Material Cleveland

Liz Maugans, Director, Yards Projects

Curator, Dalad Collection

yardsprojects@gmail.com

• Thursday, September 5, 20196:00 PM
  Saturday, October 19, 201912:00 AM

Cleveland was built on the production of the steel industry and remains a place rich with locally-sourced goods like DayGlo Paint,  reclaimed wood repurposed from historic buildings, and fibers from the Kozo plants grown in the gardens of Hough and made into paper. These are but a few examples that found their way to this region’s artists. In Material Cleveland, artist’s capitalize on experimenting with raw materials like wood, textiles, and found objects, drawing inspiration from other art historical periods such as the readymade movement in the 1900s to  the Cubism, and Art Povera.

 This fall, Worthington Yards will exhibit an eclectic group of local artists who use an assortment of media. Artists Leslye Discont Arian, Tom Balbo, Rebecca Cross, Peter Debelek, Dale Goode, Patricia Zinsmeister Parker, Scott Pickering, Grace Summanen, and Justin Woody will create locally-sourced art inspired by the materials innate, relative and impressionistically resourced to and from Cleveland. 

Material Cleveland focuses on the tools and processes employed by these artists as a mechanism to express themselves and their surroundings and further understanding of Cleveland conveying emotions from excitement to anxiety.

artist statement

Biotracings Series 1 (2019), develops from Preservation Sequence (2018), and is a collection of futuristic, natural history objects, or “exprints” of imagined, extinct plant species. The drawings that are etched into the plexi field, through which silk, and waxed threads and ribbons penetrate, are derived from shadows cast by the silk forms, made with the shape-resist and immersion dye processes of traditional Japanese shibori. Inspired by Latin taxonomies of endangered plants from Ohio, I have titled these pieces to honor my art and spirit sisters. This work considers a plausible future, where what is familiar now exists only as skins and tracings of remembered bioforms.