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ENTERTAINMENT
Artists bring their politically-charged art to Java Joint
Marshall professor Clay McNearny has several of his artworks on display at the Java Joint. The show starts at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2.
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HUNTINGTON -- You never know where the wild works of printmaker Clay McNearney and mixed media artist Chris Worth will show up or what party will follow.
Their politically-and-socially-charged works were featured at big-time art bashes that rocked Huntington's Arcade two years ago and the multi-artist mountaintop removal art show, "Bob Ross Don't Live Here No More: The Appalachian Landscape," that drew a big crowd across from Pullman Square in November 2006.
Here in the maw of winter, in the midst of the presidential campaign fireworks, it only seems right that their art comes home to the local coffeehouse, Java Joint, 1555 3rd Ave., across from Marshall University.
The opening reception is set for 7 p.m. Saturday at the funky coffeehouse, bar and restaurant.
The art opening is free and open to the public.
The Button Flies, an acoustic indie rock trio armed with guitar, banjo and the trumpet of Modest Max are set to rock out starting about 8 p.m.
McNearney, chair of Marshall's Religious Studies program, and Worth, a tutor with the Marshall University H.E.L.P. Program and alumni of Marshall's College of Fine Arts, said the idea for the show was easy.
Java Joint owner Jason Arthur asked them about doing a show.
Getting to display more than a dozen of their latest pieces each in the friendly confines of Java Joint with the whir of the espresso machine and the Lite Brite lit up by the cash register, was an offer they couldn't refuse.
"There's just more people willing to come out to these shows," McNearney said, holding his coffee cup. "That's why we did the other shows at the Arcade and across from Pullman. It's that out-of-the-museum feeling."
Both said the show is in many ways an extension of the first two shows they collaborated on with Seth Cyfers, who is working on large-scale pieces for a May art show.
"There's kind of a track record and the response begins to be that they no longer just see it as individual artists but see the event," Worth said. "It becomes a trigger point and it's simply building on the previous shows."
Although they may be tapping into that out-on-the-town and out-of-the-museum vibe, the fact that they're still just across the street from Marshall also sets a tone.
"This community is a young one and it's hopping with artists," Worth said. "Java Joint might as well be an extension of the art department."
McNearney will show all new prints that he says still explore the psychological landscape through the use of images, as well as words used as visuals.
"There is a lot of text in these recent images, but most of the time it works primarily as visual communication 'saying' more than the words themselves do," McNearney wrote about his recent pieces.
Phrases such as "Eye for an Eye," are printed across a series of Tim McVey/President George W. Bush prints of side-by-side portraits called "Talking Collateral Damage."
It's McNearney's hope that the words and the portraits initiate a conversation between the viewer and the ones imaged.
He also takes on the political and commercial use of God by people in power in American society.
"The Wal-Mart 'This is God' is my take on the easy, breezy confidence of so many in our society who believe that all is hunky dory as they chat with God over morning coffee," McNearney writes about the piece.
Although those pieces had specific direction, some of the other prints were guided more by the process.
McNearney said printmaking can be like pottery where the process itself can lend an element of surprise and its own voice.
"You pull things off the press and seldom is it the exact same thing that is in your head," McNearney said.
Worth, whose "Bob Ross" show pieces were track drawings made by his wheelchair, said he's taken what he learned from those pieces and has combined the mark making with portraiture images he has drawn blown up as much as 400 times on vinyl.
"I think the people I am drawing become symbols or signs of something else," Worth said. "They have become something more, something universal... What is the universal signifiers that make us what we are."
Interestingly, the walls at Java Joint, at least a couple paint jobs ago, held their first works.
The old Calamity Cafe hosted McNearney's first art works about 15 years ago. About nine years ago Calamity put up Worth's first publicly displayed piece, a super-sized mixed media painting that stayed up in the restaurant for years.
Arthur and Amber Clifford, who moved their funky Java Joint coffeehouse from 10th Street to the current location across from campus in spring 2005, have kept the walls open for local art -- the funkier, the better.
"I think coffeehouse and restaurants should take a cue from Jason and Amber and start showing local art work," McNearney said.
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