dayton Visual Arts Center in downtown dayton this is a great opportunity to see a great space and an exhibition that will warm your chilly winter soul. While you are there say hello to Jane, Patrick, and Janelle!
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