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Artist Statement:
I work mainly with mixed media
paintings and 3D mixed media
assemblages composed of found
metal, wood, clothing,
plastic, and paper. I find the
inner and exterior exploration
of the use of discarded
objects as a means of
expression interesting. Many
of the objects are found in or
nearby my...
Further Information
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Artist Exhibitions:
Current/Upcoming Shows:
FacilitySource Inc.
200 East Campus View Blvd,
Suite 301
Columbus, Ohio
May-December, 2009
www.facilitysource.com
Members' Small Works Show
ROY G BIV Gallery
Columbus, Ohio
December 2009
Gallery, Juried and Museum
Show History
(Columbus, Ohio unless
otherwise indicated)
8 Deadly Sins
MadLab Gallery
September 2004
...
Further Information
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/weekender/stories/2009/01/01/9A_HOP01_ART_01-01-09_T7_FICBMT9.html
(excerpt)
Found objects
"Function to Form" -- at the Ohio Art League, 954 N. High St. -- will display works by Tom Kelly and Yvette van der Velde.
Both use found objects but with different perspectives.
Kelly sometimes finds his objects in nondescript places -- "non-places," as he says.
"I liken their use in my work to how an individual unifies the many influences, memories, stimuli, subconscious impulses and other factors that build particular facets of his or her personality," he says in an artist's statement.
Van der Velde creates pieces "to remember moments, relationships or feelings in life. . . . My current work features assemblages made from pieces of my house. In this way, the documentation I seek takes on an autobiographical approach."
A reception will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday.
billmayr@mac.com
Columbus Alive 1/15/09
http://columbusalive.com/live/content/features/stories/2009/01/15/ca_ar_scape.html?sid=108
Function junction
Thursday, January 15, 2009 5:54 AM
By Tracy Zollinger Turner
When Yvette van der Velde was remodeling her house, she plundered its discarded material for treasure. She wasn't searching for antique fixtures or lost jewelry, but for scraps of wood, rusted screws and nails, torn bits of fabric and old wallpaper. The material value wasn't the point - it was the aesthetic, historic and narrative value that the items could bring to her multimedia assemblages.
Several of the resulting constructions make up half of the Function to Form exhibit at the Ohio Art League this month.
"We wanted to do a show about how two different artists go about using found objects in their work," said Tom Kelly, whose multimedia pieces make up the other half of the show. "Her work is more autobiographical, mine is more abstract."
While van der Velde makes her work out of the stuff under the floors and inside of the walls, Kelly finds most of his materials in urban detritus. He scouts items that have been chucked to the curb or abandoned near wire fences in the city. Their pieces complement each other, exhibited side-by-side instead of on separate walls.
Van der Velde began making sculptural assemblages when she was a CCAD student. Her major was photography, but after graduating in 2002, she found that the multimedia work was a more affordable, sustainable form of art-making.
"It was kind of a different way, or a different reason for making art, and I really enjoyed doing it," said van der Velde. As she tore things up in her house a couple of years ago, she found that "there was so much to be discovered ... I found myself wondering about the history of the people who have lived there before."
Her pieces have a gentle, yellowed and nostalgic quality. They impart a broad sense of narrative, leaving the details up to the viewer. They are composed of cords and strings, faint blueprints, Plexiglas and wires.
"A couple of them do have more of a specific story, but generally nothing that I would want to share publicly," said van der Velde. "I think the way I've put them together, it's visually appealing and sort of transcends the need to know exactly what I was thinking."
She shares that broadly, a few of the pieces in the show have to do with her desire to move out of her Plain City house, and back into a more urban lifestyle.
Kelly began painting and drawing as a child, but took detours through more formal career paths before making art to show publicly five years ago. He's since exhibited locally and regionally, including a recent exhibit at the South Ohio Museum.
Several of Kelly's pieces in Function to Form were composed as he read The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, about a "self-made, self-actualized" mathematical prodigy.
The Rigour of Proof has metal pieces integrated into it that seem to mimic mathematical diagrams, and faint evidence of text and vectors hazily visible beneath a thin layer of paint, but that's probably the most literal of his pieces, which also leave most of the interpretation up to the viewer.
For a couple of the show's prominent works, Kelly collected artificial flowers from friends and incorporated them into his canvas, painting them all one color. His black Gometra is one of the show's highlights, named for the house where Ramanujan poured out his last body of work before dying of tuberculosis.
"Most of the work I do is somewhat influenced by what I'm reading at the time - history, mythology, books that are referential," said Kelly, adding, "Or stories my friends tell me ... or funny lyrics in songs."
Mount Vernon News, Friday March 6, 2009
Root Art Center hosting Kelly and Pepicello
Mark Jordon
News Staff Reporter
Mount Vernon -- Tom Kelly and Kathleen Pepicello will be the featured artists in March at the Root Art Center, downtown. The two artists will be present at an opening reception today from 6 to 9pm.
Tom Kelly is a self-taught mixed-media visual artist living and working in Columbus. His work has been show regionally in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky as well as in the global Slideluck Potshow. Kelly cites the lyric writing of Sappho, Waits/Brennan, Leonard Cohen, the re-use of everyday objects, Celtic and Roman history, and the poetry of Thomas Gray, William Butler Yeats and Theodore Roethke as inspirations for his work. His work appears in private collections in London, Washington DC, Arizona and in Ohio. In the Fall of 2008 he made his museum debut at the Southern Ohio Museum for his "if not, winter" series of works on paper.
Kelly works mainly with mixed-media paintings and three-dimensional mixed-media assemblages composed of found metal, wood, clothing, plastic and paper.
"I find the inner and exterior exploration of the use of discarded objects as a means of expression interesting," Kelly said. The artist said that he finds these objects in and near home, gathering them from "forgotten spots" in his house and yard and from industrial areas.
Columbus artist Kathleen Pepicello has had solo exhibitions at such galleries as the Ohio Art League Gallery, Haiku, Blowfish, Ottawa Ridge and Canzani Hall Gallery in Columbus. She has participated in group shows throughout the state of Ohio.
Pepicello feels that there is an interconnectedness to all life that is possible to experience firsthand.
"It is a choiceless event that wounds as well as delights," Pepicello said. "No descriptive language that can be 'spoken openly' or representative image fully expresses it."
The opening reception will take place at the Root Art Center, 212 S. Main St. in Mount Vernon, today from 6 to 9pm. Visit www.rootartcenter.com for further information or call 740-326-3126.
Indie blog review of 64th Annual May Show at Mansfield Art Center:
http://artistramblings.blogspot.com/2009/04/may-show.html
Aeqai
October 2009
http://www.aeqai.com/articles/102009b.htm
Elegy and the The Romantic Mood
interpreting two artists' works in the light of the Romantic era
Elegeia - the term refers to an ancient Greek tradition of memorial poetry, implying that the work in question commemorates loss. But the loss to which the exhibition 'Elegeia: Works by Brenda Stumpf and Tom Kelly' at the Eva G. Farris Art Gallery refers is not specific; it seems to reflect the mood of an epoch looking back upon some previous mode of human existence. For the artists refer to antiquity both in the formal and narrative aspects of their art: Stumpf through impermanence and architectural/historical/mystical references, and Kelly through his interpretation of Sappho's verse.
We may gain insight through the writings of the philosopher Hegel, although admittedly his prose often daunts readers. What he referred to as the 'Romantic' era (based on, though different from, the actual Romantic movement, though I will use the term loosely), as part of his metanarrative of the unfolding of World Spirit, represented a shift from the preceding one (the 'Classical') and was characterized in part by its wistful reflections upon the previous era. For Classical art embodied, according to Hegel, the unity of Spirit and Matter, the outer body rendered as an image of higher perfection (Greek sculpture). The Romantic phase, intuiting the infinite quality of Spirit, felt that finite matter—the external world—was inadequate for the represention of the Eternal. Nevertheless the Romantic, faced with the incommensurability between the outer world and the inner, looked longingly at the simple beauty and unity of Classical art; it represented an irretrievable consciousness and incomparable beauty. For example, the Romantics, as per their namesake, 'romanticized' the classical era by frequently painting ancient ruins. It is in this sense that the exhibition is elegiac: These two artists, both in the narrative and formal qualities of their artwork, create in the Romantic mood.
There are two key elements noted above about the Romantic mood: one, nostalgia and reverence for an ancient past, and two, negation of finite Matter for infinite Spirit. The question remains as to how these two artists' works reflect these two aspects; an analysis of how these two artists' works reflect these two aspects follows.
Brenda Stumpf
Stumpf's sculptures —the three in the show from her Offerings and Attributes series— bear this love of antiquity and etherification. Outwardly, they are each highly balanced, centripetal formations, like ziggurats or Egyptian pyramids (though as pyramids, more similar to those of the various ancient peoples of Central and South America): wide at the base, triangulated with large steps for each layer. This is especially apparent in Flos Sacer, 2005. Though it is the one that least resembles a pyramid, its overall directional tendency is triangular. The apex of each represents the culmination of this metamorphosis in floral, brush-like crests. The sculpture emulates the growth of a flowering plant but with the peculiar solidity of antique monumental constructions.
The lower levels are wrapped in materials such as gauze that give them the effect of being embalmed. Egyptian embalming preserved the form (corpse or body) for the next phase of its existence as part of the transmigration of the soul, here represented in the floral summit. Matter, once dead and inanimate, becomes, through a process of internment the metamorphosized, refined element. Each layer of the pyramidical structure represents a metamorphosis of the previous one into a more refined state.
Stumpf's works, as per the Romantic mode, reflect upon the transient nature of the external world as opposed to the eternal inner world while using the above motifs of antiquity: in her case, this becomes visible history within her materials (or, as mentioned above, process). Matter is impermanent and changing, as opposed to Spirit, permanent and unchanging. The sculptures have a sense of decay about them while resisting the same. Note how the dripping of pigment, the old parchment colors and the worn look of the tea-stained textures remind one of antiquated remains. Yet these are all subsumed into a harmonious composition, lending them a poignant, melancholic beauty.
Tom Kelly
In reverence for the fragmentary remnants of Sappho's lyrical verse (itself a symbol of fragmented memory and unrecoverable past), and the beauty of the content of her poems, Kelly creates softened, burnt umbra hues breaking sporadically through textured white paint. Some of the smallest works are carefully selected segments of larger pieces — fragments (like Sappho's surviving poems), yet wholesome in their composition. Emulating Cy Twombly, he works with that artist's language deftly. Like the Romantic, he seeks to negate matter as an unsuitable vessel for Spirit (and finds inspiration in a Greek poet); in his case, he achieves this with luminosity. For example, Amid wild blossoms of the spring, 2009 he began with strong reds and dark umber tones and then illumined them by layering the
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