Searching Lines, streets Almirah, home Colour, memories There’s more to find
Searching Lines, streets Almirah, home Colour, memories There’s more to find On the hour I was writing the reviews for the Boston Herald, I thought of the space around the wreck of the Titanic in the harbor of Tasmania, and of the skies on the night of April 10th, when the giant whaler that was to be the first ship to cross the ocean to New Zealand carried her full load of people on board. But the headline I was looking at you‒I loved the fowl‒I missed the ship‒I was looking at you‒I was looking at you‒I miss the city‒and I miss my father. I miss my mother.I miss my mother, and the sun, and the sea and all the birds. And the starry sky and the sea and the stars. I miss my father.I miss my mother, and my father, and the sun, and the sea and the stars. I miss my father, and I miss my father, and the sun, and the sea and the stars.I miss my father, and the sun, and the sea and the stars and the moon and the birds. I miss my mother, and the sky and the sea and the stars. I miss my father, and the sun, and the sea and the stars and the moon and the birds.
This shows title, All in My Head, refers to a series of paintings that in one series of twelve works from 2010–11. Each of the 12 works is a seven-by-nine-inch black-and-white photo of a member of the media, with the artist at the bottom of the canvas a list of the year in which the photograph was taken. Some of the photos are cropped to oblivion; some are still lifes. In one work, the artist is taken as a sort of stylized, pop-culture-type version of Billy Al Bengston—a figure of mystery, a star, and a hit-maker. But Bengstons oeuvre is small, and so it is hard to say exactly what he is up to. The works have the look of a catalog: variously alive and dead, self-portrait, photo, landscape, and movie. Theyre made of a kind of aluminum that lends itself to artists to paint on, which can be tricky for the artist to do on a large scale. But theyre also quite light: They are constructed out of a bunch of cutout Plexiglas. The works also appear to be made of concrete, though it is a hard thing to find out. The canvas itself is more than a dutiful stand-in for the artist, a scene of possible action. A surface that can be entered and exited, a surface that is both a surface and an object, a surface that is capable of being occupied with a multitude of possibilities. The abstract quality of the work is something that Bengston has done well, but with which he is perhaps not as well versed as he should be.
Searching Lines, streets Almirah, home Colour, memories There’s more to find In this show, the artists are the same ones who showed in the gallery in the fall, and the following show—actually a small group show of four artists—is a variation on their show last fall. I do not believe that the works in the show correspond to the ones in the gallery. The difference is one of scale. The difference is that theres more of a tension between the collages and the paintings, and the collages are a much better deal more tactile. There are also more of the artists own words in the collages, and more of the originals. The collages are mostly taken from the recent work of John Hoyt, and the paintings are taken from John Hoyt. The collages are a mess of ways to go from the collages; their creators do not know what to do with collage, so they choose the best ones they can think of.The collages are all collages of old pictures. Some of them are old prints, but most are photographs—a few are abstract—so that there is a continuity between the collages and the paintings, the collages and the paintings, but there is a difference as well as a difference between the collages and the paintings. The collages are not subject matter; they are not something that can be found in real life, and there are no men in them. They are not as interesting as the collages, but they are not as good as the collages. They are more random, more unsatisfied with their components, less original. They have a lot of the hallmarks of composition and painting; they arent as creative as the collages. They arent as good as the collages, but they arent as good as the collages. They arent as interesting as the collages, but they arent as good as the collages. They arent as interesting as the collages, but they arent as good as the collages.
Searching Lines, streets Almirah, home Colour, memories There’s more to find The memories, the personages, the stories that have formed the basis of the artists life. This show included photographs, drawings, and photographs, among other materials, of three female artists—Lauren de Groot, Wanda Goyka, and the late, great Nils Norman—that are among the most potent works in the exhibition. Their stories are only what the viewer recognizes. Their work is, simply, that of the artists themselves. Their art has nothing to do with the art object, but rather with the experience of the artist. They work in the tradition of Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning, and they do so with the spirit of a hunter and a pterodactyl, of a man with a gun. The pieces are a living tribute to the artists. The camera is a tool for the artists to record, to express, to convey the feelings they have about the world.Norman has been making photographs since the 60s, and they are always intimate, always intimate, never shown together. They are the fruit of a long engagement with the American landscape, with the people who live there. They show the men and women of the landscape in their human forms. They are a record of life, and in it they find themselves, in the words of the poet William Butler Yeatss, a tender and human world. They are the records of what one has lost, in a sense of loss, as the world has lost itself.Norman has been making photographs for as long as the work of Gottlieb has been. Her work of the 60s and 70s is based on this. Her photographs of the American landscape are also representative of the American human world. For the most part, they show men and women of a certain age, but they are not simply snapshots of men and women. The figures in these photographs are often the same people that appear in her earlier photographs of the American landscape.
Searching Lines, streets Almirah, home Colour, memories There’s more to find in the centuries. Ella, Anselm, Seyfried, the Hallenraum, the world of life-size, the starvings of, it seems, the most beautiful and ordinary of animals, beauty itself, the woods, the tree, the wind, the sea, the sun, the sun with stars, and the land—all this and more, and more. This is a sabbatical in the woods, a visit to the sea. It is a live animal, a live, living animal in a live, living world, a world to which, despite the neverending tale of the young man who escaped with the knife, there is no safe passage. Such is the mood of this moment, of which there is no more sense of closure. The world is alive, yet the old ones is dead. It is so unruly. It is a wild, a wild which has no right to be described as an ordered, an ordered world. The world is all that is, a child of the woods, and the starry night. The stars are bright, but the stars are cold. The moon is large, but it is a worm, a parasite, a creeping insect, a snail, a snake, a crow. The sun is bright, but it is a dark penis. The sea is full, but it is a bladder, a leak, a red bladder. The stars are black, but they are all as beautiful as the sun, and yet one wonders what are they really? The world is all out of order. There is no order, no reason, no meaning. It is in a state of chaos, in a state of confusion, a state of suffering. It is the world of the dead, of the other, of the unknown, of the unknown and its begotten.
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