Current Show
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Now and Then/Cape Girardeau; 72″ x 57″ five-finned sculpture cartoon (at scale), 2023-24
Cosmic Trace – An Exhibition of Visual studies for the Project, Now and Then, by Henry Dean Opening Aprl 5th (First Friday Art Walk, 5 pm-8 pm) and closed at 5 PM Sat May 25. The Now and Then project is a nation-wide effort to install sculpture along the path of the moon’s ‘umbra’ (the darkest part of its shadow) during the April 8, 2024 solar eclipse, crossing the US from Del Rio, TX, to Presque Isle, ME. The works in this exhibition Cosmic Trace are studies for the national project. Some of Dean’s drawings present bright, sparse colors and/or a gestural (like “hand-writing”) style of lines and shapes. Together, they “trace” his observations of nature and the cosmos over the course of several years. They are loosely drawn to keep open his options for the project, suggesting multiple possibilities. Several times he explored the Vincennes area, even in the subzero weather here around New Years 2003. During a solar eclipse it becomes dark, something like twilight. One can then hear the night creatures wake and start singing as the day creatures pause, thinking it is night time. For humans it is a rare opportunity to feel the dramatic magnificence of the moon and sun, as well as the cosmos, and an appreciation of our tiny planet. It inspires joyous wonder, hopefully resetting our human values and priorities.See Dean’s instagram at @nowandtheneclipse24
PREVIOUS SHOWS
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July – August 2023, The time the boy lived, Taehoon Kim
Korean born, living in Chicago, the artist Kim creates ceramic pieces that appear at first glimpse to be toy-like. One might associate them with anime cartoon figures. But they go beyond “cute”. There is often something wrong, an injury, an imperfection, that could almost go unnoticed. Perhaps the figures are mourning bygone times when “the boy” truly lived as a creative person before his creativity was stifled by conventional society’s expectations of formality.
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September – October, 2022, Personal Perspectives, Deborah Hutchinson-Hagedorn
As the exhibition title suggests, in her monoprints, collages and watercolors Hutchinson-Hagedorn shares with her audience her personal responses to natural phenomena. Since retiring from teaching printmaking at Vincennes University, she and her husband have traveled throughout the country visiting an impressive variety of National Parks. Many of the works are responses to her experiences in these environments.
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July– August, 2022, Other Side Visions, Gwaylon Leaf
Gwaylon Leaf’s work is non-objective, not referring to recognizable subject matter. Instead his paintings offer explorations of mental and visual perceptions he senses while meditating. He ‘writes automatically’, relaying observation of colors, lines, shapes that come to him while in a meditative state. Many of his forms and shapes recall ancient art and calligraphy in his Chinese heritage.
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May – June 2022, Improbable Spaces, Amy DeLap, AndrewJendrzejewski
Given the uncertainties of the pandemic it has been difficult to commit to other artists for future shows. So the gallery owners decided to pull out yet another group of works from their own past. They decided to build the exhibition on the theme of space. Amy’s sparse lines and shapes, muted colors and texture create the illusion of space without recognizable subject matter, though she receives much admiration for her figurative work. In both types of work, there are overlaps of visual concerns, that reflect the artist’s overall sensibility. Andrew hypothetically plans for environments that could be the size of gardens and earthworks. These are not permanent pieces, they are one-offs, despite the fact they were made in 1980 during his first years teaching at Vincennes University. He was working with many types of impermanent, non-product-oriented sculptures as concepts, rather than commercial product. They are poetry, rather than merchandize. Many have been destroyed, but these have survived and have been restored to almost their original condition.
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March – April 2022 LUMIÈRE HORIZON: Photographs by Erick Rowe
This body of work explores the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. As they build their environment, people either abuse nature. incorporate it, or become defeated by it. Most of the images came from a sabbatical study trip ranging from Santa Moniica California to Death Valley. Lumière in French means ‘light’, but also ‘knowledge’. Evidence suggests that Rowe intends us to consider both meanings. The photographs in this series present somewhat formal portraits of architecture, houses and other buildings, as one would see them at the street view. Rowe chooses “ordinary” places, such as a simple beach house, a front yard or entrance of a home , a park facility in an empty desert. However, in their banality, when contemplated, one discovers relationships of planes, textures, lines, colors, spaces, that harmonize and contrast with each other in dynamic ways. In other words, hidden before our eyes there is an experience perceived when we reach a ‘horizon’ of visual recognition, of the structure of visual beauty revealed through one’s own attentive gaze.
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November – December 2021 Ellipsis and Ellipses: Paintings by Tom Dimond
The ellipsis, a series of dots used to imply unwritten, but understood meaning in a text is used in this title to refer to the unspoken or unexplained aspects of visual art, that need no explanation. In either case, it is what the author or the painter leaves out, with the assumption that the viewer will bring something to the work to complete the “thought”, or “feeling”.
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September 2021 Heart and Mind: Four series by Andrew Jendrzejewski.
The earliest works in this exhibition were studies emphasizing aspects of dictionary page structure using markings and drawings that reveal, alter and emphasize the structure of the page. Another series begins with cuttiing up the page, using the page as tone and texture, rather than as a carrier of the written word. This approach led to incorporating drawing and the use of other materials, such as wire and wax. Eventually the dictionary page as support was abandoned. These were done either just before the artist left San Antonio or shortly after arriving in Vincennes. A fourth series consisted of photographs used as sources for wood carvings. Hairspray was used to create texture and the color in the photograph was intensified with drawing, often until the photo was no longer visible.
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August 2021, Nuances: Mixed Media Work by Amy DeLap
Amy takes a dramatic switch from the highly representative works of the previous show to her contrasting nonobjective grid collages. While these embody totally different styles, media, and approach to subject, there are qualities that connect them to the realistic work. In both kinds of work, one sees composing with color and form, use of the translucent properties of the materials, exploration of how shapes modulate space in the compositions, and consideration of creation of an overall atmosphere.
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June – July 2021, The Way We See It, by Amy DeLap (left) and Andrew Jendrzejewski (right).
A mixture of recent and older work (Paintings, Collages, Sculptures, Reliefs) by the gallery owners.
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March – May 2020, Home Grown: Paintings by Bill Whorrall. (attendance limited by pandemic closures)
Whorral is a prolific Indiana artist who paints local rural landscapes in an intentionally funky way by breaking art school rules and conventions with frequently exquisite results. He is known for his celebrating of and commentry on country life in Indiana.
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November 1 – December 7, 2019, From the Dust Bowl to Global Warming, by Fernando Lozano
We faced what we thought was the end of the world in the 1930’s during the Dust Bowl, a ten-year drought that decimated crops and spawned infestations of locusts that darkened the sky and rabbits that ate all remaining vegetation. Sandblasting winds blew clouds of dust that buried houses and turned the noon-hour sky into night. Lozano’s large digital prints are based on actual historic photographs of the event to remind us of the Dust Bowl, to remind us that humans can negatively effect the entire globe. We now observe global warming as it shows its face with forest fires, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels that will drown out much of the southeastern US. The images are shocking, but relatively gentle compared to what is to come. The point of the show, however, is that both events are/were avoidable if people would care for the health of our planet and eliminate destruction driven by human greed.
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September 6 – October 19, 2019, Remains III: Works by Soulaf Abas
Everything changed when Soulaf Abas (Soully) returned to Damascus to visit her family in the summer of 2012, a year after the Arab Spring revolution began. She states: “I found that what used to be my playground had been reduced to a pile of rubble, with bloodstains everywhere. The smell of gunpowder filled the air of Damascus for weeks at a time. Friends would talk about the smell of burning flesh coming from certain neighborhoods. The visit completely changed my perspective and my sense of what home means. It was life-changing in terms of how my surroundings had changed and how many people I had lost.”
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Jul – Aug 2018, Revolve: Works by Robin Crocker, Robin Crocker
Crocker combines her interest in poetry and sculpture in the round and in relief, and her technical expertise in patination (coloring metals by oxidizing them with chemical reactions that she learned at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey). Reading the poetry involves circumambulation, recalling the circumambulation of stupas in India, the process of which slows one’s reading, and deciphering the words. Such effort to get the messages in her work requires involvement, and rewards the viewer with an insight into universal truths.
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May 3 – June 22, Evidence: The Art of Terry Jarrard Dimond
Dimond’s work is based on her interest and experience with nature and it’s ‘accidents’. As one might expect, her paintings seem driven by intuition. In her textilesJarrard-Dimond tediously assembles the scattered patches and connects them with stitches echoing the accidents of nature in visually low-keyed and satisfying ways.
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March 1 – April 20, 2019, Time Transfixed: Works by Curt Uebelhor
Uebelhor questions many of the values of our plutocracy from its under-pinnings to the ominously catastrophic confrontations that have come upon us in recent years, on many unrelated fronts. Uebelhor’s small dioramas, created from children’s toys, found objects and materials, juxtaposed often with humor mixed with biting criticism splay open the cut of our ‘sick society’ for the blind to see in a Time Transfixed when much-needed action seems at best too late, and comedy is the key to health.
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November 2 – December 15, 2018, Texture and Form: Ceramics by Barry Barnes
Barnes’ clay works range from monumental columns to urns, vases, teapots, and cups. His signature surface treatment consists of a cacophony of texture, color, and discoverable images, all of which take us back to nature.
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May 4 – June 14, 2018, Internal Dialogue, Sculpture, Matt Boonstra
From Charleston, Illinois, Boonstra works with a variety of materials (bronze, steel, wood, plaster) using both traditional (carving, casting, lay-up, and fabrication) and hi-tech (computer-aided design, 3-D printing, and plasma cutting) processes. Themes that ran through his work ranged from social-politically tinged statements asserting the devaluing of humanity by the powerful corporate world to intimate, personal, and playful statements about family and fatherhood.
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March 2 – April 20, 2018, Place or NonPlace, Paintings, Courtland Blade
Indianapolis painter Courtland Blade explores the qualities of urban places, both as centers intended for human habitat and those not–and the blurring between them. His manner may recall Arthur Dove or Milton Avery with his animated and simplified forms of clouds, trees, shades, and reflections. Architecture is also simplified, charmingly, yet still recognizable observation of locations in Indianapolis.
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June 2 – August 19, 2017, Land We Share: Installation, Margaret Whiting
Whiting is an environmentalist, so concerned with ecology that her art uses discarded law books, anatomical illustrations, and geological topography maps in creative ways. Collages and sculptural objects demonstrate that we share the land as the human family. What we do to “our” land affects everybody and all creatures, and that caring for the land is also taking care of our bodies. Anatomical views of our cardio and nervous systems look like the river systems of our continent. The 19th-century law books show that the laws made then can no longer wisely apply since the rise of the manufacturing, mining, transportation, agricultural and chemical industries and the exploding population growth of our species.
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March 3 – May 12, 2017, 2 LEAFS, Paintings, Bill and Gwaylon Leaf
A father and son share their paintings, both influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and the traditions of Bill’s early childhood home, a small village in China. Layered spaces and calligraphic mark-making reveal their heritage, but the simple forms, reflective gold leaf tinged with transparent colored glazes, and primary color schemes of Bill’s works and the hot-rod enamels that appear dimensional and create shifting colors of Gwaylon’s work show influences of mid-20th-century American art.
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November 4, 2016 – February 4, 2017, Tetramurmer, An Immersive Environment, Liz Miller, David Hamlow, Rachel Jendrzejewski and Theo Goodell
An imaginative contemplation of time in tandem with the natural and built environment of Vincennes. All three ASV exhibition rooms will be transformed into futuristic landscapes inspired by shapes, patterns, and forms found in local native flora and fauna as well as architectural detail on Main Street. Accompanied by dreamlike texts and sound, the galleries become immersive sanctuaries for meditating on the ever-shifting relationships between nature and humans. This project is created especially for Art Space Vincennes by installation artists Liz Miller and David Hamlow in collaboration with performance artists Rachel Jendrzejewski and Theo Goodell.
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September 2- October 15, 2016 Zoomorphs: Bronze Experiments, Cat Vitebsky
This UK artist’s Vitebsky active, gestural bronzes, cast from wax, feathers, and grasses, blur the lines between human and animal forms. Inspiration came from sources in Modernist work, Greek Mythology and her experiences traveling with her anthropologist father to the remote regions of Siberia to study the migrating Eveny Reindeer People. “Heavily clad in Reindeer skins, riding reindeer, in snowy blizzards on mountain passes, human and animal seemed one.” Like the wings of Daedalus and Icarus, who flew through the air, the Eveny believe that Reindeer, too fly, to the sun to purify human souls for the netherworld.
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July 1 – August 13, 2016: Wartime Observations: WWII Drawings, Henry Hellert, (Coutesy of the Indiana Militarty Museum, Vincennes, IN)
An amateur artist, documented his European “tour of duty” with the 193rd Infantry Division of the US Army. His drawings start with training at Camp Atterbury, then Wales, before crossing the English Channel to Normandy. He served as a scout, fighting battle after battle in Northern France, Luxembourg, Bavaria, Belgium, Holland and across Northern Germany almost to Berlin, where the unit stopped at a bridgehead at the Oder River to let the Russians take Berlin. Despite losses in many battles, Hellert continued to draw, using whatever paper he could carry or find, from posters to maps, wrapping paper, and sketchbooks. Also in the show are works he did long after the war in the fifties and sixties, which call up interesting issues of remembrance of the war, and how his style was revised and transformed from the observational to a form derived from the comics.
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May 6 – June 11, 2016: Time’s Signature: The Sculpture, Robert Pulley
Pully, since boyhood, Pulley has been fascinated with the largeness of the earth we stand on, its geological life and its place in the cosmos. These inspirations manifest in his ceramic sculpture and stone and bronze pieces. The ceramic pieces are large, earthy and suited for the garden or a large interior. The stone and bronze pieces are smaller scale and would work nicely in contemporary interior spaces.
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March 5 – April 9, 2016: Rupture Wonder: Painting by Trung Pham
Pham’s art is rooted in deeply felt and philosophically considered explorations of notions of pain and how it can lead one toward wonder and enlightenment. His ideas are developed from his education as a Jesuit priest and his studies in philosophy and chemical engineering.
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November 6 – December 12, 2015: Word as Image: The Art of Sandra Bowden
Bowden lives and works near Boston as a printmaker primarily, though at times her works become sculptural book forms. They are inspired by the Roman Catholic faith with a particular emphasis on the sacredness of the Word and holy script.
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September 4 – October 17, 2015: Surfaces, Alicia Forestall Boehm
This Chicago artist creates sculpture with encaustic and cheesecloth. The works are inspired by the city landscape and architecture. Some are large, made of similar units that can cover walls or hang from the ceiling. They are tactile, colorful, personal and evocative.
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July 3, 2015 – August 15, 2015: The Magic Realism of Luisa Cohrs
Colombian-born and now living in California, Cohrs contemplates memories and stories passed down from her mother, who survived the Colombian Civil War (1948 – 1958). Her art employs a type of realism, in this case, apparently, paint soaked cloth (hankies and doilies), pressed against the canvas to create an impression of the real object, but also employing the resulting abstract patterns to evoke magical recollections of the past. The images are personal, powerful and surreal. The hankies become poetically symbolic figures of the past. A 17 foot mural with pencil and charcoal in ASV’s hallway was inspired by the author Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez (1927 -2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America.
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May 1 – June 20, 2015: Disturbances In the Field, Sara Risley
Risley, a Milwaukee artist, primarily a photographer, creates brilliant abstract images from landscapes, then develops the images using Photoshop to take them beyond recognition while hyping up the color to full intensity. The hyped color reveals structures not apparent in ordinary photography.
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April 3 – April 25, 2015: Cardboard Chronicles: Biblical Art of Rudolph Bostic,
This untrained artist, diseased, from Georgia, moved by his religious visions of the old and new testaments of the Bible, creates interpretations of Biblical scenes as he imagines them using only house paint and cardboard. He is celebrated as an outstanding folk artist and his works have been acquired by several important collectors and shown in folk art museums in Savannah, Florida and New York.
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March 6 – March 28, 2015: Love Thy Nature: Design for Good Causes, Pravin Sevak
Born in India and educated at India’s famous National Institute of Design, Sevak and his spouse Arvind moved to the United States years ago. He draws from his passions for peace and goodness, which guide the visual research and remarkably powerful simplicity in his graphic design that have won many international awards in the field.
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November 7, 2014 – January 17, 2015:Other Places, Other Spaces: Photographs, John Puffer
Puffer’s new and reworked photographs (to meet new technological standards) offered an opportunity for introspection and reflection, always with beautifully developed form, space, and color in the compositions. In this show, he focused on landscapes and architecture from his travels around the world to probe for remnants from the past.
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September 5 – October 18, 2014: Defying Ordinary: Painting By Jaye Schlesinger
Jaye Schlesinger’s paintings of ordinary, often quite mundane, objects speak to us in a special way through the artist’s deliberate and perceptive powers of observation and meticulous handling of paint. They become magical and humorous; they transcend the object’s everyday associations.
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June 6 – August 8, 2014: Horizons and Nechs: Glass Sculpture, Seth Fairweather
The term Nechs refers to a Runescape computer game in which the player kills Nechs, imaginary anonymous slayer figures, symolizing ‘the other’. Fairweather’s Ascetic Series, the theme of which was solitude and reflection, is a search for a mpore genuine meaning in our lives.
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April 4- May 17, 2014: Sacred Spaces, Nancy Newman Rice
Rice’s three series of works deriving from TS Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, encounters memories and taking stock of one’s own life journey through visual metaphor. The work draws from visits to gothic cathedrals, and one in particular which was being renovated with scaffolding, reflections, shadows that she interpreted as a pathway to heaven. These works were small, meticulous and rich with color, values and detail.
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February 4 – March 15, 2014: Late Winter Reflections, Early Works, by Amy DeLap and Andrew Jendrzejewski
Work by the owners of the gallery who are artists themselves. It is a review of various periods of art-making by the by the couple throughout the last several decades.
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November 29, 2013 – January 17, 2014:Christmas Pageant, An Installation, Amy DeLap and Andrew Jendrzejewski
An interpretative installation of the Christmas Story that stretches from one room to the other on a constructed landscape. Near the entrance to the first room are toy figures engaged in winter activities, but as one moves through the installation there a gradual movement of hundreds of figures that are on a journey to Bethlehem to see the Christ child. There is no distinction between creatures, people, robots–it’s an all inclusive collection toy figures, with all the wacky personalities that arrive to the manger under the Christmas star with the newborn Christ Child.
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October 4 – November 9, 2013: Quiet Thoughts, Painting, Trang T. Lè
This was the first exhibition of Art Space Vincennes. I was responding to Lè’s general call for a response to her new resume. After viewing her stunning work, though, we offered a show and paid for all her shipping. She accepted.
As South Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese, Lè’s father, an officer, who worked for the Americans during the Vietnam war was discovered in hiding and taken to a prison, where they were ‘re-educated’ for 7 years, then released. Once released several families worked together to find a boat with an engine and escape from Vietnam. They became what Americans referred to as ‘the boat people’. Their motor eventually burnt out and their boat drifted for days until a steamer discovered them, picked them up and took them to Cambodia. Eventually, because of their service to America during the war, her family was brought to the US and granted citizenship.
As the Afghanistan war broke out, Lè had already been resettled in LA. She began to suffer post traumatic stress triggered from hearing about the war. She sought therapy. She went on a campaign to find the name of every American soldier that was killed in Afghanistan. For years she tracked down names, recorded her findings in a log. She then covered eight panels with a dark sky and filled them with 117,978 stars in all, each one representing a service man who died in the war. They connected with her view of the sky at night as their small boat quietly drifted in the night lost at sea. The sky gave her comfort. She began to look at the sky during the day time as well, to deal with her current post traumatic stress, creating large canvases sometimes almost blank with very subtle changes of the clouds. Eventually, her post traumatic stress went away.
By quiet, meditative observation, she was able to face her memories and deal with her post-traumatic stress. For her, it took years. Her efforts of looking back honestly, despite the difficulty in doing so, at the causes of her trauma and recreating beautiful metaphors (of the sky, clouds, and stars) that gives her peace both now and then–a valuable lesson for all of us. From Trang’s exhibition on, each show has provided some overriding message, meaning or impact that could be useful to the alert viewer.