by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Those with an insatiable visual hunger might fare well upstairs at 516 ARTS.
The gallery features 12 artists in a show called "Attention to Detail." The show opened May 26 and runs through June.
Artists executed their works with meticulous detail and concentration. For example, one artist, who was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, wrote rows of symbols representing a language he made up on a gigantic sheet of paper. Following the key that corresponds the sounds to the symbols, the language flows like musical chanting.
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There are also sketchbooks with layers upon layers of colored pen scratches that form complete drawings. Artist Carol Chase Bjerke made red misfortune cookies about the stoma she got after battling cancer.
But the pieces that stood out the most in detail were Carlos Quinto Kemm's collages, reason enough to visit the gallery. The artist lives in Las Vegas, N.M., attended UNM in the '70s and learned how to paint murals in Mexico City.
Kemm's collages are so well put together, down to the spacing of tiny details, that one might suspect he used Photoshop, but he didn't. He three-dimensionalizes his pieces by layering the foreground on separate boards around the background, which recedes in space.
"It's straight collage - I'm very meticulous," Kemm said. "I get pretty obsessive about what I cut out. Sometimes, the ideas come together really quickly, but the technical part's really slow, especially if they're dimensional."
His pieces draw from mythology and art history, and the results are visually exciting, such as the vertical collage called "Molting," an oddly posed harlequin standing on large balls. The face on the harlequin comes from a painting of a clown by the French painter Antoine Watteau. "I use him as an alter ego a lot," Kemm said. "He's kind of a stand-in for me. I had a bad car accident, and the background has the place where the accident happened, called Starvation Peak. It was at night, so I gave it a stormy night look. The healing is really a crazy process - I had to learn to walk again. I'm blessed I'm not in a wheelchair or dead. It was a pretty scary accident."
He adds paint to intensify the colors. He applies highly concentrated inks, acrylics and metallic oil pastels.
"Color is an incredible vehicle of emotional impact," he said. "Magazines don't have the best color. I cut up my art books, Smithsonians, National Geographics, women's magazines like Vogue and Elle - anything that's of interest. There's a European one I like called FMR, but it's no longer in existence."
Eric Thelander, who attended the opening, said it was the OCD art show.
"There was a psychotic level of detail," he said. "I'm glad there's no medication for what afflicts these artists. Their OCD is the good flavor. It was cool. I got an appreciation for collage."
There will be a gallery talk with the artists June 30 at 2 p.m.
