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Experiencing Dead Horse Gallery's final exhibition, featuring art by Blake Cook, Terry Durst and Robert Thurmer, is bittersweet. You want to revel in the brilliance of these artists, yet in celebrating their work, you know you are also acknowledging the end of something great.
While the gallery isn't disappearing altogether, March 27 will mark the end of Dead Horse Gallery as we know it; gallery directors Kim Schoel and Mindy Tousley will continue to represent artists, offer framing services and lease art to corporations. They will also maintain their website and curate satellite shows at the Avon Lake Public Library Gallery.
Since 2000, Schoel and Tousley have built a reputation for supporting regional artists, and for making contemporary art accessible to people of all ages. “Our vision for Dead Horse was to show and sell art by Cleveland artists,” says Schoel. “Just because Cleveland isn't New York or Chicago doesn't mean that artists shouldn't have the opportunity to make money off their work.”
Schoel and Tousley decided to take a different approach to exhibiting and selling art: they made a concerted effort to educate the community. They organized exhibitions of art by Lakewood middle-school students, and they curated shows, like Zoo , that had broad appeal and would get people in the door. “Often people came to see the straightforward, figurative art, and when they visited again, they were more open-minded about the more challenging or conceptual work,” Schoel explains.
While artists sometimes grumbled over the Lakewood gallery's fluorescent lights and low ceilings, Schoel believes the space made art novices feel comfortable. “The walls, the size of the gallery spaces — it feels a little like a living room in here,” she says. “And Mindy and I are really open. We answer questions and talk to people about the art.”
Their education-centered approach, as well as the exhibits they presented, seemed like a recipe for success, but in 2003 Schoel and Tousley began to feel the effects of a faltering economy as sales declined by 50 percent. At the same time, both gallerists, who are artists themselves, began to feel too overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the gallery to find time for their own work. They decided to scale back their operation, which meant ceasing regularly scheduled exhibitions at the end of March.
The closing of Dead Horse Gallery with so powerful an exhibition adds poignancy to the story. The selection of work by Blake Cook, Terry Durst and Robert Thurmer is evidence of Schoel and Tousley's curatorial prowess, their talent for combining artists who work in a similar vein.
Terry Durst, who adroitly combines common items to create sculptural objects and installations, has pushed his technique and aesthetic to new heights with a series of wonderfully vibrant hanging sculptures. The pieces in the series, titled Splooge , are so well assembled it is as if they were shipped to Durst in pieces, and came with instruction manuals. In Cancan , the melded collection of disparate objects — part of a toy canoe, a floor tile with the outline of a human form on it, sections of PVC pipe — lose their distinct forms and meanings, and are subsumed by the perfectly ordered composition. The sculptures are part machine, part tableau, and all visually satisfying. Because they hang from the ceiling, the Splooge pieces can be viewed from all angles, even from below. Few artists could have accomplished visual harmony at every angle, but Durst has managed the feat. He has labored as an artist for nearly 20 years, and has now perfected his process.
Robert Thurmer, the director of the Cleveland State University Art Gallery, is known for creating smart, spare conceptual work. His installation, titled Vanity, is based on the Latin axiom “ars longa, vita brevis” (art is long, life is short). Thurmer made a series of objects and ash drawings — each priced at $1 at the opening reception. Buyers were informed that all objects were slated for burning, unless the buyers wanted to preserve the work in its current state. It's hard to imagine that anyone would want to destroy any of the works in Thurmer's installation, many of which are luminously beautiful. His large-scale ash drawings convey movement and reference the body; Thurmer uses his fingers to render nebulous forms and subtle shades of gray and brown.
Conversely, there is beauty in what is absent in two “drawings” that were made by burning holes in paper. Thurmer's conceptual project succeeds because his drawings and sculptural pieces are visually seductive. However, it is only through their presence that they could ever be absent; for this reason, his statement, “I don't want to my work to take up space, I want to make space,” is somewhat questionable.
Blake Cook's installation, Anticipating our reunion via blood clot, makes for a memorable and fitting end to the contemporary art gallery. Cook has been exploring death, decay and rebirth for the past two years in a series of large-scale installations that incorporate construction materials, drawings and cardboard. The installations are physical manifestations of his grief over the loss of his parents, and of his desire to come to terms with the mysteries of life and death. The artist was drawn to the tenuous nature of blood clots, which save humans from bleeding to death, yet also cause strokes; they are unpredictable and concealed within the body.
In the days prior to the exhibit's opening, Cook's installation was a clot in itself. He packed the entrance of the space with stacks and layers of cardboard boxes, and then carved out a hole — a sort of absence of a clot — at the opening of the piece (and the gallery). The installation was an all-consuming physical experience, as visitors had to push their way through it, actually becoming a clot or blockage. Blood clot was, however, short-lived. An hour before the opening reception, the gallery's building manager declared the installation a fire hazard, and demanded its removal. Cook and several others spent the opening de-installing the piece, ultimately removing the cardboard and saving gallery patrons from potential danger. The demise of the piece was not planned, yet it was powerfully symbolic of the unpredictable nature of art and life. And it was a beautiful end to Dead Horse Gallery, which is, until March 27, definitely alive and kicking.