UMVA Showcase Spring 2024 – Craig Becker, Robert Katz, Lisa Dombek, Gary Astrachan

Craig Becker

Lorica: Body Armor, 2022–23

Masks have been a central theme in my work for more than a decade, so when the events of 2020 hit, my lack of a creative response was puzzling. With time came clarity and ideas started rising to the surface.

During this unprecedented time, we were under attack not only from the invisible, but also from political extremism, ignorance, intolerance, and even nature. The foundation of our democracy and healthcare system was shaken to the core.

This work is about our current state of vulnerability, the unconscious, and the corners of ourselves, individually and collectively, that exist in darkness.

 

Robert Katz

This sculptural project explores the process of aging and change and our perception of
ourselves as we face the inevitable realities of “what is known but often unspoken.”

In my sculpture, I systematically distort the iconic image of youth, symmetry, and beauty as depicted in the 2nd-century marble Greek carving of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, attributed to the artist Alexandros of Antioch.

By applying a latex mold over a plaster cast I was able to push and pull the portrait into various distorted shapes. No longer did the Venus de Milo’s iconic face embody the perfection and elegance of a Greek sculpture of classical beauty. Like the Dadaists and Surrealists, the image is broken down and distorted, transforming our notion of aesthetic identity and cultural traditions. The contortions of these forms compels us to consider the often “unspoken” transformations of aging.

 

Lisa Dombek

In general, my work is informed largely through internal processes in response to and inextricably influenced by the vulnerability of nature and wildlife, and often concerned with spiritual transformation. The mercurial and powerful energies of the sea, stillness and solace of woods, the miraculous transformation of the seasons are a constant inspiration. Working in series appeals to me since it allows development of an idea, whether visual or metaphorical. In terms of process, I work abstractly and intuitively. Allowing my conscious/unconscious to merge, letting the voices speak. I am eternally involved with exploration, experimentation, observation, and discovery.

With regard to “The Unconscious, the Unknown, the Unsaid,” this is a realm only too familiar to me. Unconsciously, the inside turning out. Dreams emerging. Relationships/responses to societal and global events unfolding. Feelings/situations coming to light. A healing process if one is willing to see and face what might be illuminated; one requiring patience, deep listening/seeing, allowing. The picture may not necessarily be pretty. Or it may portend visions of hope and transformation. As an artist I am grateful for the ability to express these things that are often difficult to verbalize, articulate, or otherwise address.

What begins as a color field, abstract landscape, canvas with marks, becomes a space and environment where images may begin to emerge. Forms, Muses, Scenarios. I am then conscripted to bring them forth, working on multiple levels . . . physical, energetic, emotional, spiritual. The compulsion I feel is as if someone or something is knocking at my door and must be addressed. I must answer. My response is the work.

 

Gary Astrachan 

These four collages were all made between 12 January 2024 and 4 February 2024. They are a recent subset of works from the past year that happened to the tune of “Space is the Place” and are a tribute to Sun Ra and the Intergalactic Cosmic Arkestra. The ongoing practice of creating visual “papers” or a visual journal, acts as a stimulating and playful complement to my main practice of writing scholarly articles and books relating Jungian psychology to Greek mythology, painting, poetry, film, photography, and contemporary culture. Psyche or soul, dreams, and the unconscious is my daily bread and butter. It’s where I live twenty-four/seven. Like walking the beach, that thin margin of sand between the sea and the land, making art is a way of patrolling that strip of awareness between the known and the unknown.

Making collages involves first of all a cut, a cutting out of something from where it’s found, separating and differentiating it from everything else. It’s a choice ultimately guided by unseen hands. The image, text, piece of paper, material, or smudge of color then gets recontextualized, juxtaposed, put next to or into relationship and connection with other things in the desire to create something different that may further the journey and resonate into the realm of soul. To constellate correspondences among disparate images is an attempt at suturing, re-membering, and re-collecting some of the deeper invisible threads which hold all things together and may be in the process, occasionally glimpsed.

These collages are made from found and recycled paper products recovered from their collective functions in the world in order to facilitate and midwife transformation.

 

 

Image at top: Craig Becker, Lorica I, archival pigment print, 17 x 17 in., 2022.