Ron Linden's
Shem the Penman (2007) is a modest painting with an innate but peculiar logic of its own. On a worked wooden panel, geometric forms in graphite and acrylic drift like half-shucked oysters, broken glass, or unstrung black pearls stuck in some muddy nook. Rendered in sooty earth tones, this layered abstraction shifts between slack brushstrokes and hard edges in a movement at once organic and mechanical. As its title suggests, this painting seems to exist only to spite its creator; a playful aphorism in disguise, "Shem the Penman" - a central figure in James Joyce's protean novel
Finnegans Wake - should also be read as "shame on the author," or "the maker is a sham."
Read MoreThe eponymous exhibition of the visual artist/performance artist/musician Phranc comprises at first glance no more than an apparently innocent, and anachronistic, [BW2]installation.
Read MoreOne can be a traveler at home as well as abroad. In a wildly colorful language evocative of the Fauves, the painter Mark Turgeon
depicts domestic artifacts and easily forgotten souvenirs that are excavations of the ordinary: vases of flowers, an airport security sticker, barcodes, DVDs, textiles, paperback books, street posters, statuettes, Nike swooshes, the Fair Trade emblem. The pictorial elements record the precious alongside the utterly disposable, compiling a visual archaeology of the detritus of everyday.
Read More"They'll tell you to expect the unexpected
But nobody ever tells you where it's hid." [1]
- The Flatlanders
Read MoreA visitor to Lenore Malen's New Society for Universal Harmony could be forgiven for not knowing how to interpret the objects, texts, photographs and video on view. They are displayed in a manner that is equal parts school science project, surrealist parlor game and historical re-enactment, leading to the assumption of a reality that may or may not be only an artist's fantasy. The presentation is bookmarked between two thoroughly absorbing and maddeningly elusive figures: Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, the 18th- century practitioner of magnet-induced psychic healing and hypnotism; and Dr. F.A. Mesmer, his 21st-century disciple.
Read MoreThere are things that Phyllis Goldberg just won't change. Living in New York, for instance, where she has resided since she was born in Brooklyn in 1927. But when it comes to her art practice, she is constantly evolving. Over the past decade alone, her work has ranged from abstract painting to photo collage to raku-fired pottery. On the eve of her first solo show in New York at the CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, she laughs and says, "It doesn't make sense at my age to start a career."
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