Featured Artist of June: Joann Wheeler

I want to thank Joann Wheeler for allowing me to share her work during this past month. I keep staring at these pieces and finding new things to think about. Her very intelligent work goes beyond a particular aesthetic and leads us deeper passed surfaces to challenge the way we consider our thought processes. I really want to thank her for that. Too often art just sorta leaves you with a  flat one-dimensional experience. Joann's work lives long passed walking away from it.

Next month I've asked an old(maybe I should say former) teacher and current studio mate and friend to be my Featured Artist of July.

​Thanks again Joann and let me know when you've recreated your environment or decided what's next.

​Last week's post below. and below that the previos week and below that the first week. Haha. Enjoy!

"I see my work as both personal, in the way a dream or memory is personal, and as architypal - an attempt to match external forms with internal theses," Joann Wheeler wrote in here description years ago on a now defunct website. I had a chance to chat with her this week in the studio she hasn't visited since before the COVID19 business took over our lives. We sat several feet apart fully masked and talked about art. It was a really great time for me.

Joann is a delightful artist with so many ideas about art and artists in a community. She admitted she is looking for her next creative chapter. Her former processes don't interest her as much as they once did. "Maybe I create an environment at home," she said with that look one gets when they are intrigued about what just went through their brain.

"I love to fill contained spaces with meaning, and I also love to stretch the boundaries, push the limits," she also wrote in her statement from long ago.

​Seems somethings never change!

The piece on the left was a collage that Joann said she made during a different pandemic from the 90s... AIDS.

Bellow are images from the first two weeks of posting Joann's work. Next week we'll share a few more of her wonderful pieces.

McWhinney Street - This was the address of Joann Wheeler's grandmother's house. A red brick house with a front porch. This piece shows Wheeler's mother facing off with her mother and incorporates some things that belonged to her grandmother.

Child Tiresias - Tiresias was a blind Greek prophet who, due to a curse, lived part of his life as a woman and part as a man.
He was considered to be wise because, though blind, he could see any situation
from both points of view.

These images are from her Gateway series.

First weeks post below

I first met Joann Wheeler about five years ago. I had just learned about the Artist Relocation Program she was spearheading and we met during the Oil Heritage Festival. I really thought the relocation program was a brilliant idea and what a gift for Oil City to have someone with the right passion and understanding of an artist's needs at the helm. Joann is an artist, a Fullbight Scholar, a passionate community member and supporter of all things Oil City. She helped bring over 40 artists to the area to create.
She is one of those people I keep saying to myself, "I need to find more time to hang out with Joann and just talk about life."
This piece above I chose as the lead-off image as I feature her work this month because I can't stop looking at it. It has so much life within it that I can relate to and want to investigate more. I am proud that she has agreed to be my second featured artist of the month.
Enjoy these beautiful pieces.

This bottom piece is a self portrait. I hope to meet up with her soon to make a photograph of her and look over more of her work