Rosewood Arts Center is located within an unassuming residential Kettering neighborhood. It offers exhibitions, classes in visual and performing arts, artist studios and special events and festivals. An extensive renovation was completed in 2023, revamping programming and experiences for youth through adult.
There is a prolific clay program, specialized printmaking equipment, a state-of-the-art darkroom, and a new 160-seat theater.
Kettering Health Art Gallery is located within the center and presents several juried and invitational group and solo exhibitions throughout the year, showcasing artists local, regional and national. The current show is one of a series of solo exhibitions featuring artists from across the U.S.
The artists were chosen through a juried panel of two local art professionals and a representative from the Kettering Arts Council. The process was facilitated by Gallery Coordinator Laura Truitt, who also hung the show.
MORGAN CRAIG
A two-time recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, among other accolades, Philadelphia-based painter Morgan Craig portrays abandoned spaces in various levels of decay.
His imagery of factories, cars and abandoned interiors are deeply relevant in post-industrial Dayton, once an epicenter of American invention. For context, the documentary “American Factory” about the Fuyao Glass manufacturing plant, formerly General Motors, was filmed minutes from Rosewood.
As inspiration, Craig references philosophers Derrida, Kant and Nietzsche, painters John Singer Sargent and Caspar David Friedrich, and critical theories of capitalism and its effect on society and economics.
“He’s very intellectual about his paintings,” said Truitt, Rosewood’s Gallery Coordinator.
Craig sees his work as a commentary on the impact of capitalism on communities. He refers to a “hauntological” interpretation, a concept coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida. It explores the idea that the present is shaped not just by the past, but by the absence of futures that could have been. The present is haunted by the ghost of lost futures that have been quashed by, for example, greed and lack of empathy for the worker.
It is a commentary particularly relevant to the Rust Belt, a region known for its decline in manufacturing industries. Included in the gallery are paintings of a factory in Granite City, Illinois (“Widow Maker”), and what appears to be a small town mom and pop diner (“Hypostasis, in this Heartland”). Both are depicted as abandoned and crumbling or scattered with detritus.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
Craig personally visits the real-life locations to take photos as sources for his paintings. He views this as integral to the process.
“I have been known to trespass. I will have someone with me, in case an accident is to occur. The last thing one would want is to have a floor collapse beneath them,” he said.
He described these ventures into abandoned spaces as alternately joyful with moments of “utter vexation”.
Visually, the paintings are big and bold, with inky patches of negative space contrasting zones of luminous color. The colors are saturated, almost unnatural. Each canvas embraces a different color palette.
The paintings are well drawn and representational, there is harmony in the line and proportion. The dark areas are mysterious and seem to be filling in missing information, alluding perhaps to the photographic source combined with fading memory.
With their glowing palette and large scale, a sense of awe is conveyed that is rooted in both color theory and art history.
For Craig, color is directly tied to the content.
“For many, especially those who worked in and depended upon this specific space for their livelihood, the weight is profound. The structures take on a humanistic quality. Color is paramount to this emotional element.”
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
KATHY A. MOORE
Open doorways link the two spaces of the gallery. Visitors can look through and observe the dynamic at play between the artists’ work, and perhaps notice reasons why the jury chose to display these particular painters together.
In the second room is the work of Kathy A. Moore, an Ohio native with an extensive resume who shows with First Street Gallery in New York.
Moore’s paintings depicts suburban and rural scenes, referring to black and white photography from the 1920s – 50s inspired partly by Moore’s own family albums.
Truitt finds Craig’s paintings to be very public work, addressing socio-economic systems representative of society, whereas Moore’s work is “very private and intimate.”
This is apparent not just through the subject matter and source material — old family photographs — but in the modest size of the paintings, which are all acrylic on birch wood.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The most obvious contrast between the artists is Craig’s bold approach to color and Moore’s use of greyscale — monochromatic paintings in tones of black and white.
Both artists present cohesive bodies of work, with their respective techniques seeming very consistent. Both use photography as source material.
Throughout there is the use of architecture to suggest human presence where there is an absence of the figure. Even in Moore’s paintings that include people, the faces are often left blank, devoid of features. Though they are familial places, there is a coldness, both literally conveyed through the snowscape, and also through the lack of color.
Moore described this aesthetic as an intentional decision.
“The scenes show signs of people and life, but they are sparing, as if they have been driven inside by the cold.”
Truitt commented on her approach with hanging Moore’s work, and how she wanted to cluster certain pieces together to accentuate the sense of story.
“I grouped them because I felt like everything was narrative. It’s all about these stories. She starts with a family photo and then changes the light. The snow and the cold and light is all added. They tell a story together.”
One piece by Moore is titled “Abandoned Granary”. With its smooth white facade, the titular building resembles a pueblo church, though it is likely in a rural Ohioan town not unlike those outside Dayton. The sky is dark grey and ominous, as though it is about to open up into a winter storm. You can almost imagine flurries drifting into open windows.
In the context of the exhibit it is another forgotten American structure of a once more prosperous or forgiving time — part nostalgia, part ghost.
HOW TO GO
What: Morgan Craig, “Spectres, Soot, and Simulacrum” and Kathy A. Moore, “Snow Light/Day and Night”
When: Through April 12
Where: Kettering Health Art Gallery at Rosewood Arts Center, 2655 Olson Drive
Contact: 937-296-0294 and playkettering.org/gallery
More details: Closing reception and artist talks, 1-3 p.m. April 12; Free and open to the public
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