by donald dusinberre imartsyfartsy@gmail.com
I took a trip into Springfield recently to visit 9th and Liberty, an up-and-coming gallery space in Jacksonville. During my visit, I realized a few things about myself and my city.
When I was younger, I never wanted to see people in photographs or paintings. I preferred to look at landscapes- the whole picture from corner to corner. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but perhaps I believed that the presence of human figures was distracting, disorderly and out of place.
I felt the purpose of taking a photo or drawing a picture was to specifically limit what the image meant. People make things complicated, their bodies dragging a story into the frame and muddling its simplicity. I tended to enjoy the wide, shallow pool of cursory background information. These days I feel just the opposite about the human presence in art. I relish the bottomless trenches of human influence, especially when their bodies and expressions are skewed by an artist’s hand. I have hundreds of photos of buildings and countryside from a fantastic trip I took to the Ukraine long ago, but now they all seem so boring. If I wasn’t able to remember how I felt when I took them, they’d probably have no value whatsoever.
The general idea of Digital to Physical, created and executed by local artist Byron King, was to contact artists from across the nation through email, a digital mode of communication. The artists then sent their work to the gallery, where the mode of communication took on a physical nature. That communication itself was the golden thread that bound the entire show. It is found in the body language of living things, in the virtual space of email, and in the artwork shown at the gallery.
The exhibition at 9th and Liberty wasn’t necessarily arranged to highlight living forms. Not every artist in the gallery creates work with people or animals (or monsters), but I was definitely drawn more to those artists who do, including Dan May, Chris Crites, Kevin Taylor, Ken Vallario, Sean Mahan, and John Casey.
For instance, Dan May paints strange little monsters in awkward situations. Even though his creatures are imaginary, it is plainly obvious that they are meant to experience the same range of emotion that people do. Kevin Taylor paints gawky, twisted human nudes that exaggerate body language to a dramatic degree. Sean Mahan and Chris Crites (better known as Bag Painter) offer portraits of ordinary people with strangely blasé facial expressions, begging us to ask them more about their story. All of the artists in the exhibition have highly skilled hands and stellar storytelling capabilities, and any one of the paintings that incorporate humans (or monsters) is capable of capturing the imagination.
Not only do the forms within the artwork communicate with our senses and imagination, the diversity of artists also tells us something very important. With artists from all over the country, including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, Digital to Physical also includes artists from Jacksonville, communicating the idea that Jacksonville’s artists can hang with just about anyone, anywhere. It’s a bold statement, to be sure, and it turns out to be completely true. Kudos to Byron King for establishing proof that there really are great artists in Jacksonville. It’s now up to the rest of the city to realize it.
Be sure to check out this exhibition at your earliest convenience. It’s truly rare to experience such a large display of great artwork in one place at one time. You may have never heard of any of these artists, but you should, and the majority of work from outside Jacksonville may never travel here again.
To learn more about 9th and Liberty, visit their website at 9thandliberty.com.
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