This past Friday marked the opening of the Word / Image art show at the Ortlip Gallery, a creative collaboration between brothers John and Ronald Leax. Ron Leax is currently a Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, and the affectionately named Jack returns to Houghton after a long career of teaching in the English and Writing department. The display features pyramidal formations of several of Ron’s experimental pieces alongside vinyl cuttings of a selection of John’s poems.
Ron was quick to point out that most of his work has been as a sculptor, but a decade-old back injury forced him into other artistic pursuits. Nothing has been lost in the transition; Ron’s scientific precision testifies to that. “Making art is how I figure out the world,” he said, a sentiment shared by his like-minded brother. “We’re still trying to figure it out ourselves,” Jack admitted, saying that he and his brother share a lot of the same concerns and explore many of the same themes, just with differing contexts. He described the collaboration process as being very casual. “We knew over the years that we’d been working on the same kind of themes so we decided that it would be interesting to see them together.”
Initially, Ron created a model of the gallery with an arrangement of all of his pieces, but Jack was unaware of the actual pieces being shown, only the titles. After seeing this model, Jack was able to implement his own arrangement of his selection of poems based on what he knew that his brother was doing. The whole thing is a process of investigation into uncharted territory, taking cues from Ron’s advice in that “you have to use your work to figure something out, not using what you already know.” Although he described his work as “drawings,” Ron is not averse to employing a large variety of materials, among them being coffee, insects, wine, and most unusually, urinal cakes. “Anything that will make a mark is free game,” he said.
Art faculty member Ted Murphy described the images as being largely diary entries that harbor a combination of personal story and record-keeping. “They feel like maps, like they’re trying to quantify an emotional world,” he commented. “I think if you think about that and you think about poetry it’s exactly the same.” Jack said that Ron was instrumental in the poetry selection process, saying that he encouraged Jack to utilize poetry that he had never intended to show publicly. He remarked that the original poems were exercises in disciplinarily pulling back and the minimalistic results were markedly different from his other work. According to Murphy, this is advantageous in complementing the visual pieces, and said that this makes Leax’s poetry more concentrated and image-based. Jack was able to define the creative partnership as juxtaposing the work of two people who have common background and have been working on common themes independently for many years and seeing how close they come. Word / Image will be on display in the gallery through March 13th.