Lisa Young's Fortune Hunting (2008), an online archive of found fortune-cookie texts searchable by key words, themes and sentence structures, contains a self-reflexive category: "My studio practice." By selecting this search directive, the user is treated to a portrait of the artist through the linguistic filter of fortunes: "You find beauty in ordinary things"; "I learn by going where I have to go"; "Now is the time to try something new."
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"Marina Adams: Continuums" by Christine Licata
Flowing along shifting continuums, Marina Adams' most recent painting series is deceptively direct. Her work exists in the realm between aesthetic and cultural dichotomies or perhaps more accurately, the slippery juncture where they meet: an East and West mentality, the figurative and the abstract, flesh and fantasy along with the passionate and puritanical.
Read More"Almost Home: How Yayoi Asoma Paints From Memory" by Sophie Landres
Shaped like a seahorse and nestled deep in the forebrain, the hippocampus possesses the neurons that memory and visualization share. Neurologically speaking, seeing is no different from remembering, just that "as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later."
Read More"Lost in the Badlands: Cecelia Condit's Ephemeral Collection" by Kerrie Welsh
Mummies swing toward us. Gnarled hands caress smooth skin. A crow turns its head in surprise. "I have an identification with the crow, because it's a scavenger," Cecelia Condit tells me. She describes herself as a collector of images. "I'm driving down the road and I see a man digging a grave. So I stop and ask if I can film him. If they're not my stories, they're other people's and I connect with them."
Read More"Jim Pirtle: Painting, Performance, Petroleum, and Polyester" by Margo Handwerker
When Jim Pirtle turned a dilapidated downtown building into a notorious after-hours hot spot, he also created one of the most unusual artist-run spaces for alternative art and music in Houston, an increasingly popular city for working artists in recent years.
Read More"Panoramic Appropriations: The Poetry of Painting" by Jennifer Duffy
Cynthia Miller sees her paintings as poems. Instead of playing with words stacked upon one another to create a statement, Miller layers colors and carefully chosen images that create lyrical and serendipitous connections. "My husband is a poet and we love language. The flow of the words and the rhythm create the meaning," she said. "I love the rhythm of a painting. I work in flat images and [they] create a trancelike state that stylized design will afford."
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