Byzantine with Katherine Mann

“Byzantine is a wall-sized painting that explores themes of hybridity, excess, and growth. Each panel in the series functions as a man-sized porthole into a landscape alive with details, patterns and interlocking systems. This is achieved through the conglomeration of minutia piled and cobbled together to create larger, overarching systems that define the whole painting. During our time at Blue Sky, our group observed and recorded the natural environment around us in Dayton and then created individual abstract compositions and patterns out of sketches, grave rubbings, silk screens, linoleum block prints and potter’s wheel drawings.

We then incorporated these individual experiments into a 31-foot paper painting and a 50-foot wall and floor drawing, combining the abstract and the realistic, organic and inorganic, spontaneous and neurotic. Each panel of Byzantine began with the chance operation of poured ink and pigment on paper, and were subsequently populated by the youth participants with details and characters to flesh out what became, eventually, a fantastical, even grotesque, abstract environment… at once suffocating and fabulous. “

Student Artist:
Emily Burkman, Smith College: BA, June 2009

Youth Participants:
Tim Brown, Dayton
Brandi Dale, Dayton
Ray Graetz, Dayton
Tony Hoogsteden, Dayton
Sydney Joslin-Knapp, Dayton
Roseline Rodriguez, Beavercreek
Whitney Taylor, Dayton