Denise Stewart-Sanabria

Confrontations and Observations will be at Yeiser Art Center in Paducah, Kentucky until Oct. 30, 2012.

The exhibit features the work of Knoxville, TN artist Denise Stewart-Sanabria www.stewart-sanabria.com, and West Lafayette, IN artist Christine Wuenschel www.christinewuenschel.com

The Yeiser's new Yak sculpture has been Yarn Bombed!

Yeiser Art Center www.theyeiser.org is the principle art non-profit in Paducah, Kentucky, a city that was put on the arts map by a major urban renewal experiment driven by an artist relocation plan. People whom I've exhibited with in the past, Travis Graves and Anne Bagby had shown there, so I liked that. Also, Wuenschel and I are in a book together, INDA 6, produced by Manifest Gallery in Cincinatti, so I knew her work and loved it. Local professor Randy Simmons, ironically also in that same book, was on the Yeiser board at the proposal submission time and pushed to have us exhibit together. It's interesting when you find out how the process works.

http://www.paducahalliance.org/artist-relocation-program

My installation piece, Quantum Confusion, filled the center of the gallery, while Wuenschel's drawings on paper covered the walls. My favorite aspect of the blending of our work was how her massive panoramic piece looked from the back of my piece. My people became silent observers.

Wuenschel, (left) and myself hit our gallery talks.

Wuenschel talks with Randy Simmons, local professor at WKCTC http://www.randysimmonsdrawings.com/Home.html


We appreciated a really decent article in the Paducah Sun. (Note to artists who do nudes; PG crop your 300 dpi's before submitting to papers-that way the other artist doesn't get handed all the image space and ends up feeling like a hog.)

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Walk Around Time

I had a whole day to wander around downtown. It is a really beautiful town with an interesting history. We ate in a bar that had these tiles on the floor. I like weird tiles.

The night before, we had been on the outside of town, which had a certain kultural authenticity that reminded me of Pigeon Forge, TN. So, we stuck to downtown.

Downtown has had tremendous renovation, with more to go. I think they are working on this beautiful old movie theater (above) and below, you can see one of the old brick streets and the side of the Yeiser, that connects to a small history museum.

There is a history of incredible floods in the city, as the marker on the side of a building on the 3rd block from the river attests. This portion of the Ohio River is just miles above where the Tennessee River joins it. The gallery is 2 blocks from the river.

The entire river side has lines of flood walls that now protect the city from disaster, painted with wonderful history murals.

The chair below is on the Kentucky side, the land on the other side is Illinois.

Farmer's Market: Stuff for sale above, extinct food supplies below.

Early settlers and Indians discover the National Quilt Museum.

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The neighborhoods downtown where the artist relocation program occurred have gone from ruins to gorgeous. Many of the artists who live there don't exhibit locally, but many have galleries in their studios. 2nd Saturdays are when they open for receptions to the public together, but many are open Sat. afternoons. When I went to William F. Renzulli's studio (he relocated from PA), he showed me something really cool I'd never heard of-clay slip printing. He has this huge clay tablet he uses as a base. The basic concept is mono-printing, but is done on the tablet with clay slip mixed with pigment and other materials. He has just smeared on a couple pigments here, and is grinding chalk dust into part of it, plus using a plastic circle as a stencil. After, he sprays it with water a bit, and then sprays his print surface, which is not paper, but commercial garment interfacing. It is the stuff used to stiffen lapels, waistbands, ect. It is white, and partially translucent. He does a series of prints using a roller for transfer. Each print is pulled from a sub-surface of the first, where years of previous slip and pigment reside, ready to be reactivated. It is kind of like an archeological dig.

This below shows the transitions from 1st pull, upper left, to last, lower right.

I went next to Keyth Kahrs' studio. He is mainly a landscape painter who does pop art also, like the multilayer plywood cutout corn dog painting. He's working on a hotdog now. I think they'd be cool in a restaurant.

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More wandering around:
See all the locations for Finkel's? I was excited to see Metropolis. I went on a search for Superman.