There is a sparse feeling in the galleries at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts where “IN//OUT” is on exhibit. Works hang in varied heights on the walls. A few paintings are on the floor, taking their place like sculpture. Many are bright, colorful and hover between abstraction and representation. There is often a willful scruffiness at work, acknowledging and rejecting tradition in favor of laid-back play. The show features seven young artists, most of them nearing completion of art degrees or recently graduated. This is a process of emerging, of finding a voice of clarity for internal ideas.
Lucas Ruminski uses collaged elements and paint like casein and enamel to make visual puzzles. Recurring motifs include floating eyes and disembodied hands. The title of a diptych, Self-Portrait, combines these with heavy flat colors and a profile head whose clenched teeth seem locked in a creative struggle. Kate Klingbeil’s acrylic and latex paintings are more directly representational. She pictures couples in bed whose intimate acts are slightly disguised by mountains of paint. Her boldness on this subject and handling of material stands out powerfully.
More subtle are acrylics by Miguel Ramirez. He adopts emoji symbols, known to all from the literature of text messaging. Circular faces are foreshortened into distorted ovals of shiny, reflective silver. These pristine surfaces offer shorthand winks and smiles as neatly produced stand-ins for the messy complexity of human emotion. Wry humor is found in Peter Klett’s This Can’t Be Right. A large canvas, doctored with white paint and bits of a dissected aluminum can, is accented by miniature abstract expressionist paintings. A towel on a rack suspended beneath shows a line drawing of a confused man staring at instructions for the assembly of obstinate construction boards. How does it all come together?
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This question is one that lingers among these works. They are arcane, as though each artist is exploring their craft and grappling with the wide territories opened by contemporary art. It is like eavesdropping on soliloquies that describe finding clues and the progress of development, rather than an exhibition of conclusions.
Through March 19 at Walker’s Point Center for the Art, 839 S. Fifth St.
