ILK: NOUN: A GROUP OF ITEMS OF THE SAME TYPE.
HAS A CONNOTATION OF THE TYPED GROUP BEING
OF BAD OR QUESTIONABLE CHARACTER.
IN THIS CASE: ARTISTS OF UNUSUAL PROMISE AND DISTINCTIVE STYLE: THAT ILK.
An exhibition in the McFarland Student Union Gallery at Kutztown University, March 17 - May 18, 2020 | Online opening June 12th
Installation views
What’s an ilk?
Ann Lemon
Back when Amos was alive, we had a conversation with his cousin, Eli, about the word “ilk.” Eli remarked that “no one ever uses “ilk” in a positive way. No one ever says, “You know, classical composers, and that ilk.”
Later, as we manned the Boy Scout soda stand, at the end of the street of our local summer carnival, a cluster of black-clad teens off-gassed hormones and cigarette smoke just outside the street barricade, glaring and edging to and fro.
“Ew,” Amos glanced at them sideways, “Why do we always have to be near the ilk.”
Eventually he became a member of THAT ilk, a pimply pot-smoking teen with a bad attitude. But more essentially he belonged to a different set – artists who seem to almost effortlessly (“seem” being the key word) generate a continuous stream of visual works, as though making is necessary as breathing. While some of us must drive ourselves to the page with all varieties of mental lashings, this ilk would find a way to make art by scrubbing two rocks together if imprisoned in a cave.
“While some of us must drive ourselves to the page with all varieties of mental lashings, this ilk would find a way to make art by scrubbing two rocks together if imprisoned in a cave.”
At one point Amos agreed to an inpatient stay at a mental health hospital. The general practice is to remove all belongings from the patient, other than necessary clothing and hygiene items -a procedure that would feel dangerously close to identity erasure to anyone. Imagine if Roger Federer checked into rehab and they were like,”Sorry, no tennis racquets, bud.” Yoyo Ma? "Leave that cello OUTSIDE."
Amos Lemon Burkhart, Untitled, December 2017. 11” x 8.5”
Marker and gel pen on paper.
So, there is Amos, trapped in a teen psych ward. No phone, no art supplies. He tracked down some magic markers in the rec room, or wherever, and scrounged up a piece of paper. “MOM,” he told me excitedly the next day “I REMEMBERED THIS THING FROM 5TH GRADE!” It was a scribble exercise the teacher had given them –scribble over an entire page, and then color in the resulting (abstract) shapes in multiple colors. He showed me the neon-colored page, a psychedelic whirlwind. It’s possible it was, literally, drug-induced. I looked at it blankly - so much less sophisticated than the elegant, stretched figures he had been drawing. But to him, it was a breakthrough – reconnecting with the power of color, and harnessing the idea of abstraction, and of using the entire space to tell multiple, small, non-linear stories.I think he was afraid, and he needed to draw, and so he gave himself an assignment.
My point is, the artists I have selected for this show are of that ilk. The undeniable ones. The inextinguishable fire. The push pushpush to keep going. This is a rare and beautiful and fragile mindset. Imagine, say, Tiger Woods. A lifetime of practice at this one game, starting out as play, practicing over and over and over and over, driving to get better incrementally, and then the game becomes a job, and then the job becomes an identify.
“When we installed this show it became absolutely obvious that these individual works are speaking in related languages -they talk to each other with humor, with color, with composition. They speak of the human figure and the human condition. They divulge processes both laborious and spontaneous, both anxious and joy-filled. They radiate light, movement, intensity.”
How does one retain the pleasure of creation despite all that effort, so it does not become a burden?
These are nine artists who touched, or were touched by, or connected to, Lemon, in some way. Some he knew since childhood, observed closely as they grew (and sometimes struggled) in their careers as professional artists. Several of those presented here, he stood parallel with as they created side-by-side in art class. Some knew of him only by reputation. One he lived with, for a while. I hope you will see the works here in conversation.
And also – these are all creators with a drive to keep understanding the world through making art. Not to be famous. Not to be rich. Not to get an “A". But because of the curiosity to wonder, what can this be? How can I push it further? What else can I come up with? These ilk have figured out a way to keep hearing those questions. To keep driving down the road without a map or a destination, just to see what is around the next corner.
You know the type!
Video of the lightning-round artists talk “Virtual Opening” - all nine artists from the show discuss their recent work with 5 slides in 5 minutes. Fascinating insights into creativity during the Covid-19 lockdown.
A short circular trip around the studio of Timothy Leo Baldwin.
“(Lemon) lived with chaotic energy in his head and made beautiful tapestries of artwork that flowed out of his being. As I reflect on his use of space and imagery, I became more aware of how my use of color could be chaotic, expressive and free. Amos’s work let me fill in the gaps and let things, “just happen,” whereas before, my work was more timid, structured, and academic. ”
Joshua K.Y. Boulos
“I met Amos for the last time about a month before he passed away on a beach in Beverly, Massachusetts. I was a freshman at RISD at the time and he was in Providence, squatting in his then girlfriend’s dorm at JWU. When he texted me that he was at the entrance of the building I was working in, I ran downstairs and we tightly embraced.
I was taken aback by how different he became as it had been nearly two years since we last met. He had longer hair now and a purple bomber with graphic palm leaves printed on it. That evening, him, his girlfriend and a few of my friends and me went to the roof of the graphic design department’s building. We talked about things like being afraid of heights and our peers from CSSSA, the precollege camp that we had first met each other at. It was hard to really remember what else happened that night as we went to some video/performance art degree project show where boxes of Franzia and Gushers were passed around and the kid hosting the show played guitar and tried to ollie in front of everyone and failed many times like some hot shit. I remember being drunk off said Franzia as he showed me a tiny Photoshop eye-dropper tool stick-n-poke he left on his own knee. His girlfriend was talking about the bread class culinary arts students have to take at JWU as I saw Amos look around the small but festive room we were in. I’m not so sure what happened after, I remember introducing him to my then girlfriend and kissing her in front of him.
It’s hard to remember all of that night but I remember so much walking, walking, walking. I remember going to bed after it all and recalling him complaining about the his girlfriend’s roommates who don’t know about him squatting in their dorm. I can’t remember if I dreamed or not that night, but if I did, it had to be about how fun our night together was or my hopes that he’d get accepted into RISD, but I can’t remember too much. It is a pattern, not remembering so much.
I remember the day I heard the news that his body was found in the water on a beach in Beverly, Massachusetts. I remember stepping out of class and desperately trying to remember things, remember everything. Trying to remember every single time I’d been with him that I took for granted, every secret he told me through text, every promise I made to him. The moment he left my life, I only continued to remember, remember, and remember less. I see this very clearly in the drawings I’m presenting in this show.
Remembering, but not remembering much. Trying to fill in the blanks of truth or fiction. These drawings chronicle a very particularly low point of my life this past year. I was lost in love, sex, drugs, location language, people and in my memory. Putting together any ol’ fitting pieces to build some wooden tracks to a broken train of thought. Like Amos’ work, much of the figuration depicts myself as a woman or speaks very explicitly of people I love or have loved. Some of the visuals are isolated or distanced from any epicenter of story. Not knowing where it will bring me or any conclusion that will come of it, I use drawing as the primary tool to expand my visual vernacular, in hopes that I can create a language, and a world for it to expand in. ”
A video work about my displacement within the 'Asian American' racial categorization. For “Bodies in Art,” RISD Wintersession 2019.
“These four untitled works all are a mapping of sorts, hopefully sewing together some quilt of mental periphery or some sequence without context. Your memories are just memories of memories you’ve had, and I feel like I had to eventually learn that in this, you don’t just forget what you’re trying to remember, they just start to change with you too. The people in your life who have passed away do the exact same thing.”
Josh Cloud
“Some things cannot be processed in a day, a week, a month, or a lifetime. I started this weaving in October of 2018, and finished it in June of 2019. In the course of those months and the countless strands I wove on a standing tapestry loom without a heddle or a shuttle, I silently grieved for the loss of my dear friend. This tapestry saw me on good days and bad over those months, some days I came to it with joy and energy and on others tears and questions. When I wove the final strands and took it off the loom a year after Lemon had passed, I had the opportunity to step back and see how far I had come, how much I had been able to process during the time I wove. I saw that every strand was a thought, every block of color a statement, and the tapestry as a whole, a message of love to someone who I felt was destined to play a crucial and irreplaceable role in my life.”
“This work was made during a two-week artist residency in a vintage dune shack in the remote sand dunes of Provincetown, MA. I had no electricity or running water for 14 days. My water for drinking, washing and working came from a fresh water well 50 yards down a steep hill. I was in purposeful isolation for most of this period and spent many, many hours meditating on the incredible intuitive, spontaneous creative spirit of Amos while allowing that spirit to flow through the work I made there.”
“ I was the most productive I have ever been and like to think that Amos (Bubs) was there with me the whole time, guiding my hands as I rendered these works. It was an incredible gift to know Amos (he was born a month before my son Hugo, and they grew up together), and every work I make carries the gift of his presence.”
“The film I completed in the CSSSA program, where I met Amos, included animation of cats’ cradle strings shifting into different shapes without any hands moving them. On the last day of CSSSA, when we all signed each others sketchbooks with goodbye notes, Amos drew me a pair of hands, so my cats’ cradle strings would have someone to hold them. In Amos’ memory I made a human-sized vibrantly colored, soft wool hand, modeled after Amos’ drawings, as a gift for Ann.”
“Amos seemed to love this sweatshirt, embodying its message with a quiet shrug.”
Speck Mellencamp
“It was awesome to see him work- he put no restriction on himself as far as style or subject matter. There was so much of him in his work, there was no second guessing. If he wanted to draw two dimensional trees he drew two dimensional trees, and if he wanted to draw beautiful figures he would- it didn’t matter, there was nothing holding him back. Everything he made was the purest expression of himself. ”
Time lapse film of a work in progress.
“All of my work is inspired by Amos generally. He always pushes me to make the wildest thing I can think of. Whether it’s the anatomy of his figural creations or what I would call his thought dump pieces, I find inspiration in his abstraction of what is to create what isn’t.”
Kailyn Williams
“I didn’t know Amos personally, but I looked up to him a great deal. As a younger artist, I always looked forward to seeing what he created. His work was bright, unique, captivating, and above all, inspiring. Seeing his work made me feel more motivated to improving my own work, and to have fun while I did it.”
Amos (Lemon)
For information about purchasing artwork, contact the artists directly, or email ann @ a.lemon.burkhart@gmail.com.