Artist utilizes wallpaper in senior gallery

"This puppy is a problem," Keith Hammersmith said as he pointed to a particular work in the grid before him on the floor of Walnut Hill's Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center.

Hammersmith, a graduating fine arts major, at the College-Conservatory of Music, with a concentration in painting, is struggling to find a place for the artwork in the grid of a group of 24 small collages made of wallpaper samples that he will exhibit in Rites of Passage 2006, the gallery's annual exhibition devoted to the work of college seniors.

"I though the right side would be a little too nothing, but it's all right," Hammersmith said as he stepped back again.

Liz Kauffman, the gallery co-director and founder, analyzed the grid in a similar fashion, helping Hammersmith prepare his work for Friday's opening.

"Well, there's more light on that side of the gallery, so it makes sense," she said.

Hammersmith called this a "juried exhibition," meaning he turned in a CD with digital versions of his works and a short statement, whereby he was chosen to show his work.

He said it wasn't hard to write about these works, mostly because they're simple.

"They're about being beautiful, and working with wallpaper, it's already about being beautiful," he said.

Hammersmith said the artwork is being exhibited in a large grid because their relationship to one another is important.

"Usually, a piece is all about itself, but these are already about the one next to it," he said, describing how the art will carry the viewer's eye from square to square. "By themselves, some of them are kinda bland, but when they're put together in a grid, they unify."

Hammersmith is exploring new territory with these works, since he worked primarily in paint before.

"Keith's new works are coming from a painter's perspective - still dealing with issues of form, composition and space but through decoration," Jeremy Flick, Hammersmith's friend and fellow College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning graduate, said.

"It's hard to work in paint," Hammersmith said. "Everybody wants paint to die."

He said that even as a painter, he was always trying to make his paintings about the material - through sanding or some other technique - instead of about what the materials combined to create.

"With wallpaper it's just about the material right off the bat," he said.

It all began when he brought old wallpaper samples to his studio a year ago. And the squares upon which he built the collages were left by his studio's previous tenant.

"My mother works as a fabric artist, so it all just kind of fell in line," Hammersmith said.

"In the beginning, each one was very painterly," he said, describing the evolution of his art, "and it was awful."

Hammersmith was subtly influenced by the pattern and decoration movement of the 1970s.

Since then, this work have become "subtly about composition and subtly about pattern."

He has already sold one of the works from the exhibition. Instead of being displayed on a white gallery wall, he said the piece will have a relationship to furniture, windows and maybe even other wallpaper, once it hangs by itself in someone's house.

Though the works are being displayed in a grid, he said he is not at all worried about them being sold separately.

He and Kauffmann gave the grid one last look before another staff member hangs them up.

"It's interesting that we're desperate to find some brilliant alternative that'll unite them all," Hammersmith said with a smile. "I wonder if the viewer's going to be doing that."

Friday's opening reception for Rites of Passage 2006 will last from 6 p.m.-10 p.m. at 2727 Woodburn Ave., in East Walnut Hills.

Simone's and Echo Restaurant will provide refreshments. Call (513) 861-3638 or visit www.manifestgallery.org for more information.