Makers’ Marks is an exhibition featuring work by Todd Cloe, Frank Hamrick, and Cliff Tresner. These artists’ studio practices revolve around making objects constructed largely by hand, as well as using visual forms to express parables. Their broad storytelling capacity touches on many themes ranging from formal or art historical issues to personal narratives with larger human implications.
These artists work in representational and abstract modes in media as diverse as tintypes, books, drawings, and sculptures. The intended impact of this exhibition is an unexpected immediacy and connection by visitors to the artists’ work because the personality of the artists and the essence of their materials overlap where the traces of their touch can be detected.
Tintypes individually rendered, with their distorted edges and glossy surfaces; hand-hewn wood weathered by the very hands that shaped it; aggressively welded metal; and precisely bound, deckle-edged rag paper all speak to this. By and large, the work showcased in Makers’ Marks is an interesting counterpoint to living in front of a screen and expecting instant gratification.
The exhibition is not a criticism of our milieu though, but a new way of appreciating it by reacquainting ourselves with skills and materials alien to most.
