Goodyear Displays Innovative Taste
Artist’s exhibition consists of many works created from natural materials

By Madeleine Johnson

There are the makings for a zoo in Rider’s art gallery. “The Elemental Series,” the current exhibit featuring the works of local artist John Goodyear, is a refreshingly unconventional menagerie that shirks store-bought art supplies in favor of found materials. The pieces regard the naturally occurring as a potential artistic medium.

Goodyear, a resident of Lambertville and former art professor at Rutgers University, uses both his artwork and the materials from which they are wrought to employ a sense of dynamic tension that is not only aesthetically appealing, but also psychologically invigorating. The pieces invite the viewer to contemplate “the connection between the subject and the medium of the work,” which is a different sort of exhibit than the artist is used to.

“That happened in this show more than usual because the emphasis was on the materials,” Goodyear said. “I had to find works that I could use where the materials relate to the subjects. [It] seems to relate to natural objects, otherwise you get into machine-made things or things made out of plastic.”

This emphasis on the connection between an entity and its real-life component that appears in Goodyear’s work has turned Rider’s art gallery into a magical land where a tiny elephant was carved from ivory and a chicken made of eggshells watched over its feathery egg.

“I’ve always tried to make my art as lifelike as possible,” Goodyear said. “It seems that showing some of the actual material of the subject is better than just using artistic things because real things are made out of their own material.”

Irony and dynamic tensions play against each other in “The Elemental Series,” creating an exhibit that is more rewarding than most gallery-goers are used to. Goodyear’s pieces are not only aesthetically captivating, but also psychologically evocative and intellectually stimulating. They demand more than just a passive observation from their audience. While the exhibit includes a piece that calls for the observer to come in contact with it, one cannot appreciate the rest of Goodyear’s art without stopping to think about the correlation between a piece and its medium.

One of the tensions that feed off each other in Goodyear’s exhibit is the sparing of the old and new, which also comes into play as a representation of the artist’s career, adding a personal element that gives meaning to the exhibit.

“There’s a light work that represents the sun,” Goodyear said. “The bones of the structure were made in the sixties and the front face of it was just newly invented, so it has parts of my youth as well as my old age.”

Harry I. Naar, the gallery’s Director and a fine arts professor, is enthusiastic about the current exhibit, believing it presents a different artistic perspective.

“I think most people tend to think of going into a gallery and looking at pictures,” Naar said. “This is a really important exhibition because it presents things in the art gallery that aren’t typical of the majority of people’s experiences. Here we have found objects and work on the floor. There’s kinetic artwork. There are two pieces that move.”

Naar believes that the unusual nature of the exhibit and its demand for active audience participation should draw people into the quirky world of “The Elemental Series.”

“John Goodyear is forcing people to rethink the idea of art and to rethink things that they have seen on a regular basis,” Naar said. “I hope that it is provocative in the sense that it gets people to think on both sides, both negatively and positively-because that’s OK too.”

“The Elemental Series” will be exhibited at Rider from Thursday, Sept. 22, through Thursday, Oct. 20.