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
http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-18424-art-offical-showcase-at-synthetica-gallery.html
http://www.columbusalive.com/live/content/features/stories/2011/04/07/exhibit-mellow-yellow-at-madlab.html?sid=108
http://www.columbusalive.com/live/content/features/stories/2011/07/28/exhibit-love-life-and-death-at-madlab.html
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2011/08/14/juried-show-delves-deep-into-humans.html
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2012/02/26/show-run-by-students-salutes-ohio.html
http://minusplato.blogspot.com/
http://www.columbusalive.com/content/stories/2012/10/04/preview-october-gallery-hop.html...