Janet Sgro's MAATC Thesis Presentation - Springfield Scene Online

Janet Sgro’s thesis presentation for her Master of Arts in Art Therapy and Counseling (MAATC) was on September 23rd at The Pharmacy Art Gallery.

Story by James Bockmier

Standing at a podium amidst her artwork, Janet Sgro gives a deliberately
somewhat dry social-scientific presentation about this anything-but-dry visual
cornucopia and its proven healing power. All through this academic talk, her colors
and patterns work their magic across the walls and into the space between,
spellbinding—and healing—her audience.

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Three terms from Sgro’s presentation at her exhibit define between them the
general contours of her art: “archetypal shapes,” “pattern,” and “luminosity.” Basic
yet organic forms fold inward and outward, repeating with variation within and
across her pieces. A palette of fresh-fruit and floral hues—echoing spring, sunrise,
and coral reefs—glows from within the surface outward to meet the viewer a la
stained glass. The forms and colors cooperate: striations of lavender, peach, and
aquamarine whirl in flat, curvilinear rhythms—spirals, waves, paisleys—positively
vibrating through a gilt-touched glassy sheen. Sgro eschews the straight line, hard
angle, brown, grey, and volumetric illusion; all is a high-polish slice of rainbow
agate.

Botanical and religious imagery take center stage and yet invert their more
typical roles, presenting small-scale plant forms with utmost monumentality and
the divine with greatest intimacy. Indeed, finding God in a single flower-bud is the
summation of Sgro’s thematic approach. God’s presence in the flower-bud often
manifests through fairies, also among Sgro’s favored imagery. Vine-scroll
arabesques and tree-of-life forms likewise meld the botanical and religious.
Sgro’s work evidently radiates from an inmost place of joy and childlike
innocence. This is not naïve but primordial: intuitive rather than discursive. These
are Sgro’s own “songs of innocence,” though in paint rather than verse a la Blake
(or Traherne).

This exhibition of Sgro’s works becomes a work in itself—a garden shrine of
immersive meta-pattern. The Pharmacy Gallery’s long-term installation of a
“migrating” origami-bird flock fits perfectly in this new, if temporary, context.
Some of Sgro’s pieces—like her body of work as a whole—deal in seria and
sequences, most especially the chakras, while others take the form of collage or
assemblage, some incorporating text. All of this falls in with her broader sense of
pattern, rhythm, and development across theme and variations.

As she speaks to those assembled in her garden-shrine of art, one sees that
Janet Sgro is herself the fairy by which God manifests within the flower bud, and
from her magical presence radiate these healing waves of pure visual joy.