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LIFE
Seth Cyfers hosts art showing at Club Echo
Seth Cyfers stands beside one of his art works for his one-night art exhibit that runs from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Friday inside Club Echo, 1318 Fourth Ave. The exhibit will feature Cyfers and Justin Gillispie Ñ known to some as Johnnie Battery. The duo will show new works in paint, print, photography, assemblage and video.
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HUNTINGTON -- Out of a garage filled with a 2-by-4 boxed, 12-foot-long painting, Marshall University art graduate Seth Cyfers rolls out one of his latest artworks. It takes up almost the entire driveway.
It's the 16-foot-long, Saran Wrapped, Chapmanville scroll filled with blurred Interstate symbols that have made every town in America look and feel pretty much the same.
"Scrolls are something that's historic and sacred and holy to us," Cyfers said. "But wrapping it in Saran Wrap cheapens it at the same time."
The fact that America has homogenized and super-sized great portions of its culture is not lost on the twentysomething, and Cyfers isn't about keeping his colorful, home-grown social commentary to himself.
The Chapmanville native artist -- known for throwing some of the city's best downtown art parties in the past few years -- has got a one-night art exhibit from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Friday inside Club Echo, 1318 Fourth Ave. The exhibit will feature Cyfers and Justin Gillispie -- known to some as Johnnie Battery. The duo will show new works in paint, print, photography, assemblage and video.
All will be viewed with continuous, live music by regional indie artists including T.S. Martin of Huntington on improvised experimental piano, Bud Carroll on pedal steels and other instruments, Huntington native Andrew Iafrate of Louisville, Ky., playing an acoustic and electric set of folk orientation as well as other acts.
Cyfers said the historic, brick club spot made sense for the show on many levels.
"They have a nice stage, and the music sounds really good in there. And, number one is that they have the walls that my pieces can hang on," Cyfers said.
Gillispie, who has been working in Puerto Rico this summer, will be back in time for the show that will feature several photographs and other spontaneous works.
"Johnnie Battery has some fun, dance-inspired artwork that he's graciously going to give to us," Cyfers said. "It's just going to be a good time that night. Johnnie Battery brings the party to Huntington, which he considers one of his favorite cities."
Cyfers, who has been working on a dozen pieces for the show, said all of his work of late has gone grande.
"I guess because I am an American and everything has to be bigger to be seen and appreciated," Cyfers said with a grin. "Well, it has to be really big or really small. I am looking for a dance party, and if people are dancing, they can't see the small stuff. I want people to have to dance through to see the artwork."
Cyfers, who was part of the 2006 Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition's group exhibition, "The Appalachian Landscape: Bob Ross Don't Live Here No More," again takes a look at the topic.
Called "Waiting for the Other Shoe to Fall," the mixed-media piece is made up of six individual panels that fit together for a 9-foot-by-8-foot artwork.
"It was my intention to show the friction between the urban landscape and the rural," Cyfers said. "If we continue to build and destruct -- the other shoe is going to fall someday."
A declining respect for the land and the loss of that generational tie to the land is addressed in a 6-foot-by-12-foot piece that addresses placelessness, Cyfers said.
Cyfers found a 1976 painting by his great uncle Russell Grant, framed around it with 2-by-4s and used plexiglass to cover it. On the plexiglass are vague corporate symbols that when lit up cast deep shadows on the paintings of mountains and wildlife.
"The painting is supposedly based on a photograph passed down from his grandmother of the place that existed before the community was built," Cyfers said. "You can go to any community across the nation and there are several of these businesses in them. It's just about communities being diluted down to a few symbols by the side of the Interstate. I've only done a minimal amount of work, corporate America has done the majority of the work. This may be a three-part collaboration."
Cyfers' work also takes a look at how cameras and the paparazzi can be as deadly as guns and also takes a look at the nature of America's two-party political system. Using all of his dried-up paint that missed the canvas, Cyfers has peppered an "L" and "R" for left and right, and is again using lights to cast shadows on the works.
"In our culture, the way the system is created is that people feel like they only have two choices," Cyfers said. "There should be an infinite amount of choices. It related to me as I was working on the diptychs that maybe I see things that way, too. And maybe I see things a bit too binary, and maybe I am a little bit too close-minded also and have room to grow."
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