Decaying remnants of Roman civilization appear in imaginary, quasi post-apocalyptic landscapes in Dennis Congdon's recent large-scale paintings. Recalling the Surrealist works of de Chirico or the Neoclassical period of Picasso, columns, capitals and busts abound in simplified settings where the history of art survives but humans don't appear to.
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Filtering by Category: Essays
"Home/Alone: Photographs by Soi Park" by Kelly Cannon
It is hard to imagine the Yale-trained photographer Soi Park sharing tequila with strangers at a day labor pick-up location in Connecticut. Yet that is how she became acquainted with the workers, and subsequently their families, who figure throughout her latest body of work. While she was riding on the Metro North commuter line in August of 2010, the train stopped briefly outside Stamford, giving Park a view of men loitering in a nearby lot. As the train started up again, she watched them run toward an arriving van. The anomaly of the men's urgency within the nondescript setting led her to return to the site with a camera.
Read More"A Single-Minded Migratory Bird" by Camille Xin
Leonard Contino is the kind of visionary artist described by Rilke as a single-minded migratory bird. Although formally untrained, Contino's mode of geometric and optical art is highly sophisticated, his work a unique blend of spiritual and metaphysical curiosity. He effortlessly switches between different mediums but other than his creativity, nothing is effortless for Contino.
Read MoreHarry J. Weil on Mike Metz
Marcel Duchamp explained that in the midst of creation "the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions." Once the artist is done, it is the spectator who brings it in "contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act." That is, the viewer, along with the artist, is responsible for art's success.
Read More"Mapping the Flow: Wopo Holup's River Drawings" by Nicholas Robbins
Rivers are the ostensible subjects of Wopo Holup's drawings, but not in any conventional sense. As they were for Thoreau, rivers are Holup's point of departure for the investigation of an expansive range of questions and concerns-aesthetic, scientific, historical, and ecological. Derived from satellite imaging systems, Holup's drawings present themselves as a kind of hand-crafted, subjectivized mapping, a personalized rendering of landscapes originally captured by a data-driven, all-seeing eye.
Read More"Slyboots : Stephen Schofield and the Making of Believers" by Jake Moore
The "conditional" is a term used to express what would happen given certain events or actions. Equivalents exist in many languages; in English, additional words are required to put potential into linguistic play. In French, the conditional is expressed through a form of conjugation, so the potential for a shift is thus inherent, or rather, structural.
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