Artists Let The Art Speak

The repeated image of a women’s face, in what could be a space helmet. A school of fish. Household objects. A spiraling line of red, moving across it all. It feels like graffiti, like Andy Warhol a little. It has some pop art in it, but there’s texture and grit to it, too, a sense of dirt. What does it mean? What do we want it to mean?

In a show of work by Honaker and Jeffrey Gall — running now at mActivity on Nicoll St. through December — curator Barbara Hawes has put together two artists who lean much more into the second question.

Honaker explains in an accompanying statement that his pieces are collages, using paint, found objects, and other material and suspending them in layers of epoxy. ​“The various samplings of information that are compiled within my assemblages are intuitively placed. Each image, pattern, brushstroke, piece of ephemera or found object on its own is completely arbitrary. I intentionally remove myself from any conceptualization of any individual piece of work. By keeping my concentration focused on composition and overall aesthetics, I allow the content to connect itself organically,” he writes.

In short, it can be said that Honaker doesn’t set out to make a statement; he doesn’t ask what his pieces mean. For Honaker, that’s up to us. ​“It is my belief that art does not exist in and of itself. The objects that we agree to call upon as artistic endeavors are but objects of human expression. Without a viewer or other minds to act as interpreters, would our work be art?… I rely on free association, for the viewer to create their own narrative for each piece. The aspects of the viewer’s personal life experience informs their overall experience of my work, and creates the opportunity for each viewer to find a personal story in each piece.”

Honaker finds a kindred spirit in Jeffrey Gall, who writes that he has ​“always been a daydreamer. My first report card in school read ​‘needs help tying shoes. Seems to have a gift for art. Loves to draw and paint. A daydreamer.’ In high school, my art teacher allowed me to skip my other classes and continue painting, recognizing that this was what I loved to do more than anything else.” Gall recounts a path of discovering the artists that most inspired him — ​“Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler … I worshiped at the New York School of artists.” He relates that he attended Paier College of Art and Philadelphia University of the Arts, ​“to explore abstract expressionism more fully.” Over years of art making, he still considers himself to be on a journey.

Honaker’s and Gall’s approaches to art making in some ways runs counter to the prevailing trend in artmaking, which tends toward explanation. Artists of abstract and conceptual pieces often accompany those pieces with a good deal of context, fleshing out the personal meanings for the artists and perhaps the specific political or social issues they’re seeking to engage with. This style of art making can be rewarding, but it involves a different relationship with the viewer, one in which the viewer is more of the recipient of a concrete idea; the viewer’s reaction is, in some ways, to the idea itself, and to the persuasiveness of the art in conveying the idea to the viewer and maybe convincing them of it. There is dialogue, but also a separation of the artist and the art from the viewer.

Honaker’s and Gall’s pieces, by contrast, invite the viewer to make the art with them. As Honaker explicitly states, there is no art without the viewer there to see it. The reaction of the viewer, the narrative or meaning they construct for themselves in the process of engaging with it, is an integral part of the art — as integral as the paint and canvas and epoxy. The viewer becomes an artist. It’s an open-ended and generous approach, and one that swings the door wide open for anyone to engage with the pieces however they want. In the context of the place they’re hung — the walls of a spacious entrance to a gym — they have something to say about that, too. People come to mActivity to work on themselves. What is the goal of that work? Well, what do they want it to be?

“Jeffrey Gall and Graham Honaker” runs at mActivity, 285 Nicoll St., through December. Visit the gym’s website for hours, details about the gallery and more information.