“A Patient Search: Paintings by Tom Dimond” is the newest exhibit in the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts Lobby exhibition space, on view from Jan. 15 through Aug. 2, 2019.

Tom Dimond’s work is highly detailed with hidden meanings, textural interest and layers of abstraction. Through the manipulation of materials, his work conveys familiarity and nostalgia, as well as a state of ambiguity that allows room for viewer interpretation. This collection features large-scale, abstract acrylic paintings, as well as smaller mixed media collages. His thoughtful titles illuminate the inspiration behind each work and pique viewer’s interests.

Dimond’s career has spanned five decades and he has exhibited work all over the country, in both the private and public sector. More than a decade after being named professor emeritus, we are delighted to showcase his work back at Clemson University.

The exhibition will feature paintings from the late 1980s to the present day, and demonstrate the artist’s development in style from flat, hard-edged shapes to more atmospheric spaces and textured surfaces.

Dimond explained the development of his style in this way:

1970s and 1980s

These decades were typified by compositions based on the manipulation of circular forms on a grid, initially black and white and eventually employing primary and secondary colors. As the paintings moved from paper to canvas, the forms took on the contours of the exterior edges, resulting in shaped and hard-edged paintings. These colorful abstract works were composed of a grid of nine interlocking circles unified by connecting lines, and were accompanied by a series of silkscreen prints.

The grid later expanded to include 77 circles employing radial symmetry as a compositional device. More complex variations followed in watercolor and silkscreen, which were related to the Pattern and Decoration movement.

1980s and 1990s

After artist retreats at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and the Vermont Studio Center, Dimond’s exploration of circles on a grid progressed. He revisited the theme of nine circles on a grid, alternating between watercolor and acrylic paintings. Making references to the natural environment and social interactions, the paintings moved from flat, hard-edged shapes to more atmospheric spaces and textured surfaces. Loose, incidental lines beneath the surface interacted with the geometric shapes, produced more complex shapes.

Early 2000s

Dimond returned to the large canvas format with a series of paintings that incorporated the older nine-circle theme and a new form. On a trip to Venice, Italy, he became fascinated by a marble tile pattern designed by the 15^th century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello on the floor of San Marco Basilica in Venice – the stellated dodecahedron. Combining this form with the nine-circle mandala type composition provided further study into the theme of ambiguity of spatial tensions. His titles reference the music he listened to while painting, from a group in Sweden called Hedningarna.

2010s

Dimond’s most recent series moved away from imagery and techniques of the tile works. It combines gestural watercolor painting with monoprints made on Japanese paper collaged to the surface. The first of these works mimicked earthen walls and were named after the sites of prehistoric cave paintings. Later iterations returned to complex layered surfaces with scans, distressed surfaces and collaged comic book imagery. He said these works are at once autobiographical in chronicling his visual influences, but also an amalgam of 50 years of techniques and studio practices.

Dimond served as the Lee Gallery director from 1973 to 1988 and as a professor for the Department of Art from 1979 to 2006. In 2006, he was named professor emeritus. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Mass. and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn.

The exhibition will be on view to the public in the lobby of the Brooks Center for Performing Arts at Clemson University from 1–5 p.m. Monday to Friday, Jan. 15–Aug. 2, 2019. An artist talk and reception will be held from 5:30-7 p.m. on Friday, March 1.

For more information on Brooks Center exhibitions, contact Susan Sorohan at sorohan@clemson.edu.

CLEMSON — A Clemson alumna’s artworks will be presented by the Clemson University Center for Visual Arts in the lobby of the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts this fall, from Tuesday, Sept. 8, through Dec. 4.

The seeds of Hilary Siber’s love for art and landscape were planted early. As a child in Ohio, Siber remembers drawing trees and solving jigsaw puzzles. Flash-forward several years, and she found herself exercising those same artistic muscles pursuing a degree in architectural design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

“I was fortunate enough to work in the design field for several years after graduation, but visual problem-solving soon became a puzzle that pulled me toward creating fine art,” she said. “I am forever challenged by the visual mode of communication. It seems to elude language while simultaneously creating a new one.”

She enrolled in Clemson’s Master of Fine Arts program in the art department. There, she “began to understand that creating paintings is two-fold: I am putting a puzzle together while presenting one to my viewers.”

Those artistic puzzles will be on display with her new exhibition, “Shifting Ground.”

Shifting Ground opens on the heels of Siber’s thesis exhibition, which, she said, “reflected on the grief and emotion of the death of my father.”

In contrast, this oil-on-canvas collection focuses on “universal landscapes that suggest unknown outcomes, unstable grounds and shifting panoramas.” Her landscapes are not literal, but rather subjective interpretations that she believes “model accurate representations of the rational and irrational landscapes of our emotions, experiences and intellect.”

Siber’s work has been exhibited both regionally and internationally: at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston; the Nelson Gallery in in Lexington, Virginia; and the Art Museum of Nanjing University in China, along with several other places in South Carolina and North Carolina.

Susan Kaplar, business manager at the Brooks Center and current Bachelor of Fine Arts student has admired Siber’s work for awhile.

She and Denise Woodward-Detrich, director of the Lee Gallery at Clemson, approached Siber several months ago with the idea of a solo exhibition in the Brooks Center lobby.

“We’ve seen her style and we thought anything she does will be a good fit for our audience,” Kaplar said. The exhibition includes works created since January, including two pieces originally from her master’s thesis exhibition and now on loan from private collections.

When patrons attend the exhibition, Kaplar hopes it will be a time for deep self-reflection.

“I hope it will encourage people to look within themselves, to engage in inner contemplation.”

Siber’s wish is that people see an opportunity to consider both the here-and-now and the everlasting.

“I hope that viewing these paintings conjures up a consideration for the temporal,” she said. “Perhaps by contemplating our finitude and flux, we are more apt to consider what is infinite and never-changing.”

Shifting Ground is open from 1 to 5 p.m. on weekdays and before all Brooks Center performances. An artist talk will be held before the 7:30 p.m. performance of the National Dance Company of Siberia at 6 p.m. Oct. 29, followed by a reception at 6:30 p.m.

Fast-forward seven months. Kaplar, who first developed an affinity for visual art in college, is now enrolled at Clemson as an art major while remaining the Brooks Center’s business manager. She credits Tempos with giving her a “nudge” to pursue her degree, and she has joined with Woodward-Detrich once again on a new exhibit: “Echoes: Decoding the Shape of Future Recollections.”

The new exhibition features abstract art from different artists and eras.

“Initially it was Denise and I deciding on what type of exhibit to have for fall semester,” Kaplar said. “Jackie Kuntz was Denise’s graduate student assistant, and so Denise assigned her the task of researching the available artwork from the Clemson Advancement Foundation, which is held in storage within Lee Hall. I also mentioned that Brooks Center Coordinator Sarah Edison expressed an interest in being involved with the project.” The exhibit’s mission is to prepare young children for encounters with abstract art later in their lives, and to help them think imaginatively and critically about what they see.

The title “Echoes” stemmed from the fact that the artwork spans four decades but remains relevant: Echoes of past generations of artists still speak to new generations of viewers.

“We want children to be able to make sense of and enjoy abstract art when they visit art galleries as adults,” Kaplar says, “which is why the subtitle is Decoding the Shape of Future Recollections. We want them to be able to engage with this genre instead of automatically saying, ‘I don’t get this.’”

The exhibit, now on display in the lobby, is the result of months of planning. Work began in July, when Kaplar and Woodward-Detrich started sifting through abstract work in the Foundation’s collection. They came across work that was decades old and had been in storage for years. South Carolina artists such as John O’Neil, Edward Yaghjian, Carl Blair, and David Freeman are represented here, as well as two artists, Bill Seitz and Robert Hunter, who were art professors at Clemson University.

The most difficult part was finding a common theme from the available artwork, Kaplar said. After she and Woodward-Detrich earmarked around 40 pieces, they brought in Kuntz to help whittle down that figure to between 15 and 20, and shared their ideas with each other through Powerpoint. Sarah Edison was invited to the next meeting as the group members discussed themes, pieces that really stuck with them, and possible activities. They met at Lee Hall to visually arrange the art and eliminate some due to condition, size, and other factors. The remaining works were transported to the Brooks Center Lobby, where space constraints reduced the exhibit’s number to 11.

Each piece was selected based on the overall theme of shapes. “While abstract art can take many forms,” Kaplar said, “we wanted to choose pieces that were conducive to teaching kids the basic elements of abstraction.”

The exhibit is organized from most literal to most abstract. Viewers begin with a painting in which they may most readily identify physical objects (Supermarket by Ben Shahn) to a work that requires the most interpretation of the artist’s intent (Sophie’s Parlor by David Freeman).

There have been two children’s activities in conjunction with the exhibit so far. One was an art creation exercise using shapes to build original works of abstract art. The other was a movement exercise, conducted under the direction of theatre assistant professor Kerrie Seymour and her acting class. They led children who attended a Bill and Donna Eskridge Tri-ART Series event in a movement-based exploration of the art pieces using the children’s own interpretations of the work.

“Viewpoints,” the name of the method Seymour used in the activities, “is a physical approach to theatre and staging,” she said. “So much of what I teach in my acting classes is a more inside-out or psychological approach, examining the objectives, needs, thoughts, history and relationships of a character.”

Therefore, the “physical approach” to theater often does not receive as much class time. This activity was a perfect opportunity for her students to explore physicality.

“I find that when you start to play around with ‘Viewpoints’ and other physical entryways into the work, it does open up a new window of creativity and freedom for many actors. Suddenly, the work can go beyond words and that can really allow many actors to play in a new way.  It forces them out of their literal minds and pushes them to explore uncharted territory.”

Not only is this beneficial for college theater students, but for young students as well. Seymour believes “Viewpoints” is a valuable way to respond theatrically to artwork “because so much of the experience of looking at art, for me at least, calls up so many of the viewpoints: spatial relationship, shape, repetition. Sometimes you look at a piece of art and it just seems still, other times a still image can give the sensation of movement, and suddenly you are thinking about the concept of tempo, whether you know it or not.”

Seymour and her students will reconvene on 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14, the lobby for more movement work.

“I find that both my students and the children that have responded to the art in the Brooks Lobby have enjoyed the liberty of creating with fearlessness, and have experienced that wonderful moment of giving yourself permission to play and move and respond,” she says. “When work can go beyond words, I think many of us are loosed from that fear of not ‘saying the right answer.’ Suddenly you are just working with an organic response within your body, and how can that sort of response be wrong?  It just can’t.”

Also occurring this month is an activity hatched by Brooks Center Coordinator Sarah Edison. Through Monday, Dec. 1, young students may participate in an exciting activity called “Art Detective” during Box Office hours (Monday through Friday; 1 to 5 p.m.), and before and after Tri-ART morning performances in the Brooks Center Lobby.

The idea for the activity came to Edison while deciding on a title for the exhibit. “We were talking about the title and the word ‘decoding’ came up,” she said. “I thought about the theme of educating kids, and said, ‘Well, who decodes things?’ I also remembered pretending to be a spy or detective when I was younger and thought this would be a fun concept!”

Students’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to check out book bags from the Box Office containing supplies for various activities listed on a “Secret Mission” objectives sheet. Among these objectives are drawing and writing assignments in response to the displayed artwork.

“We often underestimate children as an audience for any type of art,” Edison says. “The kids are so creative. They come up with 50 different responses to the works. We kind of lose that as we get older, so I hope the whole family, not just children, finds different ways of looking at art.”

Kaplar has been overwhelmed by the positive response from patrons, employees, children, parents, and students. “I’m pleased we have another successful exhibit in the Brooks Center Lobby,” she said.

List of pieces/artists on display:

• “Supermarket” by Ben Shahn
• “Landshark” by Antoine Predock
• “Master Cleaners” by Edward Yaghjan
• “Summer Landscape II” by A. Stanick
• “Summer” by Walter Hollis Stevens
• “Signs of the Treegarth of Orthanc” by John O’Neil
• “The Secret of a Guilty Cloud” by Bill Seitz
• “Metamorphosis De Crigo” by Manley
• “Unknown” by Robert Hunter
• “Barron Briar II” by Carl Blair
• “Sophie’s Parlor” by David Freeman