Strange Mechanisms
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time for this Past Event
- Wed, Sep 7, 2022 - Sat, Oct 15, 2022
Location
Akron Soul Train
191 S Main St
Details
Steven Mastroianni and Palli Davene Davis will be exhibiting their residency work in a combined exhibition titled Strange Mechanisms. Steven is a Cleveland-based artist who works in large scale cyanotype prints. He begins his compositions with assemblages of stencils, found objects and sketches on light-sensitized paper.
He states, “The new body of work created during my artist residency consists of large scale, multi-panel cyanotype prints. This work draws inspiration from sources as varied as the James Webb Telescope, Harold’s Purple Crayon, 18th century opera arias, mechanical drawings, Byzantine icons, the geometry of pasta, and the subconscious. Evocative of watery depths, imaginary galaxies, and mysterious maps, these luminous images create an immersive dimension with their own rules of scale and space. Like dreams, these objects seem familiar but weird; letters that don’t exist, mechanical forms floating in dark space or deep water, math problems that don't add up, and overlapping patterns that follow their own logic of space and dimension.”
Palli comes from the Oberlin area and has won the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award four times during her career. She works in wood and stone sculpture to solve a single problem: How to hold a stone. In her words, “I am an object maker. I need form. My hands need touch telling me how an object is becoming what it is to be. The Holding Stones Series has been my primary body of work since 1993. There is only the simplicity of 3 materials, wood, stone. Together they build a visual vocabulary to consider objects as metaphors for Earth & Man. Stone is the found object, gleaned evidence of the planet's alterations and endurance. Wood, victim to the hand work of man.”
