Jim Richard forces together elements of visual culture that are rich in connotations of social hierarchy and the diversity of taste. His paintings are like American food: flat, rich, irradiated and filled with chemical additives.
Barsness’ works look like antique Hindu scrolls, with elephant gods, celestial turtles, intricate mandalas and endless decorative patterns. But straight pseudo-religious iconography they’re not.
Before TV and computers, we had animals. Domestic beasts aside, animals represented the world beyond the village gate; horses and camels plied the trade routes connecting Europe to Asia, while migrating birds dotted the skies like omens from elsewhere.
Al Souza’s extravagant “paintings” are so visually disruptive they demand to be stared at long and hard—that is, if you can manage to fix your gaze on them at all. Stand before these works, composed of thousands of layered jigsaw-puzzle pieces, loose and in semi-completed chunks, and the whole immediate environment seems in flux; the paintings appear to slide back and forth, creating a vaguely feverish sensation.
Recalling, in part, an African-American community razed by whites in the 1920s, a recent installation by Whitfield Lovell evokes in elegiac detail the rural South and the quiet, dignified lives of its inhabitants.
The charcoal drawings on wooden planks in Whitfield Lovell’s show ‘Recent Tableaux’ evoke the ghost stories of African American history by playing with two types of found object. The drawings seem to coax out the figurative presence of anonymous turn-of-the-century subjects from the mundane household furnishings that once surrounded their lives.
David Bates at Dunn and Brown Contemporary by Charles Dee Mitchell, ART IN AMERICA Near the center of the painted wood relief Cannas (all works 2000), there is a break in the thin strip of lumber that composes the stem of a flower. Corresponding to the snapped stalk of a tall, floppy bloom, the break…
For those who relish art the name John Alexander brings to mind buttery oil paint, signature whiplash brushstrokes, and canvases that represent nature as mysterious and never entirely benign. In this exhibition we see a less familiar side of the artist’s work: not the panoramic seascapes, overgrown gardens and teeming swamps he’s painted for more than 3 decades, but a drawn world of great refinement.
I know you’re busy. You’ve got a ton of stuff to do at work, it’s your week to drive car pool, Sissy’s volleyball tournament begins tonight, you’ve got to pick up a king cake for the office party and you’re almost out of gas. But you can’t be any busier than Stephen Paul Day has been over the past two years.