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Medici displays Crnjak’s ‘Forest’

HOWLAND -- Mill Creek Park inspired many of the paintings in Dragana Crnjak's upcoming exhibition at Medici Museum of Art.

Don't go looking for any familiar sites in this "Forest," though.

The large canvases, most of which are being exhibited for the first time, will be on display in a show opening Sept. 10 and running through Jan. 4, 2027.

"I take a lot of photographs while I bike, while I hike, and then I'll look through them," Crnjak said. "Sometimes I'll combine multiple photographs. I'll zoom in and I'll pay attention to lights and shadows and darks. And I do manipulate photos. Sometimes I'll stretch them in Photoshop and make them kind of faded or until that image holds interest. There are no rules. Anything is a doorway, anything is possible. Everything has potential."

The title "Forest" isn't meant literally.

"The paintings are really not about Mill Creek," Crnjak said "They're not even about nature necessarily. I think of 'Forest' as a metaphorical structure -- a space that is comforting but also disorienting and kind of overwhelming and sometimes terrifying ... These paintings clearly combine nature and sense of presence and my need to slow down and look closely. But also, as I start painting, the paintings open up, and that's why I paint. I never know what will happen."

Along with the abstract interpretation of nature, many of the paintings feature distinct horizontal or vertical lines and geometric figures painted in contrasting colors from the primary image. Crnjak described those lines and boxes as "an interruption of space," but she doesn't view the paintings as a commentary on people's disruption of nature.

"I'm interested in the romantic notion of landscape as pure, beautiful (but) I really question that," she said. "Like, how is landscape really pure? We put our foot in all aspects of nature. I don't want to make statements about that. It's about technology taking over, or it's not. But there is this presence of something that's not unnatural, that's synthetic ... almost like remnants of the image that's kind of digitalized and just leftovers of the little barcodes of experience. I think of how fast we look at the world, how fast we consume images, even nature. We rarely really look and slow down."

Crnjak was born in Serbia and earned her bachelor's degree in painting with a minor in printmaking at the University of Akron and her master's degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Her work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally, including the U.S. embassies in Belgrade, Serbia, and Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. She has received four individual excellence awards in visual arts from the Ohio Arts Council.

Crnjak teaches painting and drawing as a professor of art at Youngstown State University, which is how Medici Executive Director Katelyn Amendolara Russo became aware of her work.

"I've been working with the administration to get the students more involved with the behind-the-scenes, to learn about all the career paths within the museum sector," Amendolara Russo said. "That's how Dragana and I met, and we reworked the exhibition schedule where she was able to exhibit here sooner than later."

If you go …

WHAT: "Dragana Crnjak: Forest"

WHEN: Sept 10 through Jan. 4, 2027, with opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 10.

WHERE: Medici Museum of Art, 9350 E. Market St., Howland

HOW MUCH: Admission is free. For more information, go to medicimuseum.art or call 330-856-2120.