By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The 12th NowOH Community Arts Exhibition turned into a sister act.
Gyona Rice won the top prize for two-dimensional art for her print “The Phantasms of Black Womanhood.” Her older sister, DaJaniere Rice, won the Popular Choice award as well as an honorable mention for her quilt “For Your Eyes Only, 2017.”
Best of Show went to metalsmith Jennifer Marcson for “Internalization III.”
Marcson, like a number of the winning artists, could not attend Friday night’s opening in the Bowling Green State University Galleries. She received her Master of Fine Arts from BGSU in May.
Her parents, Ron and Chris Nickey, were in attendance. Her mother said she was trying to reach her daughter who was camping to give her the news.
Chris Nickey played her part in winning art. A photograph of her wearing the perplexing piece of jewelry, which was part necklace with a finger shaped pendant and part hearing device.
Her mother said another of her daughter’s pieces on display included castings of family members’ fingers.
The exhibit’s judge, Daniel McInnis, a photographer and professor at the University of Toledo, said he wasn’t sure whether the photograph as intended to be considered part of the work, or just to model how the piece was to be worn.
“This was incredibly helpful,” he said. “It makes the viewer more visually literate about what this means and how it may be used. Without it, it’s not as complete a piece.”
He added: “This is also a beautiful photograph.”
Even with the photograph, the piece remains mysterious. The shape is at once phallic, but also looks a bit like a women’s reproductive system.
The headphone-like extensions, and a finger at the center of the model’s chest made McInnis wonder if she was having a conversation with herself.
Referring to the creator of “Twin Peaks,” McInnis said, “David Lynch would really go for Jennifer’s pieces.” On the weird scale, it rated a “10,” he said.
McInnis had high praise for the show as a whole. NowOH is opened to all artists from 12 counties in Northwest Ohio. Any artist who submits up to three works is included in the exhibit. For the 12th exhibit 46 artists participated.
This was the first time McInnis has experienced the NowOH show. “I was stunned by the quality of work. I could not believe it.”
Though he’s not a fan of “the paradigm” of the guy who shows up and ordains the winners, he was honored to be asked. Before seeing the exhibit, he wondered how long it would take him to determine the seven prize winners and nine honorable mentions. “I was here for hours. It was really tough.”
In the end, he said, “all the pieces I chose seem to take a risk, either in process or in subject matter or concept. In the best work, they overlap.”
McInnis added: “I was impressed with the diversity of subject matter, medium and people that were in the show.”
Art is “an antidote” to much of the troubles of our time — racism, anti-Semitism, addiction, alienation. “Art allows us to focus on our differences in a positive manner,” he said. “It shows others what we are seeing, thinking, feeling, and it allows us a space to discuss those things.”
In her print, Gyona Rice said: “I wanted to explore how black women are perceived as the opposite of beauty, how stereotypes and perceptions perceive us to be like monsters, as ugly even. I wanted to push that off to show us as goddesses.”
She employs fantasy and surrealism to make her point, both in the winning print and the other two on display.
These were completed, the BGSU undergraduate said, using a grant from the Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship.
Rice, who studies with Janet Ballweg, received the grant to explore her distinctive approach to print making.
She explained that she builds the final work by using pieces of multiple prints. She’ll pull a number of prints with different patterns and images, and then cuts them apart and layers those fragments together to achieve the final effect. “Phantasms” had about a dozen layers.
“It’s like a matching game,” she said.
Her use of color was “phenomenal,” McInnis said. “Graphically this is fantastic.”
Gyona Rice is one of three children in a family from Inkster, Michigan, that has art in its blood. “You’re not a Rice child if you’re not into sculpting or are gifted artistically.”
As if to prove that point, her sister, DaJaniere, had her art displayed across the gallery.
Her winning piece was a quilt that explored her own battle with depression.
DaJaniere Rice, a graphic designer who graduated from BGSU, said she’d gone through depression for a long time “but I didn’t get help until I got into college.”
The quilt was “a self study” that posed the question: “Does art therapy really work and, if it does, can I make it work for me?”
Creating the quilt was “a pivotal moment” in her therapy.
The quilt brings together not just her expertise in graphic design but her practice of keeping a journal and sewing, which she does as a hobby.
“What does mixing fiber art and graphic design look like?”
In “For Your Eyes Only,” she said, she was “putting everything out in the open.”
Questions she asks herself and excerpts from her diary are incorporated into the design, either by using fabric transfers or by printing them onto the fabric.
Painter Emily Avaritt combines contemporary concerns with a deep appreciation for art history.
Growing up in Toledo, she attended the Toledo School for the Arts starting in sixth grade. That was a natural place for her love of art to blossom and as a jumping off point to attend BGSU, which sponsors the school.
A rising senior, Avaritt studies painting with Brandon Briggs. She received an honorable mention for her painting “Austin, 2019.”
McInness praised the way she played the soft against bold in “Austin” and its companion piece “Evin, 2019.” Both were oval shaped, a once-popular device, now being rediscovered, he said.
Both are portraits of two of Avaritt ’s friends.
She’s long been drawn to portraiture and painting of Renaissance which she finds dramatic and cinematic. Yet she also wants to use a more contemporary palette of colors. She said she works with Briggs “to push as much color into my work as possible.”
The portraits play on the ideas of femininity with the male figures draped with flowers and depicted in colors that were complementary to the shades the artist herself was wearing to the opening.
DaJaniere Rice said she liked the concept of the show that “allows anyone who considers themselves creative and an artist to put their work on display.”
Other award winners were:
- Adwowa Obeng-Osei, “We Find Them Lost When the Neurons are No More,” First Place 3D.
- Tom Muir, “Linked Flight,” Second Place 3D.
- Elyse Herrera “Side 10 PM,” Second Place 2D.
- Matthew Cook, “Vanitas,” Toledo Federation of Art Societies Award.
- Hannah Miller, “Misplaced,” Kiwanis Youth Art Award.
- Joel O’Dorisio, Ileana Hernandez, Sarah Compton, Kim Turner-Young, Amy Fell, Isabel Zeng, and Daria Gan.
The exhibit will be open through July 26 with gallery hours, Thursday, 7-9 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 1-4 p.m. Closed July 4 and 5.
