MIXED MEDIA MIXED MESSAGE
Group Show for Final Friday – March 30th, 2007 6PM to 11PM:
414 S. Commerce Street in the Wichita Kansas Art District.
Though the artwork in this show is defined by each artist individually, there is much that I would like to say about this bastard term “mixed media”. Artists and curators use it repeatedly on the little tags that state the artists name, medium, price, etc. We use it to describe medium because we’re too lazy, embarrassed, or unsure to write out an eclectic list of materials used in an experimental artwork that we think the public is too lazy, ignorant, and uninterested to read in the first place, which may often be true, or it certainly will be.
The problem I have with this kind of exclusion is that the information about medium informs our literacy of texture when viewing artworks, which informs our appreciation of artwork, and our ability to “read” imagery in general. For those of us who are interested in learning about the mediums behind mixed-media, it is our chance to become more involved, educated, and interested. I believe humans have a great capacity for this kind of literacy which I call “textural literacy”. There is a texture to how different kinds of paints and materials lay down, pop out, dry, shine, crackle, ooze, sag, puff, glitter, etc..etc… which is how the “trained eye”, though hands on experience, recognizes media. And if “the medium is the message”, then there are many subtle messages coming through an artwork which is mixed-media. (And do not let the message about whether or not an artist’s choice of materials is “professional” sway you, for these pretensions were rendered obsolete by the Da Da movement in the 1920’s.)
As mixed-media artists we need to contribute to our collective learning of this subtle message-making through materials-used because the poetry of this kind of literacy can only be handled intuitively. No one has really written out the vocabulary of texture, or how to pair it with content, its just something that our brains are capable of. The more we can inform each other and the public of the results of our experimentation’s, the more we can advance as artists, and the more mixed-media art can advance as part of our cultural dialogue, and the more our culture can advance by engaging it.
Just to give an example of mixed-media-mixed-message-making, consider a heart painted in tar, ground dead leaves, and oil paint. Compare that to the same heart painted with acrylic paint. Compare that to one painted by an airbrush, as with medical illustration. Compare that to one cut out of construction paper, or to one that is printed on a gift card. Go look at the heart made of core 10 steel at the Lawrence Art Center. These are all different messages weaving through the same supposed content because of the media used to make them. We recognize them differently through their texture(which like the word text, comes from the latin word textus, which means to weave.)
ARTIST WEBSITES:
Lee Shiney
Chris Frank
Paul McKee
Kent Williams
Kenneth Boe
Other participating artists were Art Kenyon, Mande Braden, Brian Niles, and Paul Harrold.
© 2007 Kenneth Petersen Boe