Lin Emery’s graceful kinetic work is to sculpture what ballet is to dance, a spiritual song to music or a warm breeze to a summer day. Her delicately balanced monumental polished aluminum creations sway and dance silently in currents of wind much like a sweet fragrance moving silently through a memory.
By Benjamin Genocchio for The New York Times “Tremendous World” is the apt title of Lesley Dill’s exhibition now at the Neuberger Museum of Art, where extremely large, dramatic works…
Eighty percent of Canadians live in cities, but you wouldn’t know it from our art collections. From the Group of Seven in the east to Emily Carr in the west, the canon depicts our land as one of wilderness and farms, not freeways. It’s this absence of the pictured urban, in part, that makes John Hartman’s Cities series so affecting: It shows we can have beautiful paintings of Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto, rather than just the parks adjacent to them. Yet Hartman doesn’t rehash clichéd, neon-flashed, bass thumping visions of urban life. Rather, he portrays cities as organic entities. Leah Sandals spoke to Hartman at his Lafontaine, Ont., abode.
I met Robert Polidori through a photograph he had taken of the Versailles restoration. It captivated me. Seeing so many layers of history in one image was astonishing. So was being spurred to imagine Versailles as a real dwelling defined by the remnants of its inhabitants, and all the changes in history they and it had undergone.
This was the ’90s, when many photographers making art were constructing their own subjects or creating intellectual images that involved visual sleight of hand. The straightforward voluptuousness of Robert’s photo stood in stark contrast to all this. It was this originality and this lushness that enchanted me.
Douglas Bourgeois may be the most successful obscure artist in America. His smallish paintings command respectable prices—for their size, by New York standards—and his most recent show of over one hundred paintings, drawings, and collages sold quickly Arthur Roger Gallery; November 4—December 12. 2006].
As years go, 2005 was a big one for acclaimed African-American sculptor John Scott. In May of that year, a retrospective exhibition of the then 65-year-old artist”s work was held at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It was a big success by all the measures that matter.
In a recent exhibition and book, Robert Polidori, known for making startling images of
architecture around the world, turns his camera on post-Katrina desolation.
For years, New Orleans painter Jim Richard has articulated an acidic social commentary through unpeopled interiors of the showy sort featured in domicile magazines. Many of his paintings employ an icy, synthetic palette to depict settings over-decorated with contrasting examples of historical and recent art. “These are the places,” one critic wrote, “where art goes to die.”
Nicole Charbonet’s current body of work, entitled, The Truth about God, deals with subjects such as the temporality of the material world and the power of nature. Charbonnet portrays these thoughts in a series of canvases, all done in mixed media and acrylic. Her works are at once alarming but offer a sense of calm in their soft, fresco like appearance, reminiscent of the colors of Pompeii, muted almost to a whisper with the patina of time.
THE ANCIENT ARCHETYPES of various European, Caribbean, Native American, and African cultures weave together this timeless exhibition of totemic carvings by John Geldersma. With simple wood and paint, the colors of which seem almost inspired by fire, he reaches into an understanding of humanity, the history of its culture, unmistakably modem because of its far reaching universality.