Press - Cleveland Free Times, High Art: Identity

By Douglas Max Utter

From a genetic standpoint, all human beings are nearly identical. The notion of "race" is a fantasy based on superficial differences. Indeed, scientists have calculated that the MRCA or "most recent common ancestor" of everyone now living on earth was walking around in historical times, possibly as late as the birth of Christ. And the so-called Mitochondrial Eve, who passed on genetic material to every single one of us, was probably an African woman who lived about 150,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, we continue to sort ourselves out by skin color. Various government agencies ask us whether we're White, African American, Hispanic, Asian or Native American, in order to cater to different demographics. After all, race is also shorthand for culture, and cultures are real enough. And we need answers to those nagging existential questions of which "who am I?" is the first and loudest. The histories, achievements and accumulated differences that constitute culture also serve as an important basis for individual identity.

Guy-Vincent Ricketti's latest paint and photo-based works are sprinkled with enigmatic figures: 28.8, 3.7, 1.4, 2.2, 11.9. These are painted on small canvases or added to modular assemblages of small, framed color photographs. Yellow, black, red or burnt orange, and white make up the palette here, and fragmentation is the key motif. Some of the works spread outward from a central point, as if growing rudimentary arms and legs. Others are larger than life portrait heads — an African-American man, an Asian woman — sliced into one-inch segments and reconstructed, as on a grid. Ricketti thus creates a visual analog to the digital accumulation of identity in the information age. To emphasize this, he adds a small square patch of acrylic paint to each work — a color coding. It turns out the mysterious numbers correspond to percentages of racial types present in city, county and state according to the latest census figures. Ricketti calls these works "totems" and uses them to invoke an ironic, perhaps despairing sense of history: Truly individual traits are marooned as mere idiosyncrasies in the digital, statistical, artificial society that these pieces evoke.

The interior of the gallery is partially divided by temporary walls, and one section contains works composed of colors and numbers only, cobbled together from two or more small canvases. One standout is "Red 2 — Elements." Measuring less than 20 inches in height, its two rectangles add up to a head and torso configuration, painted white with a red stripe at the bottom edge of each. Black percentage figures are blazoned across the "chest" of the lower panel, then crawl around the sides, turning upside down and merging into one another. They seem to dance evasively across the blank space that seeks to define them. Overall Ricketti's identity equations add up to a remarkable installation in Elevation Art's tight, elegant space, though the initial impact of many of the works seems overly design-conscious in a retro way and in that sense decorative, like a director's take on high-art couture from a cold war-era movie: Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 Blow-Up comes to mind. But on balance, I think that impression carries with it powerfully appropriate overtones; so many aspects of the truly contemporary world, no longer even analogue but regenerated in binary code, began in the crucible of those long ago years.

It helps that the installation actually begins outside the gallery in Star Plaza. Planted amid the garden flowers that border this epicenter of Cleveland's slow-moving artistic renaissance are more of Ricketti's totems. Some are two-sided, four-by-four-foot placards showing Ricketti's portrait faces, mounted on yellow wooden supports that extend a few feet above the elevated flower beds. Then there are several slender poles, four-feet high and four inches to a side, plastered with the images and numbers that unfold again up in Ricketti's fifth-floor space. These literal "outposts" accomplish the aim of engaging passersby, but Ricketti doesn't stop there. Between noon and 2 p.m. last Friday, the huge Jumbotron screens that dominate Playhouse Square's eastern skyline displayed the artist's video work, "Identity 1.0," with almost Big Brother-ish ubiquity. If you missed it, Ricketti says it will play again at random intervals throughout the exhibition's two-month run.

He adds, "I don't want to just show art in a gallery, I want to bring it out into the street, into the city for everyone." In the three years Ricketti has acted as artistic director for Elevation Art, located a short flight of stairs above the offices of the architectural firm GSI, the artist/fine arts dealer has been a vocal advocate of innovative city-wide arts programming, like the highly successful Sparx in the City gallery hops and events. For this show he patched together funding from diverse public and private sources including the City of Cleveland and the Plain Dealer. Ricketti is all about "synergy," whether he's mixing and matching art or money.

If at times it all seems a little smooth, it's worth remembering that you do have to be aerodynamic to fly in this town — and Ricketti attains more altitude than most. Easy on the eyes though it may be, his Identity is a socially and psychologically perceptive show.

IDENTITY / ELEVATION ART
July 27th, 2006 - September 28th, 2006 Playhouse Square
1240 Huron Road, Cleveland
216-430-2751