Artist recasts Catholic saints in modern-day setting

How to go

What: Faculty art exhibit: D. Fitch, T. Longley-Cook, D. Rante

Where: Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries, Wright State University, Fairborn

When: Continues through March 6

More info: (937) 775-2978 or www.wright.edu/artgalleries

FAIRBORN — Among Catholicism’s diverse patron saints, there are patron saints for sleepwalkers, anesthesiologists and even unhappily married couples. That’s just three examples of the thousands who have been canonized. Wright State University professor Diane Fitch has recast some of these saints in a modern-day setting.

Her works are part of a faculty art exhibition on view at WSU.

Fitch, a painting and drawing professor of art and art history, is showing dozens of paintings and drawings. Gallery coordinator Tess Cortes said the vast number of works is due partly to a six-month sabbatical that Fitch took a year ago to visit France.

“Borrowing gestures and configurations from medieval and renaissance paintings and from Gothic relief sculpture, I recast iconic Christian episodes and scenes from the lives of saints in a contemporary space, using my children as models,” Fitch said. “My intent is to explore the changing meaning of these archetypal narratives when the action is transported to a present-day setting.”

Fitch deftly blends the imagined narrative with sumptuous oils. Her use of color, detail and light vs. shadow shift the viewer’s focus, while characters’ emotions add intrigue to the works. In “St. Dymphna, Patron Saint of Sleep Walkers, Epileptics, and the Mentally Ill,” a boy cowers in the corner of a laundry room ashamed to be seen in his skivvies. Other works deal with themes of betrayal, conflict and loyalty.

St. Monica, the patron saint of patience, must send spiritual guidance to Rante. Printmakers are a patient lo, but Rante takes diligence to the extreme by painstakingly cutting repetitive patterns in paper. She’s showing delicate printed patterns and large-scale installations for this exhibition. In “Capture,” a graphite and gouache on cut paper, a different type of pointillism results from the tiny pinpricked designs.

Two more WSU professors’ work featured in exhibition

Sharing space in the exhibition, Tracy Longley-Cook is showing a photographic series regarding natural and human surfaces, and Danielle Rante contemplates decay and decoration using paper and scissors. Both are also WSU professors

“I Will Follow That Line Until There Is No Next Thing,” a large-scale paper installation hung in the far corner of the gallery, catches the eye immediately. Rante has cut rows of delicate chains on long paper rolls. One is intact; the other falls to the floor in a shredded, haphazard fashion.

Longley-Cook expertly blends topographies to create a sort of visual happenstance. How close is the human body to the nature around us? Alternate landscapes have a new abstract identity.

“Visually, the ‘body prints’ mimic aerial landscape photographs, where scars, hair or wrinkles are reduced to black and white lines that imitate land and water formations,” Longley-Cook said. “I am interested in the correlation between the earth’s surface as a record of natural and manmade alterations, and our body as a record of our own personal experiences.”