Dislocation worthy show

Twenty-three years and it just keeps getting better.

More creative, more diverse, more unexpected and more inclusive of talented artists with myriad genres of work brought together from around the region into one cool space: the Definitely Superior Art Gallery on Park Street, where the 23rd Anniversary Annual Regional Juried Exhibition entitled DIS.LOCATION definitely claims attention.

This year the jury was presented with a daunting challenge: faced with 90 submissions, the first gallery would only be home in this particular show to 30 paid finalists. The result for the viewer is absolutely engaging.

Uncluttered, harmoniously lean and lacking any confusion around knowing which way or where to look first, DIS.LOCATION belies its name. The 2011 collection of winning paintings, watercolours, photographs, collages, screenprints, sketches and installations looks like it belongs together. Multi-cultural and multi-dimensional as clearly it is, nevertheless one gets a strange sense of unity within the space. The works don’t compete and/or clash with one another so much as represent what, as said, is collectively and creatively so alive and well out there in this region.

In the second gallery regional artist Joseph Fredrich pulls the viewer into a more dislocated place, deliberately. His large solid installation entitled Black Box is a pair of voyeuristic opposites: twin black boxes 6 X 6 X 8 feet deep. One, in the artist’s own words, is intended as a representation of good; the other of evil. His artist’s statement describes how his dark dichotomy occurred; in both cases, he said, time stood still. The world around him became utterly silent. The only sound he was acutely conscious of was the accelerated beating of his heart. Not something he will ever forget.

“The sense of time in both scenes was meditative (for me). When I made contact with the deer, time stopped existing. Because it was such a connection, it made everything else stop. Nothing else existed but the connection between me and the deer. It was the same with the Prague subway scene. Even though it was profoundly evil, and the opposite of the deer, again there was the absolute absence of time. What I was viewing was so profound and spectacular that everything else switched off. All that existed was the experience I was having in that subway.”

Readers of this will just have to go peer into Fredrich’s black boxes for themselves.

In the third gallery Defnitely Superior presents a video entitled Mutate Britain. Watching it brings the concept of public art to a whole new level; cosmopolitan, big and fresh, yet one thinks about how small this changing world at times really is.

“I think the more educated we are, the more our city-environment community is exposed to contemporary art, the more the roster of contemporary artists that’s been building for a long time now is drawn out. Yeah, definitely cosmopolitan, big city feel. It’s happening worldwide,” noted gallery director David Karasiewicz, “but it happens in your own environment, and you have to discover it. On your own maybe, or get some encouragement and don’t be afraid.” He grinned. “Art cannot hurt you.”

Visit the latest visual unexpecteds at Definitely Superior anytime between now and Jan. 14, 2012.