The threat of exposure to the unregulated realities of a chaotic truth outside the illusion of stasis brings both a satiating comfort and an irrefutable frustration at being trapped. I like to think the animal’s dream becomes the desecration of its captor, the American’s anger at captivity is satiated through substance and consumerism, both are their own kind of violence.
2020 has been a singularly challenging year. Artists, as always, continue to seek reprieve and triumph over obstacle and tragedy in the expression, translation and embodiment of feeling into object. We continue to make the unseen seen, to manifest form through the mastery of materiality, form that cannot be spoken in any other language, seen in any other light.
Their is a dangerous pathology that afflicts the global affluent, the hegemony that will not relinquish its power and refuses empathy for those not positioned on top. The obscenely wealthy minority of white males who control the distribution of human resources do not concern themselves with a human communal fate but with their individual comfort and, secondarily, a familial fate.
There is magical realism when reality in a work slips into reverie. Aaron Gilbert’s Psychic Novellas strobe between unflinching social realism and nightmare.
The two solo shows of Dina and Maya Brodsky currently at Bernarducci Meisel Gallery immediately thrill the viewer with sheer technical virtuosity.
There is an immense pool of talent whose voices are diminished, if not muted, because of a lack of resource and connectivity to a secluded, exclusive, and unregulated market driven by the knowledge of no artistic or learned authority but by the tastes of the generally uneducated, gambling rich.
The Latin origins of the word monster, monere/monstrum, mean to portend and instruct. A monster’s instructive function is abundant within the span of Western mythos: do not be, do, go near, or engage. Interaction with this other is a form of becoming.
The portraits created by Cayce Zavaglia are not meant to flatter. There is no idealization, only relentless recording of physiognomic traits. There is nowhere to hide from her methodical analysis of every form and tonality.
Jane LaFarge Hamill and I met when I invited her to participate in a curation project at the now liquidated Lounge Underground Artist Collective. I distinctly remember unwrapping the first of two small paintings she delivered to the space; I was taken back in the revelation of the image.
