Chattanooga Pulse

Artists Christine Gray and Johnston Foster have mounted an inspirational show at UTC’s Cress Gallery. An enthusiastic reception to their works attests to folks’ recognition of these artists’ intense drives to produce work that is both playful and relevant to deep aesthetic concerns.

Johnston Foster’s found material sculptures combine humor with complex concepts to produce effects that stun and satisfy. Christine Gray’s work, including paintings and painted gourd constructions, appears more cerebral as it invites viewers to contemplate the sources of imaginative vision. My strongest impression of this show reminded me how playful concentration strives toward expression that not only realizes complex forms, but also illuminates the impulse that provokes the artist to project such visions.

Foster and Gray are both faculty artists at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. They appear at the Cress Gallery as part of the UTC John and Diane Marek Visiting Artists Series. Comments that I encountered during the reception expressed excitement. I think that this is a particularly exemplary show for art students as well as the viewing public. Flashes of brilliance combining whimsy with depth remind me of innovative works lately at the Hunter’s NYU show and at the “Collaborations” exhibition at the Chattanooga African American Museum.

These artists, each in their own way, produce synthetic works that merge what are often seen as divergent forms: realist and expressionist modes. Christine Gray, a native of Austin, Texas, presents a small series of painted gourds and steel constructions. The natural gourds are connected to steel with oils, using an intricate and energetic dynamic, as in “Black Zap” (2009). The painting connects the abstract to the real.

Gray also develops playful titles for her works that enhance their presence, a kind of extension of her method, probably best seen in her paintings. She creates constructions of relatively simple materials. These real constructions inhabit her paintings, but, unlike a still life, her use of paint not only tends to alter these constructions, but also to connect these constructions to more abstract fields of light and texture. A fantastic cosmic energy drives the imagination forth from her constructed frames, indicating how the mundane remains connected to universal forces.

There is a common design known as “God’s Eye,” where a cross of wood supports a colorful diamond of yarn. Some of Gray’s frames involve wooden sticks that support yarn in open structures, suggesting portals to otherworldly energies, often combining light and darkness and the clarity of optics with abstract play. The effect often seamlessly merges the real and the unreal, a synthesis of the continuum of aesthetic vision. Brava!

Johnston Foster’s surreal construction “Altered Beast” (2008), a dynamic strangeness of plastic feathering and other forms, vividly shows how a “static” piece can project great energy. His “Mob Scene” resembles the mob at Frankenstein’s castle, yet, paradoxically, proves in its onslaught to the viewer that the effect of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I found layers of subtexts reaching from the whimsical to the disturbed detritus of good times.

In “Good ‘N Plenty” (2005), a rubber cornucopia spews forth a wealth of consumer wishes. The excited “Big Tipper” (2008), a two-headed turtle, spills off its back a feast worthy of The Satyricon’s Trimalchio. The massive concentration of found materials, much plastic pretending to be real, call to mind a number of contexts that underlie our precarious existence. All this play reveals the drive to revelation. Do not panic—it’s only art!