Personal Ends Toward an Expressive Middle Zone

Generally speaking, the working process of fine artists entails solitary hours and internalized creative energies spent in private studios, striving toward highly personal expressive ends. Studio artists function in an inherently different, more solitary way than those working in film, music, theater, and multimedia settings. 

There are exceptions, even in the Santa Barbara scene, such as the memorable Westmont Museum of Art show from 2015, Tug, with works collaboratively fashioned by artists Keith Puccinelli and Dane Goodman. We can now add to that slender collaborative exhibition list the show Timely, now gracing the walls of the Architectural Foundation Gallery. 

In this case, the collaborative pact between sinuous porcelain sculptor Joan Rosenberg-Dent and Caroline Kapp, an experimental photographer who also works with drawing, is mostly a conceptual and thematic one, with occasional hands-on interactions. The pair initially connected when they were involved together in a group show at the Channing Peake Gallery and recognized a simpatico in their separate artistic directions and visual/contextual interests. 

They decided to pool their visions for the current exhibition, which summons up a special dualistic ambience in this inviting art space. Pursuant to the fluid exhibition title, Timely, the artists blend references to time’s passage, implications of rhythm, and the artistic evolution of art made in the past, present, and leaning into a still-unfolding artistic future.

Commonality of formal ideas, across the two- and three-dimensional planes, create harmonious cross-talk throughout the exhibition, starting just inside the gallery door. Dent’s “Rewind” — with its spiraling arabesque and vertical bands on gray space — blends naturally with the elliptical detail and deconstructionist air of Kapp’s “Parallax No. 5.” Across the room, a selection of art by both parties engages in a certain brand of visual conversation, between the porcelain minutiae of a cup; egg-like structures and the apt “Hung Up in Time” (and the shamelessly visual pun of her tangle-wired “Unplugged”); and Kapp’s witty diptych of coffee cups viewed from above and below, “Upwards/Downwards.”

Nearby, the fertility indexing theme continues with Dent’s symbolic blend of egg and looping forms, “Birth and Infinity,” on a pedestal below Kapp’s supple vessel image “Ellipsis No. 2.” Dent’s large relief pieces “Flow” and “Time Reveals” exemplify her seamless and reinventive way of dealing with and manipulating porcelain to suggest the fluidity of fabric. These undulant forms flank Kapp’s smaller, softer-voiced inkjet print “Trickle,” which seems to lend an optical echo or answer to the situational call.

Subtly iconoclastic visions are at work here. Just as Dent has developed a distinctive and non-conformist way of working with her chosen medium of porcelain, Kapp uses extended photographic and printing techniques to veer into surprising and sometimes surreal turf in her work. Lines between drawing and the ostensible truth-telling conceit of photography blur. With “Terminal Basin No. 5,” Kapp uses the toned cyanotype printing method to create a rustic stone image on a loose grid, with an impression at once earthy and cerebral.

Literal collaboration between the artists does land in the form of the centerpiece work “Spinning/Askew,” 24 distinct variations on the theme of a spinning top, printed as Kapp’s cyanotypes on Dent’s compact porcelain tiles, all in a roughly ordered mosaic pattern. As with other works with kinetic verbs as titles and time references, the kinetic choreography of these tops captured in frozen moments hint at a shifting, temporal spirit within the fixity of fine art on gallery walls.

Ultimately, Timely is an example of a two-person show in which the artists do not stick to their own corners or thematic interests. The gallery seems to play host to an attraction not of opposites but of interactively diverse work, hovering around similar themes and visual gestures. They cull and mingle, in a somewhat timely fashion.

Timely by Joan Rosenberg-Dent and Caroline Kapp is on view at the Architectural Foundation Gallery (229 E. Victoria St.) through August 24. See afsb.org.

Upcoming events at the gallery include: 

June 8, 2-3 p.m., a discussion with panelists Silvia Perea, Curator of AD&A Museum at UCSB; Alan Grosenheider, Deputy University Librarian, developed Art in the Library Collection at UCSB; and Claire Pemberton, student, UCSB

June 15, 2-3 p.m., a discussion with panelist James Glisson, Curator of Contemporary Collections at Santa Barbara Museum of Art 

July 13, 2-3 p.m., a discussion with panelists Paul Longanbach, boardmember of SBMA; and David Gersh, past boardmember of SBMA, author, collector  

July 27, 2-3 p.m., a discussion with panelists Tony Askew, Professor Emeritus, Westmont College, and artist; and Joyce Wilson, Instructor at Brooks Institute of photography, photographer

All events are free and open to the public. Doors open at 1 p.m. Limited space on a first-come basis.