Press - Cleveland Plain Dealer, Water Exhibition

Three-quarters of the planet is covered in it.

Our bodies are mostly made from it.

But until recently, no one (at least that I know of) has created an exhibition of art that's all about it.

On view through Friday, Jan. 28, "Water" is a show of works by 12 local artists curated by Guy-Vincent Ricketti, owner and director of Elevation Art and a working artist who is also featured in the exhibition.

Simply put, the show is about the beauty and mystery of water: its physical qualities and the vastness of its implications.

Among the exhibition's most subtle and magical works are the photographs of Cleveland Heights artist Heather Moore, who is best known as a jewelry maker.

All of Moore's photos are taken with an underwater camera. Some show a dog swimming. Shot from below, these become slightly abstracted; it's difficult to tell at first exactly what you're looking at.

But their power comes from the sense of buoyancy they convey, the idea that water alters the effects of gravity to which we are so accustomed in our everyday lives.

A second series by Moore is even more compelling, depicting paper doilies that hover weightlessly like jellyfish. Again, the objects are not immediately recognizable; who ever thinks about what a doily would look like underwater?

This element of the unexpected lends her images a wonderful freshness, which is all the more surprising because the idea is so perfectly simple.

Another standout in the show happens to be Moore's husband, the painter Thomas Frontini.

A group of three paintings by Frontini of rocklike blobs demonstrates a great departure from his more commonly seen Renaissance-inspired landscapes. These three works are far looser, employing a rough and playful style that recalls countless current painters.

Each suggests a rocky island, a dense isolated mass surrounded only by water and sky. Unlike his more lyrical narrative works, they possess a straightforward metaphorical quality; each island can be seen as a solitary being in a barren world.

A larger painting titled "Primordial Island" from 1995 adheres to a more rigid, traditional style, and, as a result, is comparatively less interesting.

Three identically colored stones are bound together and float within a sphere of pale blue water like an isolated nuclear family.

According to Ricketti, the idea for the show evolved out of a discussion among his artist friends about producing a series of limited-edition prints around a central theme. Once water was chosen, he realized how many other artists made work in which water was a primary subject. So, the game plan expanded and changed.

It's not difficult to see close relationships in the works of Ricketti and some of his friends, especially George Kozmon, A.D. Peters and Tim Haas. Though each has a distinctive style, their techniques often overlap.

For instance, Ricketti and Kozmon both have works in the show that use large bolts to physically attach layered images to each other. Ricketti, Kozmon and Peters all use sheet metal as supports in several of their pieces. And Ricketti and Haas share a technique that involves digitally printing photographs directly onto rigid surfaces, including plywood.

Many of these works stand well on their own merits. Ricketti is particularly good at creating beautifully designed objects, regardless of the materials he uses. Kozmon is a masterful draftsman, whose technical experiments add a degree of edginess to his otherwise straightforward renderings. And Peters' use of rusted metal interestingly raises the issue of water as a catalyst in chemical reactions.

Allusions to scientific processes are central in the work of Charles Tucker, who uses images of flat, disc-shaped water filters (and actual soiled water filters) in assemblages that play on the aesthetics of scientific presentations of information.

Layering such images within compositions that sometimes resemble pristine Japanese scrolls, Tucker creates formal compositions that belie the pragmatic suggestions of his subject matter. The combination creates a strange tension, which questions the relationship between beauty and dispassionate reason.

Several other artists in the show further expand upon the ways in which water affects our perception of the world. Robert Thurmer's 2004 "Seascape" consists of an empty gilded frame with a strip of neon as a horizon line. Utterly simple, it forces a consideration of the horizon as a perceptual construct.

Barbara Stanczak (who is married to the celebrated Op Art painter Julian Stanczak) offers a lovely series of photographic montages, which follow a tradition started by British painter and photographer David Hockney. Shooting a single subject over and over again from slightly different angles and then butting the resulting prints up against each other, Stanczak creates meditations on water's rhythmic qualities.

"Pine Needles in Water" is particularly strong, made up of six nearly identical images that are stacked vertically.

From a distance, "Water" covers a remarkable range of ideas. Like the substance itself, which is the very foundation of life, it is pure and simple - and very often beautiful.

Tranberg is an artist and writer living in Cleveland.