View Finders

Not everything in the Cleveland Artists Foundation show Painting
the Town: Artists in Cleveland in the Late 20th Century is painted
or shot from a roof or upper-story window, though aerial views are
common here. Some are just the opposite, like the textural studies of
architectural detail in Hugh Kepets’ intaglio prints. But it’s striking
how point of view is often the essence as well as the pretext of these
landscape depictions by a group of distinguished Cleveland artists
(several of whom now live in New York) — whether it communicates
the sweep and scope of a city, or the marriage of grit and geometry at
a downtown street corner.

The installation of more than 30 paintings, drawings, prints and
photographs curated by William Busta and CAF’s Interim Director Lauren
Hansgen is framed at opposite ends of the gallery by two on-the-ground
action shots — views from the highway through the windows of a
moving vehicle. One is a large, meticulously blurry charcoal-on-paper
drawing titled “Unicum: Interstate, 2004” by Laurence Channing, showing
not any part of a city, but a hillside covered with a tangle of barren
trees, sloping up from a road streaked with shadows. The margins of the
windshield and dashboard have been omitted, but the placement of the
viewer is immediately obvious. This is what urban travelers see as they
speed between more eventful (for them) places. The hill in Channing’s
work unscrolls like a glimpse of a foreign text.

At the other end of the long room, legible even from a distance, is
Catherine Redmond’s 1987 oil-on-canvas “Afternoon Sunlight:
Simultaneous and Sequential.” Four-fifths of the work is blue sky with
a few scattered clouds, but toward the bottom, we see a typical stretch
of I-90 or I-71. A red van is headed to the right along the other half
of the highway, visible across a wide median. Beyond the van, we see a
swath of institutional buildings, houses and trees. In the left
foreground, a rearview mirror reflects a downtown view of a factory and
a water tower. As in Channing’s drawing, we know where we are, though
it’s odd to see these familiar fast-moving subjects given such
duration. It’s also unsettling to notice that not only the reflection
in the mirror, but the entire painted image has been reversed.

A similar sense of disorientation is shared by much of the work in
Painting the City, especially photographer Abe Frajndlich’s six
heat-sensitive infrared photographs from 1980. The aura of strangeness
derives in part from the medium but also has to do with Franjdlich’s
subjects, which range from a tight, upward-slanting view of Noguchi’s
monumental sculpture “Portal” next to the Justice Center’s impassive
façade to an aerial view of a cat’s cradle of railroad tracks,
bridges and highways glowing with apocalyptic portent.

Cleveland-scapes created during the final two decades of the past
century by David Buttram, Bonnie Dolin, Mary Lou Ferbert and Thomas R.
Roese round out an exhibit of urban visions charged with a sense of
underlying economic, social and psychological transformation. 

arts@clevescene.com

This article appears in Apr 8-14, 2009.