2025 Fall – 2026 Spring Exhibit

Special Guests: Dr. Sanjay Batra and Deanne Batra; Dr. Douglas Waite and Dr. Martha Waite

Featuring
Recent work by Professor Kyle Joseph Petty, Lecturer in Media Art

Patterned Tactics
It is with great pleasure we present the exhibition Shifting Patterns, which feature the paintings and mixed-media prints of two artists, Barbara WF Miner and Dan Hernandez.
Shifting Patterns examine both literal and metaphorical obsession with visual patterning. The strategic use of visual patterns are hallmarks of both artists

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a pattern as something that serves as a model or example, a regular and intelligible form or sequence, or a design made from repeated lines, shapes, or colors. It can also refer to a customary way of behaving, a pre-arranged play in sports, or a method of doing something that others can copy. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines pattern as a discernible, coherent system or configuration based on the interrelationship of component parts, a form or model for imitation, or natural or chance configuration, like a repetition of shapes, colors, or events. It can refer to an artistic design, a model for making something, or a reliable sample of traits and tendencies in people or groups, such as behavior patterns.

Barbara WF Miner’s work reflects her love and interest in the “natural landscape,” land, water, vegetation existing without significant human influence. She has the luxury of living on a large 15-acre parcel of land in Ohio’s Great Black Swamp. Miner constantly traverses the property to experience what the lush land has to offer. Unlike the conquerors of nature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she luxuriates in its presence. She roams the acres seeing and feeling its potential impact on humans, making visual camera notes. Her work is not to document what she sees for posterity, she interprets, refines, to create a stylized flora, which celebrates the environment. Miner’s work is spectacularly vibrant; the color palette is dazzling and pulsates radiantly. Her highly patterned mixed media paintings rely on a seductive mixture of abstracted leaf-like forms infused with flowing directional movement. Experiencing Miner’s work on panel and paper elicits a feeling of excitement and wonder, as if in a slow pirouette, spinning, under a canopy of autumn leaves. The viewer is seduced and transported by the sensations triggered by the patterned mixed-media works.

Dan Hernandez’s paintings and serigraphs at first appear to be a visual homage to early video game imagery and language. The viewer is instantly transported to another time from a visual memory bank, of early Nintendo Entertainment Systems, imagery, from the 1980s and 90s. The patterns which are likely based on the shape and size of digital pixels, are bold and clear. The simplicity of the animated staccato movements of the characters in their rudimentary landscapes, combined with the soundtrack, provided a certain hypnotic experience. Hernandez’s work departs from mere visual homage to exploration of memory and cultural affect. The work is painstakingly detailed, producing complex scenes for the viewer to inhabit. He deploys a reshaped video game iconography to offer intricate narratives. He is well aware of seductive nature of video games; its ability to engage and transport the player/viewer to another place. The video screen is the conveyance for the 3rd millennium, serving to change the face of culture. We have been entertained, pacified, and inured by screen images. Hernandez intends to warn as well as entertain. Through seemingly simplistic graphical imagery, culture may have been usurped by the Mario Bros ©.

Shifting Patterns are observations of the times we live in. Both Miner and Hernandez strategically use visual pattern as a tactic for expression, relying on its inherent mutability to transport the viewer to another place.