Weight & Witness

Where is the naked man when the chair is empty?

JACK KOPPERT ’21

I began obsessively painting myself nude during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Without the obligations of my professional hairstyling career, I was able to invest in a fresher passion, painting figures from life. The problem: everyone was in isolation. This was a new and private life, terrifying. My living space was full of mirrors previously used for off-the-books, in-home hair processes. I had been painting plein air paintings in the back yards of friends. Now I saw my interior living space as a subject. And if no one else was available, I was. I sat down and painted myself, just as I was, in a single sitting of maybe three or four hours, then made several more of these paintings over the next days. I thought of them as plein air paintings, documenting light, time, and awareness. I did not think of them as self-portraits, or portraits at all. The naked man is representative of a self, a seeing self, conscious and aware. We are all the naked one, trying and scratching to communicate.

There is a recurring cast of characters in the series: mirrors, chairs, a naked man, clamp lights, paintings, an infrequent doorway, and a flimsy French easel. The mirror is a doorway of illusion, a frame of reference and sometimes a twin to the figure. Chairs, figures of a sort, when vacant give me a feeling of a specific kind of absence. Placed in a conversational arrangement, or not, chairs open possibilities for nuance in the narrative. Where is the naked man when the chair is empty? He’s pulled on his britches and gone for a smoke. He left the clamp light on, revealing the heap of similar paintings scattered around. A doorway, like a mirror, reflects human proportions, and also makes me wonder what is on the other side–an end to illusion or another painting?

ALEX LEWIS ’21

 I noticed a running theme through the furniture on the curb, the “too-orange” faux pine wood furniture. These pieces of craft reductive furniture were over manufactured from the late 90s and far too late into the 2000s. The collecting and storing of this furniture (while having no space to put it) inspired decisions on how to present the work. Through arranging these discarded domestic objects with my ceramic objects, I am prompted with various questions: What is directing trends? Why are values leaning away from valuable objects? What is the allure of fast furniture culture? What is the current state of consumer consciousness? And what does storage charge objects with? In my current body of work, I construct these arrangements in a format that presses precarity and false compact space. I am careful not to alter the curb-found objects and allow the ceramic to be influenced by the found.  I find that most of my ceramic decisions are made by sympathizing with these objects as they themselves are in a period of transition, a fragile state,  leaving their current home for who knows where.

ABout the Artist

Jack Koppert ’21

Jack Koppert is an Ohio born figurative painter. Koppert gained his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Otterbein University in 2021. He obtained a master’s degree from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2023. Koppert is frequently a faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art as well as various other organizations. In 2022 he was awarded a mayoral certificate of recognition from Baltimore Mayor, Brandon Scott for his role in co-founding The Blooming Rainbow Project. 

ABout the Artist

Alex Lewis ’21

Alex Lewis is a visual artist whose ceramic-focused practice explores the relationship between domestic spaces and the objects within them. Lewis holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Otterbein University. Lewis is a faculty member at the University of Indianapolis, as well as an instructor at a number of local studios organizing workshops around a variety of ceramic furniture.

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