FRONT 2022 artist Paul O’Keeffe turns grief into sculptures that ‘ruminate’ over his son’s death

CLEVELAND, Ohio — The loss of life of a kid is a dad or mum’s worst worry, a violation of the pure order that the oldest ought to die first. For Cleveland Heights artist, Paul O’Keeffe, that worry turned a actuality 10 years in the past in Could, when his son, Christian, who was about to show 21, died by suicide in Kent.

It’s simple to think about that individuals dealing with such a loss, whatever the trigger, would change careers, take up a social or political trigger, embark on a non secular pilgrimage, or trek throughout America on foot or on a motorcycle.

O’Keeffe responded by making artwork.

Impressed by visits to Lakeview Cemetery in East Cleveland through the years, the place he noticed all kinds of memorials in conventional and modern kinds, O’Keeffe, a retired professor emeritus of artwork at Kent State College, started working in his studio.

He created a sequence of darkly elegant sculptures in layered and folded sheets of laser-cut metal painted in otherworldly tones of darkish blue that mix summary kinds with fragments of poems left behind by his son, who was finding out writing at KSU on the time of his loss of life.

“I used to be in a state of shock,’’ O’Keeffe stated. “I discovered an odd solace in beginning to learn my son’s poetry, within the sense that the years earlier than his loss of life, he had pulled away and needed to be unbiased.”

O’Keeffe exhibited among the sculptures in 2017 at The Sculpture Middle in Cleveland in an exhibition entitled, “Screaming Voicelessly to a Distant Silence.”

Now, an expanded group of six sculptures exploring the grief, loss, and the poignant resonance of Christian O’Keeffe’s writings, will play a considerable position within the 2022 version of the FRONT Worldwide: Cleveland Triennial for Up to date Artwork.

Opening with two days of previews Thursday, FRONT is a sprawling exhibition of worldwide, nationwide, and native artwork involving works by 100 artists at 30 venues throughout Northeast Ohio together with the Cleveland Museum of Artwork, the Akron Artwork Museum, the Cleveland Public Library, and the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve College Well being Schooling Campus.

The theme of this yr’s FRONT, which follows the inaugural exhibition in 2018, is that of artwork and art-making as a type of remedy and therapeutic in response to trauma.

The present additionally explores the probabilities of pleasure and group at a time of sharp political and social divisions, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the nationwide reckoning over racial injustice sparked by police killings of unarmed Blacks, and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol.

The present’s title, “Oh, Gods of Mud and Rainbows,’’ comes from a Langston Hughes poem imploring readers “to see That with out the mud the rainbow Wouldn’t be.”

Prem Krishnamurthy, creative director for FRONT 2022, stated that O’Keeffe’s sculptures “relate very on to the theme of loss and struggling and trauma, and the way it may be reworked.”

Krishnamurthy went on to say that “what’s outstanding to me’’ after O’Keeffe suffered the lack of his son, “is how he’s used the instruments that he has at hand — the instruments of art-making, the instruments of sculpture, to work by means of it along with his thoughts and his physique.”

Krishnamurthy credited his former creative co-director, Tina Kukelski, for advocating the inclusion of O’Keeffe’s work within the triennial. Kukelski stepped again from co-directing the present for private causes in 2020, however stays engaged as a member of a big group of advisors, Krishnamurthy stated.

To emphasise the robust relationship between O’Keeffe’s work and the underlying theme of this yr’s FRONT, the triennial is displaying his sculptures at three of its many venues.

Three of the sculptures can be on view on the Transformer Station gallery, 1460 W. twenty ninth St.; two can be on view on the Cleveland Public Library’s Foremost Department, 325 Superior Ave.; and one, measuring 30 toes lengthy, can be on view on the Akron Artwork Museum, 1 S. Excessive St.

A local of Dublin, Eire, who speaks in delicate tones with a mild brogue, O’Keeffe, 64, attended St. Martin’s Faculty of Artwork, London, and the Nationwide School of Artwork and Design, Dublin. He later gained a Fulbright Journey Scholarship to check on the College of California, Los Angeles, the place he earned a grasp of tremendous arts diploma in 1981.

He has proven his work broadly in solo and group exhibits at galleries and museums in Northeast Ohio, New York, Paris, London, and Dublin.

O’Keeffe stated his FRONT items are completely different from earlier works of his which might be primarily summary and don’t embody phrases.

“The second you place textual content in a piece, it particularizes it, even when the textual content is considerably poetic,’’ he stated.

Many of the works are painted in tones of darkish blue, or Payne’s Grey with Flashe, a vinyl emulsion paint with a excessive ratio of pigment to medium that produces deeply saturated tones and a extremely matte, non-reflective floor. A floor painted with Flashe in darker shades of coloration can seem to swallow mild.

On the Transformer Station, a big sculpture encompasses a row of discs resembling typewriter keys incised with letters spelling out the phrases “I Love Everybody,” a press release O’Keeffe stated he present in a pocket book his son left open on a sheet in his bed room in Kent.

The letters float above layered plates of metal perforated by elaborate, laser-cut openings. One of many plates is adorned with a pair of shoe inserts that appeared to point the absence of an individual who may need worn the sneakers.

One other work, entitled, “In Memoriam (I Wanna Be Pure),” resembles an elaborate, wall-mounted bench comprised of geometric kinds and accompanied by a pair of boot soles on the ground, once more suggesting a human presence, or absence.

The set up on the Akron Artwork Museum, measuring 30 toes lengthy, is designed to evoke the circumstances of Christian O’Keeffe’s loss of life as he was struck by a practice on tracks alongside the Cuyahoga River close to Kent.

The work encompasses a lengthy, slender rail inscribed with what O’Keeffe referred to as “a really lovely poem’’ by which his son is “imagining in a heightened, virtually exhilarated state, how his physique goes to fuse with a freight practice.”

The sculpture culminates in a frame-like kind the artist sees as a sort of mirror that marks a degree of transition or departure.

Christian O’Keeffe was the third of 4 youngsters born to O’Keeffe and his former spouse, Kathy O’Keeffe. Following a divorce, O’Keeffe married Natasha Levinson, with whom he has a fifth little one.

O’Keeffe stated that previous to his loss of life, Christian suffered persistently from severe accidents after he was attacked by two males whereas touring alone in New Mexico throughout the summer season of 2011.

Christian was fascinated with the writings of Beat Era authors together with poet Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, creator of “On The Highway,’’ and needed to emulate their instance by touring alone throughout the U.S. by bus. He additionally visited poets in conferences organized for him by a KSU professor.

“The character of the suicide is you’ve got a stage of guilt, of not being on high of every little thing,’’ O’Keeffe stated. “With Christian, letting him go away for the summer season and do his personal factor — I’ve regrets. I suppose one needs a stage of management over your youngsters’s lives, however you may’t actually have it, I suppose.”

O’Keeffe stated he would have made the sculptures on view in FRONT 2022 with or with out the triennial, however he’s grateful to the present’s organizers for inviting him to develop on the initiatives he initially exhibited in 2017 at The Sculpture Middle in Cleveland.

The expertise has been, for him, a type of therapeutic, of shifting by means of a interval of profound grief.

“I don’t know that it helps me course of,’’ he stated, “It lets me ruminate in a manner, which is probably not totally wholesome.”

However he stated: “I’m very pleased to have been in a position to make these items,’’ he stated. “I’m hoping — I don’t know if it’s doable to get closure from making a physique of labor or not — however I’ve moved on from occupied with it in a reasonably obsessive manner.”