Jacoby Arts Center: riday, 20 January 2012

Jacoby Arts Center is pleased to present the Awards of Excellence 2012 Exhibition. Award winners of last year’s annual juried exhibit are invited back to display their talents in Awards of Excellence 2012. This year’s juror, Noah Kirby, selected the work of local artists Jason Bly, Dennis DeToye, Toni Mack, Andrew Van Der Tuin and Jeff Vaughn to present this January.

The opening for this exhibition is January 20, and Jacoby Arts Center is hosting a Gallery Talk on February 8 to grant local art enthusiasts a chance to meet the artists and hear about their processes, motivations and future projects.

This year each artist’s work is unique and provocative. Painter Jason Bly’s realistically rendered objects are an investigation into the daily barrage of digital images and how we process the information. He meticulously paints chosen digital images in a traditional painting method of thin layers of oil paint — juxtaposing realistic rendered images with flat graphic surfaces and comparing the deliverance of the image. Sculptor Andrew Van Der Tuin also uses resources from our current technology, sourcing materials from Home Depot to make deceptively simple, light weight, flexible pieces that reduce the sculptural elements to “kits of parts” wood, zip ties and steel. The constructed parts multiply, describing form, movement and concepts.

In comparison, Jeff Vaughn masterly paints lush landscapes giving us a sense of divine beauty. He records the earth’s glory so completely that you receive the same joy and inspiration as a day in the woods. Dennis DeToye really can’t say why he likes to paint faces. He finds painting people with glasses, dark skin tones and wrinkles interesting and challenging. He paints on a large scale, encompassing the picture plane, bringing you up close and personal to the subject, confronted by the individual humanity. Fibers artist Toni Mack’s whimsical hooked rug piece, Tolle Lane, is a walk through childhood memories, a placed loved and captured in her heart and soul.

Noah Kirby, a professional sculptor and Senior Lecturer of Sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis, co-founded Six Mile Sculpture Works, a non-profit institution dedicated to preserving, promoting and expanding our sculptural and industrial heritage.

Located at 627 East Broadway in Alton, Illinois, Jacoby Arts Center is open Tuesdays-Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sundays from 12 to 4 p.m., and closed on Mondays. For more information, visit www.jacobyartscenter.org or call 618.462.5222.