Southampton East - Arts & Living
Oct 11, 2007
By Eric Ernst
While most attention is usually paid to either traditional galleries or the growing number of local alternative spaces, both the Southampton Inn off Hill Street and the Southampton Historical Museum on Meetinghouse Lane offer venues that, in their entertainingly disparate and almost eccentric atmospheres, seem to place the viewing experience on a wholly separate plane.
This is particularly notable in the case of the current exhibition of recent works by psychiatrist/artist Tom Kranjac at the Southampton Inn. While this show cannot exactly transform the utilitarian nature of its conference room venue, the works on view provide an exuberantly unrestrained contrast in their wildly rhythmic cadences.
Using gestural abstraction dominated by an assertive use of color, Mr. Kranjac creates structure in the works through a thoughtful relationship between bright coloration and energetically expressive brush strokes. Further, there is also the understated presence of nature throughout the exhibition although it is a presence more felt than seen and appears to the viewer more as a type of psychological landscape rather than a literal outdoor vista.
This is, given the artist’s real world vocation, an interesting development if one considers the century-long relationship between psychiatry and the creative process in which both, as Dr. Gilbert Rose wrote in “The Power of Form,” encourage “individual growth and development ... where personal truth is lived and not just thought.”
Starting with Freud and the surrealists, followed by Dubuffet’s fascination with schizophrenics and his art brut, and, later, Pollock’s figurative works as expressions of Jungian imagery, the flow of influence between art and psychiatry has been primarily a one-way street. Because of this, it is pleasantly rewarding to see in this exhibition a different perspective, one that offers the viewer new insights on the influence of art on a psychiatrist, rather than the other way around.
This impact is most immediately felt in Mr. Kranjac’s use of color as an emotional coding system, appearing in the small works as Fauvist compositions and becoming more simplified and elegantly spare in the larger canvases, such as “Grey Fog,” “Dark Crimson,” and “Blue/White (Skyscape).
In addition, through his use of negative space, the artist is able to conjure delicately hidden melodic impulses that ebb and flow, injecting jazz-like melodies that seem to appear randomly and yet not without meaning, becoming a personal stream of consciousness that continually asks more questions than it answers.
The exhibition of Tom Kranjac’s paintings, “Sounds of Summer: The Rush of Autumn,” continues at the Southampton Inn through November 30.
Offering another interesting exhibit in a somewhat incongruous and ironic venue is the Southampton Historical Museum, currently hosting “Mahogany Dew: African-American Artists in Southampton.”
One could make the case for incongruity and irony either for historical reasons (1843, when the house was built, is hardly considered a period of racial enlightenment) or from a stylistic perspective: the presence of Frank Wimberley’s powerful collage paintings hanging in a Greek revival-style drawing room, for example, is just a little too bizarre and hallucinogenic.
Nevertheless, once the culture shock wears off, the exhibition offers interesting insights and powerful imagery. This is notable in the recent works by the aforementioned Mr. Wimberley, who continually expresses a dynamic sense of energy that quite often is barely contained by the limitations of the viewing space. This kind of energy can be seen in works such as “Harlem AM, ’71” (pigment print on paper) and “Berbere ’92” (mixed media on paper), each of which vibrates with an inner intensity while simultaneously seeming to float in a delicate stream of meter and melody.
The photographs of Herbert Randall, on the other hand, presenting images from the civil rights movement from 1964, offer a reality that is in many ways little different today from what it was back then. Presenting images that are redolent of both pride and desperation, these photographs serve as a cogent reminder of our own societal accomplishments, and of our failures.
Also featured in the exhibition at the Southampton Historical Museum, which continues into November, are paintings by Joanne Williams Carter and Michael A. Butler.
Michael A. Butler’s “Lunasea” is currently on view at the Southampton Historical Museum
“Seascape” by Tom Kranjac is on view at the Southampton Inn.
Southampton East - Arts & Living
Oct 11, 2007
By Eric Ernst