From the organizers: WE Gallery at Dance Place Liberty Station is excited to present Turn! Turn! Turn! featuring Mark Siprut and Larry Caveney. This exhibit explores dance as an expression of life and return to joy following the seasons of change and uncertainty endured during our times of isolation and separation from community during the last three years. Opening event is Friday, April 14 from 6 - 8 p.m. and includes a community dance facilitated by Michele Lyons. In this exhibit of photographic prints and interactive video, Mark Siprut shares his passion for dance and music through his digital imagery incorporating photography and video with collage. Mark’s artistic expression is influenced by his love of dance, body movement and music. He began dancing at age 10 and continued through his teenage years. He danced to the popular music of the 60’s and was especially drawn to Motown music. In college, in the early 70’s, he discovered international folk dancing and fell in love with it. Folk dancing led him to an interest in playing Balkan music. He learned to play the drums; Tupan and Dumbek, and played in Balkan music ensembles in Hawaii, Santa Barbara and San Diego. Folk dancing and music reinforced his interest in world cultures, especially Middle Eastern/Turkish. Additionally he developed an interest in his Sephardic Jewish heritage which was the impetus to travel to and and then teach on a Fulbright grant in Turkey. Prior to his time in Turkey, while in graduate School at UC Santa Barbara, he discovered Lindy Swing dancing and studied with famed swing dancers, Jonathan Bixby and Sylvia Sykes. He developed a great love for this dance style and currently continues to enjoy swing and salsa dancing here in San Diego. Mark Siprut is an Associate Professor in Multimedia in the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University (SDSU). He earned his BA and MA in Art at Humboldt State University and his MFA in Art at University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to being an educator, Mark is an artist, designer, dancer and musician. In addition to his formal studies in photography and printmaking, his current creative research is in time-base, interactive and electronic media. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Bonita Museum and Cultural Center entitled; “Photographic Portraits of Bonita”. He engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural applications to visual communication. Larry Caveney combines bold strokes and captivating color palettes in this series of dance paintings which form a palpable and kinetic immediacy. The paintings use familiar yet ambiguous figures in order to reveal deeper existential truths. Looking closer at his canvases, the four elements are at play in each frame: air, fire, earth and water. The motion depicted in both his paintings and video works cut through the air, swirls it all about, be it a dancer’s twirl across the ballroom floor or the strut of a superstar sashaying toward the audience. In these frames, the air is disrupted by greatness and the painting captures this disruption. The energy on display burns with the heat of the subject’s intent but also the artist’s as well. The layers of meaning are derived from having captured the explosion of heat, each picture of Caveney’s is defined by the fire of what the subject burns. The solid object of the pictures is a manifestation of the element of earth. Even when the depiction creates illusionistic space, even when the artist captures crystal moments in time and articulates their magic, the object itself is what guarantees its permanence, its earth. The element at the core of Caveney’s practice is the human body, whether depicted in performance video, or the liquid paint he moves around to complete his compositions. Bodies in motion captured in a loop forever dancing. Bodies frozen in mid gesture seem to pulse with the rhythm of the dance, inviting us to the floor, where the we connect with our own embodied gestures. Larry Caveney graduated with an M.F.A from Vermont College, Montpelier, VT and has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1983. In addition to working as a painter, sculptor, and performance artist, Caveney is a former professor from the Art Institute of San Diego. Caveney has been collected by The Permanent collection in Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC and The Permanent Collection in Casoria Contemporary Museum, Naples Italy Turn! Turn! Turn! is a project of WE Gallery presented in collaboration with San Diego Ballet and Arts District Liberty Station and will be exhibited in the Mandell Weiss Gallery space in the Dorthea Laub Dance Place located at 2650 Truxtun Rd in San Diego. A portion of sale proceeds will benefit The San Diego Ballet Scholarship Fund.
