Conceptual artist featured in Summit Artspace show
Dustin Arthur Grella uses life
journeys
to inspire in self-titled exhibit
By Roger Durbin
DOWNTOWN AKRON — Summit Artspace is featuring its first-ever single-person show, the works of conceptual artist Dustin Arthur Grella, through March 3.
Described as writer, traveler and artist, Grella is above all the artist-adventurer. His journeys in life — both near and far — inspire the ideas that become the expressions of his art and form the artifacts of his installations in his show, titled Dustin Arthur Grella.
Take his “Notes to Self,” an installation piece that began some five years ago. While working on another project, Grella wrote and mailed a letter to himself. He liked the idea of it enough that he kept doing it and promised to keep at it, he said during an interview, “until it isn’t exciting any more.”
The work continues on, but has transformed, of course, as the circumstances of his life alter. There’s a letter that was written the day he learned that his brother, Devin, was killed in Iraq. There are several — and they play a prominent role in this exhibition — that Grella wrote during a five-month, 15,000-mile trip from his hometown of Medina to Panama in Central America.
Using a wheelchair since a 1995
accident, when a platform
collapsed at a Grateful Dead concert, the 36-year-old
Grella said he was pummeled with the notion of gaining
and relishing his independence. “Everything,”
he said, “seemed to depend on that.” The
trip seemed like a great way of making that happen.
And it did.
But not only self-sufficiency
came out of the experience. Beyond realizing that he
could do anything for himself, Grella also understood
that he didn’t have to, and could count on others
and indeed share the experience.
His letters, then, are a record
of where he’s been. But they also form an intriguing
stamp collection. The ones from south of the border
generate colorful interest in their own right. And the
writings are a journal, a chronicle of what’s
come his way and what he thought of it all.
Recently, as the envelopes displayed
on mounted racks along one long wall of Summit Artspace
reveal, he began working with mail artist Rob Lehr.
Grella wrote the content of the letter (each has about
1,100 words), while Lehr added representational and
imaginative figures, drawings and other motifs.
One day, maybe not so far in the
future, Grella said he will take the letters —
with their comments on world events, life on the road,
the pitched emotions of personal tragedies and the events
of ordinary life and his art — and turn them into
a book. The conceptual installation artist will become
the writer as artist.
A new project on display at Summit
Artspace, “Water into Wine,” sprang out
of his attendance at a friend’s wedding. Neither
bride nor groom drank alcohol,
so Grella’s notion was to bottle and label water
in honor of the occasion. On display is the first, a
2006 vintage (with a 20-year cork in it) that came from
his parents’ well. Grella hopes to have another
with New York City tap water, one with melted snow and
one with Alaskan water (probably from another travel
adventure). Each time, a different artist will design
the label to be affixed. Grella has two artists already
lined up.
On the walls of the gallery space
are Grella’s slate drawings. The explanation in
the printed didactic on the wall tells of the artist’s
recollections in school when he was asked to go to the
blackboard. Finding that experience intimidating, he
finds release in using discarded slate boards that a
schoolteacher friend found and
turning them into outlets for his chalk drawings.
Employing hard and soft pastels
for alternately sharp-edged figures or images and for
spraying with water to create a descending overlay of
color across the images, the works become highly evocative
of the process of creating art works.
In a side room, Grella takes another
artistic step with his “Slate Animations,”
where he uses time-lapsed photography to illustrate
the process of creating the images. At times there are
flashing images of the artist himself caught in the
act of adding or altering the next level or rendition
of the drawing as he overlays image upon image. For
a preview, visit his Web site at www.dustin
grella.com/animation.html.
Also on exhibit is the artist’s
“Quadrangular Chronicles.”
The idea behind this work was to have friends each take
a journal and write in it daily, for 365 entries. If
they got tired, they could pass it along to another
person. Each journal, then, would reflect the experience
of the diarists; collectively, the four, if read each
day, would comment on the very different experiences
that the writers had as life unfolded, or, perhaps more
interestingly, they might all comment on the same event.
The differences in the telling would be fascinating,
the artist believed. Grella created boxes to house these
works.
Grella’s works can be viewed
during gallery hours, which are noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays
through Saturdays. Admission and parking are free. Summit
Artspace is located at 140 E. Market St. For more information,
visit www.summitartspace.org.
Roger Durbin is associate dean
and professor of bibliography for University Libraries
at The University of Akron and an avid art enthusiast.
To contact him, e-mail r.durbin@sbc
global.net.
Dustin Arthur Grella’s “Drip I” is on view at Summit Artspace.
Photo courtesy of Dustin Arthur Grella
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