Using sculpture, photography, painting and cardboard, four artists created works to portray their individual perspectives of the American Southwest for JRB Art at The Elms’ current exhibition.
Joy Reed Belt, gallery owner and curator, selected artists Shirley Thomson-Smith, Jim Keffer, Jenny Gummersall and Jason Cytacki for the Art of the American Southwest show, which she hosts each June to coincide with the annual Prix de West brunch held at the gallery, in conjunction with the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.
This year’s brunch, held June 9, honored Thomson-Smith, a nationally renowned Prix de West artist for more than 20 years. Belt said Thomson-Smith contributed sculptures of American Indian and peasant women to the exhibition.
The artist does not use photographs or models for her work, but rather her imagination, Belt said. Thomson- Smith’s matriarchal and earthly sculptures represent sensitivity and women’s historical role as “the cornerstone of society and the passivity, intuition and stoicism on which civilization depends,” according to her website.
“[Visitors]
tell me one of the things they enjoy in the large main gallery is the
juxtaposition of the unusual patinas of the sculptures with the
primitive Southwestern paintings,” Belt said.
Keffer,
an Oklahoma City native and self-taught painter, is represented by 21
paintings depicting the landscape and architecture of rural Oklahoma,
New Mexico and “anything west of I-35” through a “contemporary
minimalism” style, he said.
“My connection is just to the land itself,” said Keffer, noting that he visits New Mexico throughout the year to paint on-site.
In
contrast with his paintings of adobe houses and vast Santa Fe expanses,
Colorado photographer Gummersall captures the smaller, “organic”
details, such as snow on a horse’s coat, the fabric of worn chaps and a
silhouette of a cowboy on horseback.
“Oklahoma is such a historic gateway to the West; it has such grit, fortitude and hope,”
Gummersall said. “It is fitting that these images be shown in Oklahoma.
The American West is a landscape of the American spirit.”
Belt strove to illustrate the variety of the Southwest through the four artists’ work, and believes she succeeded.
“I want to show that the Southwest has a varied landscape, a varied color palette and varied symbolism,” she said.
An
assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma Cytacki painted
cardboard dioramas of mountainous, Southwestern landscapes. His recent
work explores frontier mythology and its longevity in popular
imagination, according to a news release.
All four artists have
permanently featured pieces in the gallery as well, noted Belt, who
coordinates her gallery’s monthly exhibitions nearly two years in
advance. Each opens during The Paseo Arts District’s monthly First
Friday Gallery Walks.
This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2013.