Creative hands of Case artist have stitched messages from nature for Bonfoey Gallery exhibit
Christopher Pekoc art exhibit runs through December 31
December 7, 2004 | For more information: Susan Griffith (216)-368-1004
 Hands are at the center of making art, waging war, healing wounds and almost everything we do. For Christopher Pekoc, instructor in Case Western Reserve University’s art and art education program, hands not only create art but also are among the subjects of the intricate, multimedia stitched collages that have become the hallmark of his work.
The public can view his work in the solo exhibit, “Drawn to Nature,” at the Bonfoey Gallery, 1710 Euclid Ave. The free public showing runs through December 31.
“Hands are what make us who we are,” says Pekoc. “Our hands play a role in almost all of our actions and our actions define us.”
Long after Pekoc’s fascination with hands began as he started his career in the mid 1960s, he ran across a statement by American painter Thomas Eakins, who said, “A hand takes as long to paint as a head nearly and a man’s hand no more looks like another man’s hand than his head like another’s.”
Eakins’ statement resonated with Pekoc, whose fascination has images of hands emerging from the surface of his works into a visual field of sewn together photographic images. The photo may be printed on paper or transparent film with gold, silver or other colored backings.
Along with hands, other images such as birds, snakes, trees, water and maps of the wind are visual components he uses for this current exhibit that reflects on nature.
Birds take flight in his work. After his 2001 Ohio Arts Council sponsored trip to the Czech Republic for a two-month artist residency, the images of birds that attracted him so long ago began to reemerge as subjects in his works.
Pekoc was inspired by his sojourn to the Czech Republic, where he lived in a castle with 14 other artists from around the world. The castle featured a formal room decorated with hand painted wallpaper from the 1800’s that had an Asian motif of birds and bamboo. In the room, surrounded by birds flying across the walls, Pekoc began to think about the birds as symbols of fragility and freedom.
“They are fragile creatures like many of us—soaring as we reach for success but frightfully falling when we fail,” he said.
A life-size self-portrait in Pekoc’s exhibit captures his shadow against the wall of this castle room. Other elements of the piece were composed from a photographic image of the wallpaper that he enlarged, copied onto polyester film and cut and stitched together on a sewing machine. He began the portrait in the Czech Republic and completed it in his studio in the Tremont neighborhood in Cleveland. Through this self-portrait, one of the larger works in the exhibit, Pekoc takes the viewer back to this room in the castle with a brocaded taboret resting on its parquet floors in his work titled, “Shadows, The Chinese Room Remembered in Red, Cimelicê, Czech Republic.”
The image of birds also emerges in several other works, including his collage titled “Manomet.” Inspired by a friend’s journal from a six-month stay at Manomet, a nature preserve located on the Massachusetts coastline, Pekoc constructed the piece with a 36-inch wing, set against a network of gold and silver ropes and a blue sky background to symbolize the activity of netting and banding birds that took place there.
From faraway to closer to home, Pekoc’s focus on nature also includes Lake Erie in the 7-by-9 foot piece, “Traversing Erie: East toward Buffalo; West toward Cleveland.” The work has 100 standard 8.5-by-11-inch gilded sheets of polyester film connected together with 400 brass rivets. A portion of those sheets feature a photograph of the lake’s surface, while the rest of the sheets reproduce the log book pages belonging to the lake freighter, the William G. Mather.
Another untitled work displays a map of wind flowing over the earth, placed next to a large gilded tree trunk. The piece was photographed in Pekoc’s Tremont neighborhood, set against a red background perforated with holes. The background represents the sky and the perforations symbolize the ethereal quality of wind and air. Pekoc references the old seafarer’s saying of “Red sky at night, sailor delight. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning.”
The message Pekoc hopes to convey through his works and the use of gold and the stitched together images of the birds, trees, serpents, water and sky is that the earth is a fragile, valuable and treasured resource.
For information about the exhibit, call 216-621-0178 or visit www.bonfoey.com.
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