Art Dept Event: Placing Color

Placing Color is the new show that opened in Boyden Gallery January 19th, with an opening on the 21st. All three artists in the show, Carrie Patterson, Kayla Mohammadi, and Brett Baker attended the opening and gave a brief introduction to themselves as artists.

Patterson’s pieces were part of her series about St Francis Xavier Church, a local church in St Mary’s County. Her pieces are her impressions of the church translated into blocks of color—there is the green of the priest’s vestment, yellow of the ripe corn outside the windows of the church. The paintings, Patterson informed in the gallery talk, are exploring the sacred space of the church. To me, she has distilled her visual and emotional experience in the church down to the purest interpretation, one that demands the viewer’s attention.

Kayla Mohammadi is the most representational of all the painters in the show. In her 

paintings, we can still see the ocean viewed through a window, the boxes of a river barge, or a bowl of

 cherries. But these objects can only be discerned through thorough study, the viewer must walk in to the painting and question what he or she is viewing. But what is viewed is eventually translated, as a more colorful version of the space or landscape.

Brett Baker has the most varied series of paintings. He has several small paintings, intensely textured with layers of paint from years of painting on top of one another. They have been so heavily painted that the colors have approached similarity, and with the size of the paintings, they appear to be portraits with the weight of the small paintings. Baker also includes a large installation painting in the show, facing the wall. The corridor of color that is created involves the viewer entering the painting as well, while we approach the painting seeing the skeleton of the painting canvas.

All three artists are colorists—their art has a focus on the color. Yet, the viewer must place oneself within all of the paintings. Mohammadi and Patterson’s paintings describe places, while Baker’s large painting literally creates a new space for the viewer to physically enter and experience. This gives relevance to the name Placing Color, as the artists have tried to place the viewer within the paintings.

Placing Color Website

Artists: John Klima

John Klima's Glasbead is a cross-disciplinary work in which multiple users can make music through a visual, interactive interface. Glasbead is inspired by Herman Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game, where ideas are played like musical notes in a futuristic game. Instead of ideas, users of Klima's Glasbead move stems around in the orb, which play musical tones when hit by hammers also within the orb. 

Klima, a software programmer with a BFA in photography, created Glasbead after freelancing for Microsoft. The piece of art is cross-disciplinary, one characteristic of New Media art, combining programming and visual art to make a program that creates music via a visual interface, with the ability for users to collaborate and have a shared experience with the piece. This piece and artist interested me for these reasons. Many traditional art forms involve an individual experience: the viewer, by oneself, interacts with the art and has a personal experience. With Glasbead, multiple people can experience the same piece and interact with the program and each other. The crossing of disciplines is also very fun for me--this is art that has been programmed, and the visual aspects of the art have a direct connection to sound-music is made by one's placement of the visual component. 

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