The Big Communication Talk

All art is a dialogue. It is why we create. Ask 100 artists why they create art and they would give 100 different answers, but if the veneers of those answers were scraped away, eventually we would get down to art’s role as a dialogue. Art is a conversation between the artist and an audience.

This is true of all artists, even those who seem to operate outside of the mainstream of the art world, even those who do not identify themselves as artists or the products of their creation as art. It is true of the artists who work out of Little City’s Center for the Arts as well. This group, fully aware of their status as artists, embraces the role of art as a vehicle for communication with a greater enthusiasm than almost any other group.

This could be because their need to communicate through art is greater than the need of other artists. The studios of Little City’s Center for the Arts are peopled by artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Though there is great diversity in their individual needs, interests and abilities, all of which help to shape their art, they do share a commonality. Means of communication that others take for granted have for them been impaired, making the communicative function of art all the more important.

The Big Communication Talk examines how some of the Little City artists use art to communicate, and what they choose to communicate about. Unsurprisingly, each seems to approach the issue from a highly personal viewpoint. Jeff Burke appears to be giving vent to libidinous concerns through his art. Wayne Mazurek and Luke Tauber each are intent on conveying the fruits of their intense intellectual musings on pet subjects, in Mazurek’s case transportation, in Tauber’s case classical composers. Harold Jeffries’ works are the result of actual dialogues with multiple inner voices. More often than not these dialogues concern the nature of Heaven.

Sometimes the artistic choices that an artist makes are fraught with irony. The almost completely non-verbal Tarik Echols has chosen to create art through the repetitive and decorative placement of written language, while the hyper-verbal Mike Lyon creates works that distort written language into new forms.

Included in this exhibition are three short videos, the animated science fiction adventure Harvest of Doom, and, making its public debut, the live action The Land of Milk and Money, Both videos use an allegorical approach to address some of the artists’ environmental and social concerns. Also making it's public debut is Luke Tauber's A Symphony About a River, which combines autobiographical nuggets with music and facts from the life of Robert Schumann in a wryly humorous way.

Originally exhibited in the Elmhurst Artists’ Guild Gallery at the Elmhurst Art Museum from October 24 to December 4, 2009, The Big Communication Talk lives on in this gallery, allowing the dialogue to continue indefinitely. If you would like to talk back to the artists, visit our blog at littlecityarts.blogspot.com. A catalogue containing artist bios and art from our Design Center is available here.

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