Hinsdale Doings
February, 2001
Hinsdale Center for the Arts

Exhibit shows computer as artist's tool
By Sandy Illian Bosch

   Life just wasn't the same for artist Claire Prussian after her bout with cancer. She wasn't the same. And neither was her art. A painter for 40 years, Prussian, of Chicago, found a new, tool for her trade as she was recovering from cancer. Canvases were too heavy for her to in move on her own she turned instead to something smallera computer mouse. "Anything you want in the world you can find it on a computer," said Prussian, one of three artists featured in It Takes More Than A Mouse: Adding the Computer to the Artist's Toolbox. The exhibit opened at the Hinsdale Center for the Arts Sunday, Jan. 28th and will run through March 8th.
    
Curator Susan Sazama of Burr Ridge said the exhibit is about showing what an artist can do with a computer, not what a computer can do for the artist. She hopes the exhibit will show artists young and old the possibilities offered by adding the computer to more conventional art media. "The educational side of this was a paramount consideration," Sazama said. The 14 pieces on display by Prussian portray her take on fairy tales and the dark side that often is forgotten.

Although some of their tools are the same, Prussian's style is starkly different from the other two artists in the  exhibit, Claire Wolf Krantz and Joyce Neimanas, both of Chicago. A photographer and painter, Krantz first took hold of the computer mouse in 1994. Today, she combines photos, paintings and computer manipulation to create montages that blur the line between reality and imagination She sometimes spends months compiling and combining the elements for her mixed-media prints. Often, the admirer isn't sure whether he's looking at a painting or a photograph. "That's what I'm trying to do”, she said. One piece might have more than a dozen components, which all meld together to create a scene that before existed only in Krantz's mind.

Neimanas also mixes pieces together to create her art, which, like that of her fellow exhibitors, has been shown in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. The resulting collages just might leave the viewer with questions about himself. "All my work deals with identity," Neimanas said. She said the digitally produced pieces she's chosen for the HCA exhibit show the versatility of her work. A painter for more than 30 years, Neimanas started using the computer to create art in 1990. Today, she combines it with other media to create her one-of-a-kind images.

"They each have unique skills," Sazama said of the three featured artists.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.