With all the recent dialogue challenging longstanding notions of gender, race and marriage, one would expect to find these themes daringly reflected in art.
And they are — just not so much in Palm Beach County.
The Cultural Council Biennial 2015, running now through Aug. 29 at the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County’s Lake Worth locale, sounds promising. One finds a variety of media, style, color and application and plenty of gorgeous nature by the professional artists who responded to the open call.
While the Best of Show has already been issued to a short film, viewers can still vote for their favorite piece to win the People’s Choice Award. The winner will be announced in August.
Photography makes several black-and-white appearances through works like A Grand Reflection, by Debbie Rubin, and A Great Tree by George Steinman, both of which remind us why nature remains an artist’s eternal muse. It can be powerful and unforgiving, as the canyons portrayed like waterfalls in Benjamin Rusnak’s Bones, or it can be soft and elegant, as Dolores Kiriacon’s Wilting Lily.
Her photograph is part of a portfolio recording plant life cycles. Here, we see two poetic faces of one flower: a white youth being followed by an early death. The Lily appears against a black background; all distractions have been eliminated to deliver a simple truth: loss is part of life.
The isolated young tree depicted on Oak Sapling in Moonlight, by Carin Wagner, can be unexpectedly captivating. The delicate plant being born out of the ashy, feathery ground looks innocent and hopeful while it lets the white light announce its dark green leafs. Be sure to spend some minutes contemplating the thin-layered background featuring browns, greens and blues in harmony.
My personal vote would have been clear at this point had it not been for John Frazee’s emotive Spiritual Overtones. The melting effect of bright whites and reds rushing down, like lava after a volcano’s eruption, lends the abstract piece a sense of drama and urgency. It is as if the colors had not finished crying and this precise moment was not to last. In the end, the soothing effect of Wagner’s work prevailed in my mind.
Artworks like Meshed Men: Portraits in Crime, by self-proclaimed photo-humorist Lorenzo Laiken, and Party, by Margie Agoston, are ideal for viewers who prefer art that is fun instead of dark and serious. So is Play, the short film that won Best of Show. It causes one to smile at the adorable sound of children at play.
The artist, Cheryl Maeder, describes the moment in which she saw, from the top floor of a shopping mall, the little ones laughing and jumping around a breakfast-themed playground. The magic moment of pure happiness is set to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker.
Despite it being in various ways satisfying, Biennial 2015 does not feel new. Many of the displayed pieces seem as concerned with their creators as with the world we live in, which is also old news. A few works do make an effort to keep up with modern tendencies and stimulate a conversation beyond their creators’ inner thoughts and feelings.
Upon entering the gallery, to the right, one finds a piece commenting on our technologically driven culture. Tammy Knipp’s Mail Barcode in Key of B-flat is a 20-foot version of the Intelligent Mail Barcode: a digital encoding system developed by the U.S. Post Office to sort and track mail. Each barcode used 65 vertical bars in four heights. The installation is accompanied by music corresponding to those four heights. It is an interesting sensory and visual experience.
Last Picnic, by Hanne Niederhausen, dives into the nutritional food-intake dilemma a typical consumer faces daily. Dinner has been served, except that dinner here is controversial images speaking to the overabundance of food choices and the uncertainty surrounding chemicals and additives. It is not an easy feast to digest.
Having seen the exhibit, one wonders about the benefits of making a year figure part of its title. The practice is rather common, and Biennial 2015 is only one of many events that must think we cannot track time. But could it subliminally convey the unintended idea that a certain show is reflective of a time, when it might just be reflective of a geographic area?
Every notion one thought untouchable and universal is being dissected and put back together right now in unrecognizable and very public ways — witness Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover. Where are the equally loud, brave artistic interpretations of this moment we live?
Perhaps it’s Nature’s fault. Maybe it is time we gave it a break. Every muse needs to retire from time to time, if only to come back renovated and the spectator, having not seen it for a while, shall embrace it as if it were new.
The Cultural Council Biennial 2015 is on display through Aug. 29 at the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, 601 Lake Ave., Lake Worth. Galleries are free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.