Art: 3-way Harmony

John Miller's "She Sees What I See"

Bellevue University Exhibit
Through Nov. 7
Bellevue University
Hitchcock Center
1000 Galvin Road South
bellevue.edu

It is obligatory for a university art gallery to offer faculty and student shows, and they are often more than perfunctory. In 2009, UNO hosted a worthy example of each while Creighton’s current faculty show is quite strong particularly the work offered by photographer Don Doll and mixed media artist Tim Guthrie.

When galleries offer their space to artists outside their academic pervue, it adds a welcome dimension to the local art scene. This is especially true when universities open their doors to local and regional artists always looking for venues. It’s good for the institutions too, away of giving back, a way of supporting established artists and launching the careers of the emerging.

While we anticipate the Kent Bellow’s Mentor Art Show, which opens Nov. 17 at Creighton’s Lied Gallery, make the effort to see the current exhibit at Bellevue University’s Hitchcock Center, which continues through Nov. 7. Bellevue art shows often arrive unheralded and under the radar and that is a shame. The untitled exhibit features accomplished work from three familiar “faces,” Bob Willits, John Miller and Renee Ledesma Hoover, and they deserve to be seen.

Mike Giron, artist and Bellevue professor, has organized another fine show with individual pieces professionally grouped and lit on the lobby floor and in display cases. Yet the show would benefit from more curatorial attention such as artist and show statements clearly posted and a list of works and credits in lieu of ID labels.

A title would help also. Even a simple one lends an exhibit some authority and reinforces the venue’s contribution to both academia and the community. Giron says the show began “as an interest in a Day of the Dead theme” which makes sense given the close proximity to the approaching All Souls and Saints Days. But only Hoover actively engages Dia de Los Muertos in this show, and even then unexpectedly, so Giron took another tack.

“It turned into transition from the dark side to themes of hope and renewal,” he said. “The darker motifs split between the personal/internal supplied by Miller and the social as depicted in the series on greed drawn by Willits. Hoover’s bright upbeat work balances the other two.”

That said, why not call this multi-dimensional show, “Mind, Body and Soul,” because in that order Willits’ charcoal and oil pastels are satirical and analytical, Miller’s oils are sensual and emotional and Hoover’s mixed media and clay sculptures are mythic and spiritual. What unites them are: themes of life, death and renewal, though only Hoover explores the last; work that is largely figurative and narrative; a bold, expressive palette; and less obviously, an avoidance of art for art’s sake or anything remotely resembling Conceptual Art, Abstract Expressionism or the picaresque. It’s personal with these three, and they tend to wear their ideas (Willits), feelings (Miller) and hopes (Hoover) on their canvasses.

The exhibit begins with 11 mixed media on paper from Willits, eight of which are dominated by “Fat Pink Men,” fat corporate cats flashing Charles Bronson grins (In Europe, Bronson was called “the smile that kills”). Each figure projects a CEO image whose countenance deteriorates before our eyes left to right across this powerful series. The demonic avarice and hypocrisy is timely, if somewhat overt, but Willits measures his satire with an appropriate set of icons that offer the viewer clues as to each work’s intent.
In “Fat Pin Men # 1” an appropriate subtitle might be “Caveat Emptor,” as this “suit’s” welcoming smile shields whatever he has up his sleeve. In #2 or “The Gambler,” the grin of this fat pink man can’t hide the glint in his eye as he plays us like pawns on a chess board. In #3, we glimpse the value system of the “Ugly American” wielding a handgun and posed before a sullied American flag. The message of false patriotism, hypocrisy and profiting from the point of a gun may seem obvious to some, but the image does the satire justice.

The last two “Fat Pink Men” are worthy of poet/painter William Blake’s grimmest imagery of the human condition. “FPM #5” depicts a “Corporate Carnivore” feasting on raw beefsteak while a roosting vulture awaits its turn to devour the remains of each. This theme of greedy consumption and self-destruction continues with Willits’ most successfully provocative piece, “FPM (Déjà vu)” or “The Doppelganger” as our protagonist is seen eating his own skull like mask; his shadow or mirror image, which has been consuming him. Soon there will be nothing left of either. Willits doesn’t paint a pretty picture of corporate America, an aesthetic highlighted by rough, dark, gestural mark-making. His POV is expressive, cynical and unforgiving, but portraits of the loss of one’s soul usually are.

Likewise, Miller’s oils are dark and forbidding, but he interprets his more personal narratives with a style that borders on the surreal and the fantastic with a definite nod to the sixties. “So much was going on and changing,” Miller said, “and the arts were a great part of it. I really wanted to a part of that.” In the seventies he felt like a misfit studying art at UNO because “I was a figurative painter and that was taboo … everything was Abstract Expressionism.” Later he met many local artists including Willits with whom he shares the belief “that art needs content to be art.”

Miller has 13 oils here, a few on wood panels. In all he uses an old master’s technique of painting in thin layers and a type of glazing called scumbling. Not only has his process matured, Miller has become more self-introspective, moving from the socio-political to issues closer to home exposing “our inner demons, beliefs, fears and loves. I try to present these with bright colors and a little bit of humor. He saves the humor for his large “Ashland Gothic” which effectively parodies Grant Wood, and the sarcastically titled “Hot Roast Beef Salad,” “Death of a Buick” and “Plastic Jugs.” And the latter only if you ignore text references that frame the hapless woman covering her bosom and interpret this narrative instead as “I got them bad breast implant blues.” Perhaps not, but Miller’s scenarios invite interpretation, and his imagery provokes without its distracting text messages.

Especially effective here are his female figures who, again from left to right in “Lament #57,” “Distilled … Revisited,” “A Need to Fly” and the inconclusive “Carla’s Brand New Necklace,” suffer their demons with increasing dehumanization. In all, our tortured women endure stages of ennui, despair, mental illness and addiction, often with the half-naked, bare-breasted seduction and resignation of a Courtney Love. Miller doesn’t paint a pretty picture either, but as “Ashland Gothic” is a self-portrait of sorts, it would appear that his is finally comfortable in his own skin and all that his art implies.

After the edgier art of Willits and Miller, Hoover’s optimistic and transcendent work will seem like a welcome relief. As this is her second group show this year with a solo on the horizon Nov. 20 at Pulp Gallery, viewers may be familiar with her life-affirming “Ofrendas,” among others, in clay and mixed media. Titled here as “Puerta Abierta’s” (open door), they feature a solo figure posed on altar-like stages making an offering typically of symbolic birds and flowers.

Hoover says this is her more positive response to the Day of the Dead by “embracing my rich Mexican heritage. My interpretation is that it has less to do with death and more with the celebration of life.” Her figures are “angelistas” (little angels) whose graceful innocence projects its own transition from left to right via facial expression and emotion. In a sort of rite of passage her angelistas experience anxiety, longing, rapture, transcendence and the sublime, qualities that coincide with titles of each piece.

After the harsh realities and emotionally wrenching work from Willits and Miller, this soulful study from Hoover is a fitting finish to this deserving show in search of a title and an audience.