By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Horses that emerge from a tangle of roots, bright bugs made of fused glass and dancers frozen in time by a single shutter click all will come together in a single show that opens Friday at the Hays Arts Center.
The main gallery is featuring “Intermittent Musings,” a career retrospect of glass and mixed media art from Stan Detrixhe. The Founders gallery will host “Unwrapping Life,” mixed media carving and ceramics by Terri Horner. Also featured will be “In Motion, Dance photography by Michael Strong.”
The opening reception for all three exhibits will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the Hays Arts Council.
Stan Detrixhe
Detrixhe, 66, works in a variety of media including fused glass, reverse painted glass, oil and collage.
Detrixhe is a a Hays native, but studied at San Diego State before moving back to Kansas. He started working with in glass in 1983 when he working as a designer for High Plains Stained Glass. The company designed and repaired stained glass windows. Although there is not as much demand for it today, Detrixhe still offers commercial stained glass work as well.
One of the larger pieces of glass work in the exhibit includes several wire panes featuring bugs.
Detrixhe said he chose the subject because he saw them as a challenge.
“What is an extreme example of what you could do with fusing and still have it hold up?” he said. “So I thought of all the little legs on the insects coming off as being very, very delicate, and then the middles of the insects are very, very strong. I was trying to determine if those two things were compatible.”
Advances have been made in fused glass, but when Detrixhe started there were issues with compatibility in different colors of fused glass. One color of glass can solidify before another, which will cause the glass to crack.
All the insects in this piece of artwork were modeled after actual insects. Detrixhe researched the anatomy and features of the insects as he was creating the pieces.
Another challenge for Detrixhe is painting reversed glass. As the name implies, all of the painting has to be done in reverse on the back of the piece of glass. He said he likes the effect that is achieved in the final product. As light hits the front of the finished pieces, it makes the color seem even brighter than the original paint.
Detrixhe has several large collage pieces in this exhibit. Some are abstract and others look more like a traditional paintings.
He created abstract brown, blue and green collage pieces by chance. He started snipping pieces out of magazines and gluing them on a background, and it just kept getting bigger until it was several feet tall. A second piece followed. The third green piece in the series he created from digitized images.
He said even if he is going to create a finished piece in another medium, such as oil or glass, he likes to use collage to create a first impression of what the finished piece will look like.
Two oil paintings will make a reappearance in this exhibit from a former Hays downtown bar. The bar used to be in the basement of what is now Coldwell Banker Executive Realty, 1001 Main. The paintings were donated to the HAC when the bar closed.
Terri Horner
Horner, 61, Great Bend, is a cosmetologist by trade, but went back to school and earned her bachelor’s degree in art from Fort Hays State University in 2009.
Although Horner’s formal education came later in life, she has always loved art and drawing. Today she is a sculpture. Her favorite media is wood, and she often uses cedar.
“Wood and stone are particularly nice because you uncover what is in there,” she said. “What I see I can bring to light for someone else to see that they might not otherwise find in there.”
Horner gave several examples. A piece that was chosen for the 2018 Smoky Hill Art Exhibition at the HAC depicts horses carved from the roots of a hydrangea bush. The roots were a gift from a friend’s garden. Horner said she turned the root around and around and upside down, but all she could see were the heads of horses in the tangled wood.
A thin sculpture of a women was inspired by a knot that Horner imagined as the women’s hair. In yet another piece depicting Eve, the nape of the woman’s neck, her hair and the curvature of her face were all determined by the grain that was naturally in the wood.
“The fact that I like three-dimensional work and it’s more comfortable to me, I think is because I have worked on a 3-D pallet my entire life working on hair,” she said, “because that is an art in and of itself.”‘
Another piece was inspired by her in-laws, Ralph and Edna Horner. The wood sculpture features a faded, ghostly image of the couple when they were young. A cast of their hands is in an opening in the wood below. On the back of the piece is inscribed a excerpt from a love letter Ralph wrote to Edna when he was stationed in Africa during World War II. He worked as mechanic in the Army Air Corps. They wrote to each other every day.
“I really wanted to honor them in a sense, because No. 1 they were awesome people,” Horner said. “They were just the kindest, sweetest people ever. They were also so in love. Dad died in ’93, and they were every bit in love at that moment as the day they met. They were such an inspiration and an example.”
Several of the pieces in “Unwrapping Life” also depict animals, such as a lion, monkey, giraffe and elephant in wood and polar bears in Italian ice alabaster.
“I have just always been an animal lover or that’s just what’s there,” she said.
Horner is branching off in new directions. She is working on an independent study at Barton Community College in ceramics. Although it was not ready for this show, she hopes to be able to show that work soon.
Michael Strong
Mike Strong started shooting photos in the 1967 when he took a photojournalism class in college. That was the only photo class he took, but he had found his passion.
He couldn’t find a job as a photographer right out of college. He kept finding jobs for reporters, so he became a photographer who wrote. Today he is primarily a dance and performance photographer. Strong formerly lived in Kansas City, but is now living in Hays.
His exhibition “In Motion: Dance Photography by Michael Strong,” shows examples from years of perfecting the art of photographing the movement and emotion of dance.
“It never, never stops for me,” he said of the dance photography. “This is always perfection. I am always perfecting. There is nothing else as interesting or exciting for me because there are always changes in moves.”
Strong said he didn’t really understand dance photography nor was he any good at it until he took tap lessons. He started to see new aspects in his photography and better understand the timing that goes into dance after he started to dance.
“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew my pictures were different from the normal newspaper people who came in, who clearly didn’t see what they were looking at,” he said. “To see something, you have to know something. To know something, you have to do something.”
When Strong is going to photograph a performance, he starts attending rehearsals as soon as possible. He makes notes about the timing of the movements.
When he shoots, he does not use continuous shooting. Every image is captured with a single click of the shutter. He said this has forced him to choose his shots more carefully and perfect his timing. Several photos in the exhibit will include consecutive frames of a single subject to show how this techniques shapes Strong’s photography.
Strong also shoots with an ultra-wide angel lens. This allows him to be very close to his subjects, but still capture a broader image.
“For me, this is about perfecting and never quite getting there,” Strong said of his photography, “but always staying on an edge. I have a tell I have for myself. If I find myself thinking it is too easy, I stop because it means that I am not paying attention. I start doing a quick little inventory of where I am at in the dance. I do a quick little inventory of all the setting on my camera. That puts me back in the mood. You have to be on edge in some way, shape or form.”
He never shoots a posed shot. They are all images made in the moment.
“I call these my transitive [shots] like a transitive verb. You know you need an object that comes after it,” he said. “These are transitive in the sense they are coming from somewhere and going to somewhere rather than just jumping up and boom there you are.”
Although Strong started shooting ballroom dancing, today he photographs the American Youth Ballet, University of Kansas dance and University of Missouri Kansas City dance as well as other events and companies.
