LIKEABLE. GENE KOSS’S work is likeable. And I like looking at his work. Seeing how earlier themes continue to evolve, what new variations on the theme of, for example, Disc Drawings, have been developed, what new huge piece has taken form, and what new ideas have been added too the artist’s repertoire, as some idea are revisited and renewed, while others are new. This new exhibition at the Arthur Roger Gallery is no exception. Especially interesting is to see the new large work that the artist has conceived, Line Fence in this exhibit. Working with cast glass as his primary medium, which he often combines with various and sundry other materials and found objects, Koss’s work challenges whatever reservations one may have, with respect to a medium conventionally associated with utilitarian objects, about the viability of glass as a material for conceptual art. Combine Koss’s wit, expressed in titles evoking amusing associations that offer multiple paths for approaching the work, with the artist’s use of glass in ways unexpected by those unacquainted with its potential, and the confident craftsmanship of the mature artist produces work that represents a confluence of formal strength, humorous associations, and syntheses of multiple historical antecedents.

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS: IMMACULATE surfaces, varied lines and shapes, contrasts and harmonies of color, rhythms and textures evoking an elusive sense of the familiar, of mystery, wonder, and delight in the interplay between precision and ambiguity, abstract patterns, designs, and suggestions of the representational with the possibility of evolving into the beautiful, the sublime, and the merely interesting that, as photography, challenges Benjamin’s lament of the destruction of aura ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’. At first the exhibit seems a visual extravaganza without any apparent unifying theme, a polysemous conflation of works by different artists, even though the title clearly states that these are photographs from Edward Burtynsky’s Water Series. Slowly one focuses on individual photographs, responding to each on its own terms, and only then developing some understanding of visual and conceptual interrelationships within and among through shared associations and significant differences as the overwhelming initial reaction (if they were not contained within the solid black frames they might fly away) evolves into a sense of coherence.

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When you find out that Kate Blacklock uses a scanner for a camera, you react in one of two ways: “Everything is a miracle” or “Nothing is a miracle.” Either you dismiss her photos as an unorthodox divergence from the strict definition of the medium, or you are intrigued by what she might be able to do with a flatbed, office-type scanner. You may look at her subject matter and decide that her “Still Life” or “Nightscape” work is unremarkable, but this would be overlooking many aspects of the work, most of all the strange and wonderful process of how she makes it. It was Albert Einstein who proposed that there are basically just the two ways to live life. We must assume that the German Jewish scientist whose name has become synonymous with the word “genius” lived like everything was a miracle – he was himself kind of a miracle.

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