michelle marie murphy, gianna commito, natalie lanese,

janice lessman-moss, erik neff, paul o’keeffe, kristina

paabus and amy sinbondit approach materials, processes and

concepts in disparate fashions, yet their work is united by a shared

visual vocabulary of non-representative curvilinear and rectilinear

forms. Once dominated by rigid dogmas and hierarchies imposed

by powerful art critics, the practice of abstraction has broadened,

allowing contemporary artists to explore the genre on their own

terms. With images and information readily available via the Inter-

net, abstract artists reference a multitude of styles, art historical

periods and facets of visual and popular culture. New technologies

have multiplied the tools available to artists and reenergized

experiments with process and materials.

Geometric abstraction has been a vibrant

mode for artists in Northeast Ohio for

decades. As Abstract Expressionism—a style

associated with spontaneous, energetic

mark-making or flowing fields of color—

dominated midcentury art in much of the

United States, geometric abstraction became

Ohio’s vanguard movement.1 Painters and

sculptors in Cleveland, Oberlin and Kent

created hard-edged, non-representational

compositions guided by predetermined systems based on logic or

mathematics. They drew inspiration from psychology, science and

technology and sought to engage viewers as participants in singular

aesthetic experiences.

In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art presented The Responsive Eye,

an exhibition that catapulted Op Art into the international spot-

light.2 A type of geometric abstraction in which complex, repeating

patterns create illusionary effects, Op Art was a global movement

with a special connection to Northeast Ohio. Julian Stanczak,

Richard Anuszkiewicz and the Anonima Group—founded by

(continued on last page)

Opposite:

Michelle Marie Murphy,

Eyeshadow Overlap Op,

(detail) 2011, chromogenic

print on metallic paper,

34 x 30 in.

Right:

Julian Stanczak, It’s Not

Easy Being Green,

1980-2000, acrylic on canvas,

57 x 57 in., collection of the

Akron Art Museum, Rory

and Dedee O’Neil Acquisition

Fund, 2013.1

Born 1981, Lakewood, Ohio; lives in Cleveland and Chicago

michelle marie murphy responds directly to Northeast Ohio’s rich

history of geometric abstraction. Murphy graduated from the Cleveland

Institute of Art’s five-year bfa program, which devoted its first two years

to foundational design principles. Murphy photographs makeup products

arranged in repeating patterns that mimic Op Art paintings. She uses

both in-camera and post-production methods, physically arranging the

palettes and altering the images digitally to enhance the optical effects.

In Business Casual (2015) Murphy musses a beige rectangle of eyeshadow

surrounded by the impeccable surfaces of whites, pinks and blues,

revealing the identity of her material through an effect impossible to

create solely with a computer.

Murphy’s Perceptual Beauty series, ongoing since

2011, both pokes fun at and celebrates Op Art,

a movement she was introduced to as a student

her first semester at cia. (The series’ title

references Perceptual Art, another name for

Op Art.) But it also functions as a critique

of consumer culture and the beauty industry.

“I see makeup as a loaded art supply. It’s

designed to be enticing and appealing,”

Murphy said. “From a consumer standpoint it

is marketed toward specific target audiences.

It’s put on display in very specific ways.”3

Murphy’s photography represents a common consumer good that

countless people purchase to alter their appearances daily. The idea for

the series occurred to the artist during a walk down a drug store cosmetics

aisle; she invites us to consider the economics behind cosmetics, a product

primarily marketing toward women, who as a group are paid less than

men. And what are these products’ role in the way women present them-

selves to the world? “The goods that you may consume as a person—aside

from being an artist—it’s hard not to look at them critically,” Murphy said.

Michelle Marie

Murphy

Opposite:

Business Casual, 2015,

chromogenic print on

metallic paper, 40 x 30 in.

Above:

Eyeshadow: Going Out ‘n

Back Again, 2012,

chromogenic print on

metallic paper, 30 x 30 in.

Born 1954, Pittsburgh; lives in Kent, Ohio

w i t h t h e i r e x p l o s i v e , swirling

patterns, Janice Lessman-Moss’ jacquard

tapestries share a visual kinship with Op

Art. The works are inherently geometric—

weaving has a structural grid formed from

the intersection of the warp, or longitudinal

threads, and the weft, or the lateral threads.

Lessman-Moss, who moved to Northeast Ohio

in 1981 to teach fiber at Kent State Univer-

sity, elaborates on this system by introducing

pattern and color.

The artist uses simple shapes—a circle inside

a rectangle—to begin her complex designs.

She sketches in Photoshop, developing several

variants of a pattern by altering colors and

transparency or adding filters, before settling

on a final version. For Lessman-Moss, a good

design has an underlying sense of control, a

central focus and a push and pull of space.

“I’m interested in these as both illusion and

object. They are objects. They are weavings.

They’re tactile things. I want that to be somewhat pronounced,” Lessman-Moss said. “If you em-

phasize the border, the edge, you define the limits of the pattern so it takes it out of the realm of

the traditional textile, where a textile just goes on forever.”

Lessman-Moss lines her industrially-produced tapestries with hand-felted borders. Working with

assistants, the artist dyes and cards wool then fashions it into individual square-shaped pieces.

The wool is then soaked with hot water and stomped on. The physically taxing process required

for the felt stands in stark contrast with production of the tapestries, which are created according

to the artist’s design on a commercial textile loom in North Carolina.

Opposite:

#432, 2013

cotton and wool,

75 x 67 in.

Right:

#446, (detail) 2015,

cotton and wool

73 x 66.5 in.

Janice Lessman-Moss

Born 1962, Coshocton, Ohio; lives in Newbury, Ohio

erik neff earned degrees in biology and entomology before attending the Cleveland

Institute of Art, where he studied under Julian Stanczak. Neff finds inspiration in nature, specif-

ically the wooded landscape of his rural Geauga County home. These surroundings affect the

artist’s choice of colors, which he tones with gray during his wet-on-wet painting process. “For me

it’s a very intuitive palette,” Neff said. “I think a lot of it is probably influenced by the fact that I’ve

chosen to have this studio that is in a stream valley.”

Soft-edged, stacked rectangular forms fill the foregrounds of Neff’s paintings. Flurries of small

brushstrokes cover the backgrounds of his large canvases Quarry and Breakwater, (2015).

Neff weighs formal decisions with an intuitive, emotional sensibility to create an overall gesture,

or gestalt, evocative of an experience or place.

“Much of what I’m painting is a combination of

process painting, so it’s about one mark leading

to another mark. The overall arrangement

of marks and shapes are constantly juggling and

moving and getting scraped out and

repainted until they begin to form for me a

kind of abstract reality or narrative.”

Neff starts his paintings by wiping leftovers from

his palette onto blank canvas. For him, there’s

less pressure using surplus materials.

He rescues eye-catching bits of wood from the

pile he uses to heat his studio to construct small sculptures he calls “studio mascots.” Exercises

in surface texture, weight and color, these conglomerations of wooden blocks sit next to his

brushes, scrapers and palette. Neff adds a little bit of paint to them here and there as he works

on his canvases.

ErikNeff

Above:

Procession, 2015, oil on wood,

12.5 x 14 x 2.5 in.

Opposite:

Breakwater, 2015, oil on canvas,

69 x 74.5 in.

Born 1980, Cleveland; lives in Toledo

natalie lanese’s geometric designs, applied with acrylic or

latex house paint directly to walls and floors, alter viewers’ experiences

of the Akron Art Museum’s Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries and

challenge their visual perception. “The constant thrill for me with my

work is that the experience of a space can be completely altered just by

using color, shapes and lines,” Lanese said.

The artist, who lives in Toledo and teaches at Siena Heights University

in Adrian, Michigan, works intuitively. She develops doodles and loose

sketches in advance, and then spends time at each site to best understand

how to adapt her ideas to the architecture. Sometimes Lanese projects

and traces her studies, other times she applies

tape to the wall or draws without a guiding aid.

But she and her assistants always apply paint

freehand. That human quality is essential

for the artist. “Brushstrokes and slight wobbles

in the line remind the viewer that he or she

is looking at painting made by a person,”

Lanese said.

Her patterns, typically chevrons in contrasting

colors, call attention to the flatness of the

surface they cover. In recent installations,

such as Camofleur (2014), at Survival Kit in

Cleveland, Lanese pushes the illusory qualities by painting false horizon

lines. Sculptural elements constructed of plywood or foam add to the

deception—they match the background patterns but aren’t flush with

their surroundings.

Lanese thinks of her installations as 3-D, walk-in paintings. She’s mindful

of the shifting dimensions through which people experience her work.

The artist selected the gallery for her installation because the location

of the entryway and exit force viewers to walk through the painting,

adding the fourth dimension of time. Her vibrant designs make popular

backgrounds for cell phone photographs; posted online, the 3-D

installation is flattened once again into two dimensions.

Natalie Lanese

Opposite:

Camofleur, 2014,

installation at Survival Kit,

Cleveland

Right:

Sketch for Depthless

Without You, 2015

Born 1957, Dublin, Ireland; lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio

for his series a distant silence, Paul O’Keeffe works

quickly. His other bodies of work, which include sculptures cast from

bronze and aluminum, require extensive labor—such as model-

making, mold-making, grinding and sanding—and take months to

complete. To speed up his process, O’Keeffe needed an affordable

and readily accessible material. He decided on acrylic sheets. Off-cuts,

including the Victoria’s Secret cast-offs used to create his newest

works in the exhibition, are easily obtainable.

O’Keeffe, who moved to Northeast Ohio to teach sculpture at Kent

State University in 1983, studied with Anthony Caro at Central Saint

Martins University of the Arts in London.

It was Caro who stressed re-using discarded

materials; while O’Keeffe heeds that advice,

he seeks out materials that lack emotional or

conceptual associations, selecting acrylic for its

beauty, but also for its neutrality.

O’Keeffe instated a series of rules to follow,

or, in some cases, bend, in order to speed up

his process, restricting himself to straight cuts

in the acrylic with his table or miter saws. But

O’Keeffe does not assemble his sculptures

according to a formula; he actively makes deci-

sions regarding part-to-part relationships.

Despite his use of basic geometric forms, O’Keeffe does not see his work

as part of the geometric abstraction genre. “How I got to it was really

not so much thinking about the whole history of painting or abstrac-

tion, but it was more from looking at things in the world. Like windows,

doorways, reflections.” This source of inspiration seems apt for work in

which translucent acrylic surfaces reflect the world around them. The

highly reflective surfaces of O’Keeffe’s hard-edged, wall-hanging sculp-

tures play with viewers’ senses—they change color depending on the

angle from which they are seen. He contrasts the shiny, reflective areas

with the matte finish of highly pigmented vinyl paint.

Opposite:

a distant silence IV,

2013, acrylic, vinyl paint,

17.5 x 14.5 x 2.25 in.

Right:

a distant silence VIII,

2013, acrylic, vinyl paint,

17.5 x 9 x 2.75 in.

Paul O’Keeffe

Born 1977, Akron, Ohio; lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio

amy sinbondit’s work is about opposites: geometry and gesture,

comprehension and misunderstanding, planning and risk-taking. For

the artist, the genre itself embodies duality. “There is a certain amount

of control and order that occurs with the geometric side. With abstraction

you are able to twist and manipulate the geometry.” She balances

contrasting rectilinear and curvilinear forms in her ceramic sculptures,

seeking a rhythm between angles and curves.

Sinbondit creates her swirls and hard-edged forms through the extrusion

method, forcing wet clay through a specially designed die. She cuts,

bends, curves and twists the hollow ribbons of

clay. Sinbondit is not afraid to push her clay,

literally or figuratively. “It starts with understand-

ing what the material’s limits and capabilities

are and trying to twist those limits a little bit to

see what the spectrum is. Then you can take

risks to get things to work.” She’s not averse to

using atypical materials to achieve her desired

effect. Along with glaze and paint, vinyl tape,

lacquer, resin, epoxy or powdered gold cover

her work’s surfaces. If Sinbondit makes a

mistake, she considers it part of the work and

keeps going, sometimes even fixing the problem with a material that

accentuates the aberration.

Written communication inspired works like Pompadour and Drifting

Meander (2011). She derives the gestural, curved shapes from letterforms.

The rectangles come from the boxes that appear on screens when a com-

puter is unable to read a font. Technology inspired one of Sinbondit’s

most recent works in the exhibition. This past June, she spent two weeks at

a residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine developing

a 3-D printer. The see-through form of Singularity (2015) is reminiscent of

the grid 3-D printers use to support the object produced by the machine.

Amy Sinbondit

Above:

Pompadour, 2011, red

earthenware, porcelain,

terra sigillata, glaze,

21 x 24 x 7.5 in.

Opposite:

Atone in Gold, 2014,

wood-fired porcelain,

ceramic stain, glaze, epoxy,

10K and 14K gold dust,

11 x 12 x 7 in.

Born 1976, Sea Level, North Carolina; lives in Kent, Ohio

materials are key to the practice of Gianna Commito, who moved

to Northeast Ohio in 2005 to teach painting at Kent State University following

Craig Lucas’ retirement. She layers coat upon coat of casein, a milk protein-based

paint with an opaque, matte finish, on top of panels primed with absorbent

marble-dust gesso. Commito applies masking tape to demarcate the edges of the

stripes, diamonds, rectangles and chevrons that form her compositions. Despite

her precautions, the casein allows for what the artist calls “scuzz-factor.” A close

look at one of her panels reveals surface textures rarely picked up in photographs.

The casein’s surface, which dries quickly enough to layer but is tacky until it

cures, mottles, lifts off in places, and reveals

the slightly raised outlines of the paint

underneath.

The surfaces of Commito’s panels have a

very physical presence, but they also create

the illusion of shallow dimensionality with

planes that hang in an anxious balance,

heightened by her jarring color combina-

tions. “I want there to be a little anxiety or

slipperiness in each piece—there’s always

something trustworthy like a clear horizon-

tal or vertical axis, but the periphery may

be slightly off kilter or uncertain.” Commito

works slowly and deliberately, taking the

time to step back and absorb the results of

one decision before moving on to the next.

“The pleasure in working for me comes from

allowing the image to unfold, for it to pass

through stages of feeling a little too pat, to

way too complicated, and finally into some

kind of resolved image,” she said.

Gianna Commito

Opposite:

Nepp, 2014, casein and

marble dust ground

on panel, 30 x 24 in.

Right:

Court, 2014, casein and

marble dust ground

on panel, 24 x 20 in.

Born 1976, Haverhill, Massachusetts; lives in Oberlin, Ohio

kristina paabus, who moved to northeast ohio to teach

reproducible media at Oberlin College in 2014 following John Pearson’s

retirement, examines man-made structures that keep society functioning

smoothly: concepts such as language, time, religious belief, strategy

and logic.

The daughter of Estonian immigrants, Paabus learned English as a kinder-

gartner. Language was a common conversation topic during the artist’s

childhood—gathered around the dinner table, she discussed newly discov-

ered words and phrases with her sister and parents. For her multi-layered

screenprints, Paabus uses stencils that behave like letters of the alphabet—

arranged in different orders, they generate

different meanings. The artist’s interest in the

printed multiple is not rooted in creating num-

bered editions, but in reinterpretation. “So you

could have the same thing, the same stencil

for example, and use it in so many different

ways, ” Paabus explains. She chooses from her

library of hundreds of hand-made and digitally

produced stencils. For monoprints such as

Safekeeping and Something to Believe In (2015),

Paabus outfits a plotter with a marker instead of

a blade, and digitally instructs the machine to

make marks.

Although Paabus’ graphite drawings resemble

Op Art, they reference the artist’s struggle with

insomnia while living in Estonia on a Fulbright

scholarship in 2009 and 2010. Winter in the Baltic country brings only a

few hours of light each day. Reflecting on her experience living and working

with very little sleep, Paabus questioned time as a construction: how does

the idea of time shape us physically and psychologically? To represent time

graphically, Paabus lays out a grid with marker, fills each square with an oil

sharpie, and uses graphite pencils of differing hardness to fill each circle.

The resulting gradient from light to dark represents the fluctuation in the

artist’s experience of the passage of time.

Kristina Paabus

Right:

Something to Believe

In, 2015, screenprint and

digital plotter drawing on

paper, 19 x 14 in.

Opposite:

3h, 2012, colored pencil, oil

and ink on panel, 12 x 12 in.

Right:

Janice Lessman-Moss,

#444 (detail), 2015, cotton

and wool, 72 x 67.5 in.

Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt and Ed Mieczkowski in Cleveland

in 1960—had been working in this style for half a decade before

exhibiting in The Responsive Eye. The Anonima Group focused

on viewers’ psychological and physiological responses to their

vividly colored, highly structured paintings. In their rhythmic

compositions, Stanzcak and Anuszkiewicz drew upon the color

theory they learned studying with Josef Albers at Yale University.

Other artists working concurrently in the region, including

David E. Davis, Samuel Butnik, Craig Lucas and John Pearson,

focused on geometry, but were driven by formal concerns

expressed through reason and logic.

Mieczkowski and Stanzcak taught at the

Cleveland Institute of Art for decades;

Pearson and Lucas served as faculty at

Oberlin College and Kent State University

respectively for many years. The influence

of these painters, who were colleagues or

instructors to some of the artists participating

in neo geo, explains in part the longevity

of geometric abstraction’s relevance in

the region. neo geo demonstrates that

artists in Northeast Ohio working in this

genre today look to rich and varied sources

for insight and inspiration. Geometric abstraction continues to

be practiced by artists internationally; neo geo participants count

Mark Grotjahn (Los Angeles), Jim Lambie (Glasgow, Scotland)

and Diana de Solares (Guatemala City) among their many peers.

The artists in neo geo use unexpected materials, unusual processes

and state-of-the-art, as well as ancient, technologies to create fresh

significances. Geometric abstraction pares art down to pure shapes,

lines and colors, yet infinite possibilities lie within those boundaries.

The genre’s inherent limits provide a framework for regeneration,

a challenge heartily accepted by artists practicing in Northeast Ohio.

Theresa Bembnister, Associate Curator

Front cover, clockwise beginning upper left:

Gianna Commito, Court (detail), 2014,

casein and marble dust ground on panel,

24 x 20 in.

Erik Neff, Shoreline (detail), 2015,

oil on wood, 9 x 10.25 x 1.5 in.

Natalie Lanese, Camofleur (detail), 2014,

installation at Survival Kit, Cleveland

Paul O’Keeffe, a distant silence IV (detail), 2013,

acrylic, vinyl paint, 17.5 x 14.5 x 2.25 in.

Amy Sinbondit, Section Break (detail), 2011,

red earthenware, engobe, terra sigillata, glaze,

14.5 x 18 x 11.5 in.

Kristina Paabus, 3h (detail), 2012,

colored pencil, oil and ink on panel,

12 x 12 in.

Janice Lessman-Moss, #446 (detail), 2015,

cotton and wool, 73 x 66.5 in.

Michelle Marie Murphy, Eyeshadow:

Going Out ‘n Back Again (detail), 2012,

chromogenic print on metallic paper, 30 x 30 in.

Inside cover:

Kristina Paabus, 24h, 2012,

graphite, oil and ink on panel, 12 x 12 in.

neo geo

November 21, 2015-April 24, 2016

Akron Art Museum

neo geo is organized by the Akron Art

Museum and generously supported

by Myrna Berzon, Dianne and Herbert

Newman, the Kenneth L. Calhoun

Charitable Trust and Harris Stanton

Gallery. Media sponsorship is provided

by wksu 89.7 and Western Reserve pbs.

Catalog design:

Christopher Hoot

Akron Art Museum

One South High

Akron, Ohio 44308

AkronArtMuseum.org

©2015

Footnotes

1. See Elizabeth McClelland, “Art in

Cleveland After the Cleveland School,”

in Harmonic Forms in the Edge: Geometric

Abstraction in Cleveland, ed. Carolyn

Rabson (Cleveland: Cleveland Artists

Foundation, 2001), 7.

2. The exhibition featured the work of

99 artists from 15 different countries,

including Italy, Spain, Germany, Great

Britain, France, Hungary and Argenti-

na. See William Seitz, The Responsive Eye

(New York: The Museum of Modern Art,

1965).

3. Quotes in this essay are from

interviews with artists conducted by the

author in spring 2015.

November 21, 2015– April 24, 2016 Akron Art Museum