Collinwood gallery bubbles over with edgy energy of Cleveland artists
by Steven Litt/Plain Dealer Art Critic Wednesday August 27, 2008, 12:00 PM
Courtesy of Vision Art Gallery Don't try this at home: The artist known as The Sign Guy offers some radical advice in "The Burning Man," part of the show "Coup on Waterloo: The Ghetto Intelligentsia" at Vision Art Gallery in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood.REVIEW
Vision Art Gallery
What: The group exhibition "Coup on Waterloo: The Ghetto Intelligentsia."
When: Through Sept. 5
Where: 410 East 156th St., Cleveland
Admission: Free. Call 216-409-1031.
ART MATTERS
Art galleries and museums in the 19th century crammed their walls to create visual excitement with "salon-style" exhibitions. The technique is alive and well in Cleveland's Collinwood neighborhood, where the current exhibit at Vision Art Gallery fills two modestly scaled rooms with roughly 120 paintings, drawings and sculptures by 16 Cleveland artists.
The goal of artist-participant-curators Sunia Boneham and Michel Di Liberto is to create a sense of boiling energy in the space formerly known as True Gallery, which closed last January after a thief broke in and stole 33 paintings and photographs.
Boneham and Di Liberto have succeeded. Their show, titled "Coup on Waterloo: The Ghetto Intelligentsia," is a miracle of organized compression, filled with work that has a raw, scruffy edge and an Arte Povera buzz. The title, inspired by the survival of persecuted Jewish communities in Europe, is meant to evoke the idea that community spirit can overcome negative forces.
The quality of work in the show varies considerably, and you wonder whether some participants have the drive and the self-critical energy to improve. For example, Dana Depew's sculptural light fixtures, made of carpet-covered cylinders festooned with flowery glass Victorian lampshades, command attention with visual bombast rather than a sense of being finely made.
But there's enough good work on view to justify a visit before the show ends. Highlights include the hallucinatory, apocalyptic illustrations of Jake Kelly, a Florida native who specializes posters, T-shirts and album covers.
One Kelly image shows an asteroid smashing into the Earth while hundreds of doomed human beings look on amid an urban landscape framed by two monumental skulls and a pair of giant, slime-covered cartoon characters rising out of cracks in the ground.
Also outstanding are the small paintings and placards by the artist known as The Sign Guy, who peppers Tremont with his wiseacre creations. The Sign Guy is an equal-opportunity offender. His paintings include a drunken Santa and a cartoonish bird who chirps "Vote for Me" in one frame and "Jesus Saves" in another.
Vision Art is a for-profit project organized by local property owners and art enthusiasts including Miles Kennedy, a retired associate professor from Case Western Reserve University.
Di Liberto, a 30-year-old rock musician and native of Collinwood, moved back to the neighborhood from New York recently with Boneham, a 34-year-old native of Rochester, N.Y., who has a master of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute in New York City, and their year-old son, Harrison.
"We moved back to Cleveland because it's so cheap and our quality of life is so much better," Boneham said. "We want to give an overview of the local art community and organize as many shows as we can to help bring this neighborhood back."
After the current show comes down, Vision Art has three exhibitions planned through the end of the year, and is planning on starting silkscreen classes in the fall.