Cleveland artists Melanie Newman and Terry Durst met as bartenders at the Beachland Ballroom. One night last year, right before the doors opened, they came up with a great idea for an installation and began brainstorming.

Melanie and Terry want you to know that It’s Not Your Fault.

Terry is a Brandt Gallery veteran, having shown his work here for about 10 years through the nineties. This show will be Melanie’s first time working in the space, although she is familiar with Tremont as her first show post BFA graduation from CIA was hosted by the Doubting Thomas Gallery.

I deal with raw human emotion that is often represented through figures, abstract portraits, or completely abstract images. I use flat saturated color in most of my work because this is how I see our world and society; plainly, dismally, and vividly.  Human emotions are the focus of my work, although the content is sometimes revealed to me after the pieces are completed.

I am influenced by the skateboard and outsider art that surrounded me in my adolescence growing up in Cleveland, Ohio.  Other strong influences include urban art and any sort of Abstract Expressionism.

The members of Team of Rivals hail from the following bands:  The Heathers, Dead Federation, Missile Toe, Zero Defex, CD Truth, Numbskull, Starvation Army, Oral Authority, Pestilence and the SLAP Jazz Trio.  Gina Muscatello on Vocals, Jeff Hardy on Guitar, Mike Zubal on Bass and John Henry Scully on Drums have been part of

Davide Andras Imburgia/Tom Orange Duo

C. Randolph C.

And Evening of Words and Music, Friday May 4th beginning at 7:30 p.m.

“Keir Neuringer composes & improvises acoustic & electronic music, writes socio-political performance texts & essays, & creates interdisciplinary artworks, all with the aim of bringing audiences into a state of emotional & intellectual curiosity that meets the conditions for meaningful dialogue with, & transformation of, the culture at large. Over the last 25 years he has cultivated a personal & intensely physical approach to solo saxophone improvisation that honors & builds upon diverse music-making traditions. He also plays analogue electronics & farfisa organ, & sings & narrates text. He has been an active participant in the experimental music scenes in Krakow, The Hague, and Amsterdam, and currently lives in Central New York.”

http://keirneuringer.com/about.html

Russell is on tour this month so the very able Blayne Hoerner will be our hostess this week.

Instant Impressionism- Automatic Paintings the Polaroid Way

Work by Daiv Whaley

I find myself working in several mediums depending on the need for certain technologies. Polaroid photography, on the other hand, is simply a love—a joy and a love of ‘accidentally’ capturing some perfect moment of beauty in the natural world and watching it develop before my eyes. It’s like the toy prize in the bottom of the Cracker Jacks box, like the B-side single you’ve never heard from a favorite band.

Flowers are amazing creations—their colors, shapes and sizes suggest explosions out of the earth—floral fireworks. Again, their organic systems—building themselves up out of the ground from tiny seeds and synthesizing energy out of pure sunlight, water and soil—make them amazing machines and self-building architectures. Good designs from the greatest Designer!

My Polaroids are attempts to fuse a sci-fi aesthetic to natural beauty. Using angles, close-up shots, light intensity, intentional blurriness, as well as my own manipulations of the film as the pictures develop, I strive to create a modern or even futuristic feeling with each photograph – more how paintings affect me and feel to me. The title of each piece also contributes to this aesthetic, since words are very important. Interestingly, each year color becomes more and more important in this collection – more painterly, as if the Polaroids are becoming automatic paintings of sorts, which is where the title for this exhibit originates.

These selections have been compiled from a 19-year ongoing project, learning how to get instant film to express my feelings. Bright & beautiful open edition prints, I hope you enjoy this fun method for capturing light and color

Daiv Whaley, March 2012

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Daiv Whaley studied Writing, Journalism & English Literature at Kent State University. Although active in graphic arts in high school, it was not until residing in the art dorm at university that he began to catch the art bug, promoting local punk shows and then God through flyers he stapled around campus. Stints living in Chicago and the Cleveland/Akron area exposed him to artists like Dan Flavin, Marc Chagall, Barb Kruger, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Working in several mediums – Polaroid and cell phone photography, propaganda, light & sound works, Eco-art and performance, Whaley has shown at Lake Erie College, the Beck Center for the Arts, ROY G. BIV (Columbus), Asterisk Gallery, Akron Public Library, Ingenuity Festival, First Night Akron, ASAP (Chicago), Art Metro, Brandt Gallery, North Water Street Gallery (Kent), Zombo Gallery (Pittsburgh), and the Second Floor Gallery (Chicago), among others. He has curated several exhibits in Cleveland galleries and performed in a self-produced cable access TV program, at the Cleveland International Performance Festival, with GROOP at Spaces Gallery, and at the Mattress Factory and Chicago’s Fringe Festival in support of Kristen Baumlier.      His favorite influences are God, nature, Rock & Roll, Sci-Fi and language. Whaley is also a culture journalist and is at work on his first comic book story.

The artists: Jeff and Craig will perform for you.

Performances include:

Singer/Songwriter Craig Martin

Acoustic Set – Jeff Curtis and Tom Orange

Iron Oxide

and a special guest Craig Chojnicki doing the things only Craig can!

Light and Vision by Jeff Curtis

Incorporating words, phrases, and lettering as an intrinsic part of the visuals in my drawings, I am influenced by the history of graphic design as a means of visual communication, and further using visual representations of language as a means of enhancing, augmenting, and sometimes subverting verbal expression.  My reinterpretations of classic book covers and elements from the books themselves give me a chance to explore the processes of graphic design, and to draw out my own subjective reactions and extrapolations of these works of popular culture.

Opening Night performance by Iron Oxide.

St Malachi by Ora Coltman

The Cleveland School has garnered attention over the years for the turn of the century painters it produced and influenced throughout the midwest/Great Lakes region of the United States.    The WPA Projects employed some of these artists, work by Ora Coltman is still on display at the main branch of the City of Cleveland Library.

The Cleveland School eventually became the Cleveland Institute of Art.

This exhibit contains work by three Cleveland School painters, as well as of several paintings subsequent to the Cleveland School period.

Hombre painting by Bruno Casiano

As a child growing up in the Island of Puerto Rico, I encountered the wild rural life of a small town called Juana Diaz. Since, this has been the motivating factor of my artwork, composed of sub-conscience interpretations of mountains, mangos, ceiba trees, caves and the awareness of being on an island. This is the key part of the process of my work, which dips into these memories seen through the eyes of a young kid, where depth of a brilliant sky becomes entangled with leaves, branches, water, colors, forms and high contrast.

This euphoria of the creative process finds the measuring place in the tangible material. Two parallels, man and material interact concurrent to such objective, called art. The complexity of its continuous resurrection repeats itself in many stages throughout the entire existence in which materials are being manipulated. By these undetermined or determined allusions, composed by the surreal and real, singular and plural thoughts which constantly recall stages of  my human experience.

This subjectivity and visual pursuit for the “truth” is which gives birth to the process and creation, and continues to break esthetic interpretations, which results into my final art work.

As a child growing up in the Island of Puerto Rico, I encountered the wild rural life of a small town called Juana Diaz. Since, this has been the motivating factor of my artwork, composed of sub-conscience interpretations of mountains, mangos, ceiba trees, caves and the awareness of being on an island. This is the key part of the process of my work, which dips into these memories seen through the eyes of a young kid, where depth of a brilliant sky becomes entangled with leaves, branches, water, colors, forms and high contrast.

This euphoria of the creative process finds the measuring place in the tangible material. Two parallels, man and material interact concurrent to such objective, called art. The complexity of its continuous resurrection repeats itself in many stages throughout the entire existence in which materials are being manipulated. By these undetermined or determined allusions, composed by the surreal and real, singular and plural thoughts which constantly recall stages of  my human experience.

This subjectivity and visual pursuit for the “truth” is which gives birth to the process and creation, and continues to break esthetic interpretations, which results into my final art work.